COLUMN ONE : Relief Now Rwanda’s Nightmare : Distribution of aid has been commandeered by exiled Hutus amid rising theft and violence. Agencies threaten to leave out of fear or frustration over helping those accused of slaughtering Tutsis.

Purple wildflowers and weeds now shroud the unmarked mass graves. The once grisly dump trucks cart mounds of garbage, not corpses.

Fresh water gushes from countless taps, and the rain-washed air is clean and clear.

Ambulances rush the sick to some of Africa’s best-equipped hospitals, where they are treated by experts from around the world.

And at last count, 976 rickety bars and brothels, plus hundreds of shops and restaurants--not to mention a tiny thatch hotel named Amizero, or Hope--do a brisk trade in the giant refugee camps. There is even a volleyball court.

But three months after the world watched in horror as an estimated 50,000 Rwandan refugees collapsed and died in miserable camps on the bleak volcanic moonscape here, frustrated U.N. officials and relief workers say the largest, fastest international relief effort in history has become a new kind of nightmare.

Their concerns range from massive theft of donated food and other relief goods, to death threats against U.N. field officers and aid workers, to daily political assassinations and other murders in the three largest camps. They also cite major environmental damage to the adjoining National Park of Virunga, Africa’s first wildlife park and a critical sanctuary of the rare mountain gorilla.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, humanitarian groups now openly acknowledge that the distribution of relief supplies to the estimated 750,000 Hutu refugees has come under the direct control of former Hutu government leaders and militias--the same extremists accused of systematically slaughtering at least half a million Tutsi civilians inside Rwanda before they fled here in July.

“The militias and the military totally control the camps,” said Samantha Bolton, spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders, one of the most active of the 85 aid groups here. “They control all aspects of camp life. And the refugees are prisoners, are hostages.

“It’s outrageous,” she said. “It’s gotten to the point where we’re aiding and abetting the perpetrators of genocide.”

The ethical questions and misgivings have grown so severe that 16 international aid groups have publicly threatened to withdraw assistance from the refugee camps unless security is assured and the former Rwandan authorities and their henchmen are removed.

In a Nov. 3 statement, the groups--which include Doctors Without Borders, CARE, Oxfam and the American Refugee Committee--warned that “current relief operations are untenable” and working conditions are “unacceptably dangerous.”

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which coordinates the relief effort, separately “expressed grave concern” about “the threatening presence and activities of former Rwandese army, militia and civilian leaders in the camps.”

“It’s becoming impossible to conduct the operation successfully,” agreed Penelope Lewis, spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program, which provides most of the food for the refugees.

In response, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said after a crisis meeting in Geneva last Tuesday that he will ask the Security Council to send peacekeeping troops to eastern Zaire to provide security.

But U.N. officials here say privately that they don’t expect such help soon, if at all.

Several relief groups already have pulled out or sharply curtailed their aid.

CARE Canada, for example, evacuated all staff and officially withdrew on Oct. 30 from the largest camp, Katale, after receiving two anonymous letters that threatened five staff members by name.

CARE had been in charge of food distribution, sanitation, social services, road building and camp management at Katale since the first destitute refugees arrived in late July. The camp now has about 230,000 residents.

At first, with cholera raging and thousands dying daily, relief agencies gave little thought to who controlled the camps.

But Jean Lapierre, CARE’s coordinator, said security quickly deteriorated as the emergency abated. And in late September, he said, fighting broke out between rival gangs known as the Bandits and the Scouts. Many of the Scouts had worked as an unofficial police force for CARE.

“It was really like the Bloods and the Crips, fighting for turf,” Lapierre said. The two-day gang war ended with the disappearance, and presumed deaths, of 30 Scouts. At that point, the U.N. refugee agency and most private aid groups temporarily pulled out. All except CARE have returned.

But the Bandits’ reign at Katale was short-lived. Leaders of the Hutu government in exile quickly asserted control in the camp and created a sinister security force called La Jeunesse, or The Youth, to enforce their edicts. Working in groups of 20, the young toughs patrol the camp’s 11 zones.

The Youth are all believed to be former members of the Interahamwe, the government-run civilian militias implicated in the worst of the anti-Tutsi massacres. Francois Karera, a suspected Interahamwe leader, is the de facto leader of Katale and head of refugee food distribution. He is also one of Rwanda’s most-wanted war criminals.

The new leaders demanded complete control of distribution of relief goods, even the blankets, plastic sheeting and other non-food items that were given to “vulnerables”--the aged, pregnant women, children and the disabled.

“The prefecture leaders came to us and said, ‘We’ll decide who will receive these from now on,’ ” one official said. “They wanted everything done their way.”

The aid groups refused, and U.N. officials estimate that 30% to 50% of the refugees now don’t get enough food or other assistance. Aid workers fear the food is given to the estimated 30,000 Rwandan soldiers who are regrouping and retraining in nearby forests, or is being sold to buy arms.

Just down the road from Katale, for example, the black market at Rubare is bustling. Stalls are stacked with four-quart cans of refined vegetable oil and bulging sacks of corn and flour, all clearly marked “USA--Not to be Sold or Exchanged.”

On sale nearby are heaps of gray blankets, cooking utensils, red and white plastic buckets, high-protein biscuits and other relief goods sent by the World Food Program, the European Community Humanitarian Office, Switzerland and other countries.

The diversion of food has led to a dramatic increase in malnutrition in the camps.

Nicola Dahrendorf, acting director of the U.N. refugee agency here, said the number of children treated for severe malnutrition has doubled in the last six weeks. In Mugunga, the third-largest and one of the most chaotic camps, a recent U.N. survey found 14% of the population suffered from acute malnutrition.

The United Nations still doesn’t know how many refugees are here. Refugee leaders insist 2 million Rwandans are in the camps. Aid officials say the real figure is about 750,000 or fewer, based on visits to clinics, water consumption and other indicators.

“We’ve never been able to do a proper registration of refugees . . . because so many of our people were being threatened,” Dahrendorf said. She said refugee leaders “inflate the figures” to get more food and to discredit the current Kigali government. They say the government cannot be legitimate if so many Rwandans live outside the country.

Dahrendorf, a human rights lawyer, wrestles with the moral dilemma of how to aid an impoverished refugee population led by accused mass murderers. She compares it to the international relief effort that provided crucial aid to Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge in the early 1980s after they were forced from Cambodia.

“We shut our eyes to that,” she said. “And we’re shutting our eyes here. There’s no doubt we’re strengthening them.” She cited unconfirmed U.N. reports that the defeated Rwandan army is recruiting in the camps, “especially among children,” so it can resume the war.

But she called it “complete hypocrisy” for humanitarian groups or governments to consider abandoning the tens of thousands of innocent refugees because of their leaders. “You don’t start a major relief operation and then say, ‘Oops, we’re feeding the wrong people,’ ” she said.

Instead, she said the three main camps must be broken into satellite camps, a change that refugee leaders steadfastly refuse to consider. “You can’t leave the camps as they are,” Dahrendorf said. “They’re too overcrowded, too explosive, too volatile. They’re impossible to control.”

The environment is already a victim. An internal U.N. report this month found that the refugees were having a “significant and very negative impact” on the once-remote Virunga national park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is now in walking distance of the majority of refugees.

Each day, the report found, 30,000 to 40,000 refugees cut hundreds of tons of wood from the park for fires and construction. The deforestation, as well as poaching and improper dumping of waste, threatens the gorillas, chimpanzees and other wildlife.

U.N. officials--and the new Tutsi-led government in Rwanda--say the obvious solution is for the refugees to go home. But with reports growing of reprisal killings of refugees inside Rwanda, the U.N. refugee agency no longer actively assists in repatriation.

Even so, the agency says 140,000 refugees have slipped out of the camps, mostly at night, and crossed the border since September.

Aid workers don’t stay in the camps overnight. Often they find corpses when they return in the morning, victims of political killings or vendettas. On average, 20 people are hacked, stabbed or shot to death each week, sometimes in massacres of entire families.

“I think terror reigns in the camps at night,” said Lyndall Sachs, spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency. “There is banditry, there is thuggery and there is organized intimidation by militias.”

Katale’s Hutu leaders blame all violence on “infiltrators” from the victorious Tutsi-led government that now controls their homeland. Indeed, Juvenal Mbunimpa, the head of refugees from Gitarama prefecture, accuses “some white men” in the relief agencies of secretly fomenting violence on behalf of the Tutsis.

But a more accurate reflection of the camps’ grim reality came at a Doctors Without Borders clinic at Kibumba, the second-largest camp, earlier this month.

Witnesses say a refugee accused of being an “infiltrator” ran into the compound at midafternoon, pleading for refuge. A mob of young men chased after him. Despite pleas from the horrified Rwandan staff--and in view of a passing U.N. vehicle--the man was dragged outside and hacked to death with machetes.

“It was impossible to stop,” said Marcello Tenti, an Italian logistics officer for Doctors Without Borders, who was nearby. “There was nothing anyone could do to stop it.”