Rwanda’s Hutus Finally Head for Home : Africa: Driven from camps by the Tutsi army, many refugees now seem eager to resume old lives.

Could these be the same Rwandan refugees we have been watching all these months?

They moved through a reception line on Wednesday with stacks of fresh biscuits and plastic jugs of water, holding tickets for a hot meal. Children and mothers were called for measles vaccinations. Families spread blankets on the grass and ate lunch as if having a picnic.

And there was something else in the air: a trace of eagerness.

After eight months, they were coming back. “We are tired of camps. We want to go home,” said Nkurkiyo Wukiza, 36, a farmer from southern Rwanda.

With his wife and four children, Wukiza has been a refugee in his own country since last summer. Most recently, the family lived in a 4-foot-high hut covered with plastic sheeting in the now-infamous Kibeho refugee camp of southwestern Rwanda, where an estimated 2,000 neighbors were killed over the weekend when the army moved in and ordered the facility closed.

For months, human rights monitors, U.N. observers, relief workers and journalists have combed the camp and others like it in Rwanda and neighboring countries. Almost always, they heard the same fear expressed by these refugees: We cannot go home. We will be killed. We are Hutus, and the Tutsis now have the power and the guns.

By force, and at an appalling loss of life, Rwanda’s Tutsi-led army finally said enough to the camps inside the country and drove the Hutu refugees out.

For hundreds, probably thousands, of the refugees, a new groupthink quickly took hold.

Wukiza stood in the mud of a so-called transit center in Ndera, outside the capital, Kigali. Answering questions, he was surrounded by fellow refugees, first a few, then a gathering mob. They nodded and encouraged him, as if he was doing a good job.

“Before we feared it would be unsafe. But now we’re ready to go home,” he said.

Men and women in the crowd sounded their approval.

Since Saturday, 7,000 refugees have been brought in trucks and buses from the refugee camps to this transit station, built for 800. Some of the scene is familiar--the gamy smell of poverty in close quarters, the flies, the half-naked children, the dirty bandages.

But the change in mood was unmistakable.

Hour by hour, even as more were brought to this center, others eagerly lined up to depart for their home communes. “They are rushing under the trucks. They do not want to stay in camps anymore, that’s clear,” said Killian Kleinschmidt, an executive for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

This is not to suggest that Rwanda has gained control of its refugee crisis. Several hundred holdouts remained in horrifying conditions at Kibeho camp, refusing to leave, surrounded by army troops--the fourth day of a grim standoff that has attracted global news coverage.

These holdouts insist that they will be killed if they emerge. The army says the ringleaders among them are suspected militants who face arrest on charges of participating in last year’s slaughter of up to 1 million people, most of them Tutsis.

President Pasteur Bizimungu, Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu and Shaharyar Khan, the U.N. special representative to Rwanda, will go to the camp today to try to persuade the holdouts to leave, a U.N. spokesman said Wednesday.

Hundreds of other Hutu refugees, who left the camps as ordered, have tried to go home. But they were pelted with rocks, lashed with sticks and driven away by Tutsis who had moved in and taken over their farms after winning Rwanda’s civil war in July.

Already, a few refugees reportedly have been killed when they tried to go home. And even the most optimistic officials acknowledged that tension and violence will continue as part of the refugee resettlement for months.

The nations of the West have applied their own sort of pressure on Rwanda. Kigali was notified that Belgium has joined the Netherlands in suspending its Rwandan reconstruction aid.

The United States chose verbal pressure. George Moose, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, concluded a previously scheduled one-day visit to Kigali on Wednesday and told reporters that Rwanda cannot afford another bloody misstep with its refugees.

He said the killings at Kibeho camp Saturday “frankly could have and should have been prevented.” But, he added, “It should not distract us from our longer-term objective--that is, how do we restore peace and reconciliation in Rwanda?”