Fear Stalks Hutu Refugees Forced Back to Rwanda : Africa: As money and patience run out, Zaire seps up explusions. Campaign to coax people home flopped.

At the point of a gun, Rwanda’s suffering refugees are being sent home.

This week, as of Wednesday, 13,000 or so men, women and children had been rounded up and trucked to the border here and at two other locations in eastern Zaire. They had been uprooted from entrenched camps, plucked off streets, corralled at watering stations, marched from jails, packed along, then ordered to walk the last eerie 100 feet across a no-man’s-land, back to the country they left in panic 14 months ago.

Back to the unknown.

This is, some say, exactly what was needed. But not this way. It’s brutal. But it might work. It could forestall even greater tragedy ahead. Or it may be just another kind of misery in one of the world’s most infernal reaches.

Still, a few of those crossing from Goma on Wednesday bore smiles. Most were stoic, holding the hands of their children and following orders. One man resisted and was dragged screaming.

An additional 100,000 refugees from Rwanda and neighboring Burundi have refused to leave Zaire and, instead, have fled for shelter in more distant refugee camps or into the forbidding rain forests of Central Africa. Perhaps 1 million more spent Wednesday night holding tight and wondering what fate held for them.

Families have been separated. At least two people were wounded by gunfire. Hunger is spreading. The season of cold, torrential rain has already begun. Fear is everywhere.

Zaire says it has had enough. There are more refugees in camps here than anywhere in the world. The country faces mounting internal unrest from its impoverished citizens. And Zairian leaders feel they have been taken for granted by the developed world.

So the country mobilized its army to begin breaking up the refugee camps, beginning--methodically--on Monday.

The world already has witnessed many of the horrible things that could occur: plague, carnage, war.

On the other hand, for these refugees who have endured--and inflicted--so much suffering, the bitter, often incomprehensible politics of the region may finally go their way, even if unintentionally, analysts say.

Just one year ago, refugees were dying here in staggering numbers; 50,000 perished from cholera and other diseases. Their flight from Rwanda saw more people flee faster than at any time in recent history.

These are Hutus, and more than 1 million spilled across the border from Rwanda. What they left behind was the savage genocide of 500,000 to 1 million Tutsis--and the smoldering ashes of a civil war in which the surviving Tutsis won.

Since then, 300,000 more Hutus have fled here from neighboring Burundi, a country inflamed with its own ethnic warfare.

“The problem today is not a classic humanitarian emergency yet--it’s a social and political crisis,” said Carol Faubert, the United Nations’ special envoy for refugees here. “We hope that this repatriation can be turned into a positive development.”

The United Nations and the legion of humanitarian groups here, of course, have deplored the forced return of Rwandan and Burundian Hutus. International law is supposed to protect the rights of refugees.

On the other hand, many seasoned officials of these organizations have conceded that their yearlong campaign to coax the refugees to return home voluntarily was a flop.

And practically everyone is too strapped for cash to assist the refugees for much longer. So far, other nations, including the United States, have provided $700 million to feed and care for them. But the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said this month that it had to cut its budget due to waning interest among donor countries.

“In a way, this move by Zaire may work. We’ve been complaining about the deadlock in this process” of voluntary repatriation, said Nicolas Cantau, regional refugee director for Doctors Without Borders, the international, non-governmental aid agency. “Maybe this can be the first step in moving forward.”

The problem has long been, and remains, a profound mistrust between Hutus and Tutsis of this region, fueled by extremists on both sides. In the more than 20 refugee camps in eastern Zaire, Hutu extremists have been accused of holding people hostage to their fears, warning that they would be killed if they tried to leave.

“Now it turns out that the refugees fear the Zairian soldiers more than they fear the leaders in their camps. So they are going home, even though they may not want to,” said John Watt of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated government says it wants the refugees to return, and it has struggled this week to cope with the unexpected influx. At the same time, Rwanda has said that it will not excuse anyone for participating in the 1994 genocide of Tutsis, and its prisons already are inhumanly overcrowded with suspects. No one is quite sure who will be judged guilty and for what degree of involvement, adding to the heavy air of anxiety.

U.N. officials demanded that Zaire immediately end its gunpoint repatriation. Now that the homeward migration has started, those officials said, refugees should be allowed to make decisions voluntarily.

This week’s events occur in an atmosphere of rising tensions in a fragile region. Zaire has been accused for months of clandestinely helping Hutu refugees rearm themselves in preparation for an assault to try to retake their country--or part of it. Rwanda has responded by reinforcing its borders with fresh troops and won U.N. approval for the lifting of a longstanding arms embargo.

In turn, Zaire warned that it expected the refugees would be preemptively attacked by the armies of Rwanda and Burundi.

“People ask when will the civil war resume. Well, the civil war started in 1990, and it’s still going on,” said Chris Nzabandora, spokesman for Rally for the Return of the Refugees, a new Hutu political group. “Right now there is so much mistrust, you cannot rule out anything.”