African Leaders Vow to Help Rwandans Return

Rwanda’s 2 million refugees are among the most terrified people in Africa. If they return home, they risk harassment, jail and death--or so many of them believe, because their leaders tell them so.

So for more than a year, the great masses of peasant refugees, most of them Hutus, have cowered in their city-camps in Zaire and Tanzania--multimillion-dollar wards of the world’s relief agencies.

On Wednesday in Cairo, the presidents of the countries involved in this tragic stalemate pledged to try to lift the great weight of fear from the shoulders of these long-suffering refugees.

In particular, the erratic president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko--whose nation is host to about 1.3 million of the refugees--put his signature on a promise to weed out of the refugee camps the “known leaders” who are holding back tens of thousands who might want to return to their homeland.

The leaders are the former Hutu army officers, militiamen and politicians of Rwanda who lost the country’s 1994 civil war to the Tutsis and who orchestrated a genocide of 500,000 or more Rwandans just before they fled.

Mobutu and presidents or delegates from the four other nations most deeply involved in the problem--Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania--had gathered here, far from the fray, for what was supposed to be a week of talks. But they shortened their summit to only two days, and adjourned Wednesday with a three-page declaration prepared by former President Jimmy Carter, “facilitator” of the gathering.

Carter told a news conference that the summit was cut short because agreement came easily.

Important questions were left unanswered, however, in the “Cairo declaration” signed Wednesday: How is Zaire’s Mobutu going to weed out these intimidators? What is he going to do with them? Will his army chase them into the hills? Put them in prison? Is he willing to risk his own ill-trained and unreliable soldiers in a battle with the refugee ringleaders and their remaining army?

When reporters queried Mobutu on these points, he gruffly dismissed the questions.

Carter stepped in to say that “the names of the intimidators are known, and adequate action will be taken so their opportunity to intimidate will be terminated.”

The former U.S. President, now a free-lance peace ambassador, added that he will assume personal responsibility for obtaining electronic equipment to track down mobile radio transmitters used by refugee ringleaders to spread propaganda and ethnic hate.

Other areas of agreement were announced at the end of the conference, which was conducted in a grand new hotel surrounded by soldiers and machine-gun emplacements. Mobutu agreed to lift his threat to forcibly expel all the refugees by Dec. 31.

Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu said his government wants the refugees to return to Rwanda, reclaim their property and “live in safety and peace”--a pledge he has voiced before.

To try to coax refugees home, Rwanda’s president also agreed at the conference to reverse course and allow a small contingent of United Nations peacekeepers to remain in his country. The last soldiers were scheduled to leave next month, but Carter said their departure would unsettle refugees who might otherwise be tempted to return.