195,000 Hutus Flee as Ethnic Fighting Escalates in Zaire

The growing conflict and humanitarian crisis in eastern Zaire appeared to be spiraling out of control Saturday, threatening to engulf the volatile Great Lakes region of Central Africa in a new nightmare of ethnic bloodshed and anarchy.

United Nations officials said 195,000 Hutu refugees abandoned a vast camp north of Goma and fled into surrounding hills to avoid fighting between the Zairian army and well-armed bands of indigenous Tutsi rebels, known as the Banyamulenge, that began three weeks ago.

The huge exodus from the teeming Kibumba encampment was sparked by bloody clashes overnight in the area. The escalation of the crisis, an outgrowth of a regional power struggle between rival Hutus and Tutsis, came after more than a week of pandemonium and mass flight from refugee camps farther south.

U.N. officials now estimate that 460,000 refugees, along with 10,000 displaced Zairians, may be on the move along a nearly 100-mile stretch of rugged terrain from the Goma area south to Uvira.

“From a humanitarian point of view, it’s catastrophic,” said Paul Stromberg, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

“I’m afraid we’re really in for it now,” agreed Jude Rand, CARE director in Kenya. “This is what we’ve been dreading” since more than 1 million Hutu refugees flooded into eastern Zaire in July 1994, fearing reprisals for their role in Rwanda’s genocidal war.

“This could be worse than 1994,” warned an aid official who asked not to be identified. “We were not targets then. We could get food and supplies in. Now the roads have been closed. And we’re all leaving.”

Two U.N. planes were sent Saturday from Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue 128 expatriate relief workers and other foreigners from the besieged Zairian town of Bukavu, about 60 miles south of Goma, after mortar and machine-gun fire was heard in the area. Numerous vehicles and other equipment from the aid groups have been seized at gunpoint by Zairian soldiers.

About 50 medical, supply and other foreign aid workers made a harrowing escape Tuesday from Uvira after guards protecting their convoy shot and killed five members of a Zairian mob blocking the road. Several dozen nonessential personnel are to be evacuated today from the increasingly tense city of Goma, officials said.

Plans to airlift food and other emergency supplies to the refugees Saturday were put on hold as conditions deteriorated. “The security situation is going down the tubes,” said Brenda Barton, spokeswoman here for the U.N. World Food Program.

Fighting between Zairian soldiers and the Banyamulenge guerrillas continued in and around Uvira. Heavy fighting also was reported, but could not be verified, around Rutshuru, about 30 miles north of Goma, suggesting that a pincerlike movement by armed Tutsi forces may be underway.

Analysts said a two-pronged Tutsi campaign may be aimed at pushing the refugees, and Hutu militias based in and around their tent cities, deeper into Zaire to create a strategic buffer on Rwanda’s western border. Rwanda’s Tutsi government has repeatedly asked the U.N. to close the camps, complaining of regular cross-border raids by Hutu forces.

“As long as they are in camps where they can’t be controlled, and where they act with impunity, they are undermining the stability and development of Rwanda,” said a relief official here. “They are attacking across the border every night.”

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A Western diplomat in Kigali urged caution about estimates of the number of refugees on the move, warning that the aid groups and U.N. agency have a vested interest in raising alarms and inflating figures to maintain support for the $1-million-a-day international relief effort. He noted that the camps have emptied several times before, although never on this scale.

“Let me make this very clear,” the envoy said. “We don’t know what’s going on. And anyone who says he knows what’s happening in eastern Zaire is lying.”

But the spreading turmoil has raised fears that it could cause a breakup, or even a violent implosion, of highly unstable Zaire. The nation’s autocratic ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko, has been in Switzerland for months, reportedly undergoing treatment for prostate cancer.

A spokesman for the Banyamulenge’s rebel group, the Democratic Alliance of the People, said Friday that the Tutsi guerrillas intend to capture Bukavu and topple Mobutu. The spokesman, Muller Ruhimbika, said three smaller opposition groups had joined the rebels to fight “for the whole of Zaire.”

The statement, issued in Kigali, could not be confirmed. Nor was there any independent proof of Zaire’s claims that heavily armed columns had come from Rwanda and Burundi to back the rebels. Both countries have denied the charges.

Aside from poor communications, the confusion is further compounded by a multitude of heavily armed and poorly disciplined armed factions in eastern Zaire.

Ragtag units of the Zairian military, troops from the former Hutu army of Rwanda, remnants of Rwanda’s Hutu militias and two groups of Hutu guerrillas from Burundi all use the area as a base. Many wear similar camouflage fatigues and are notorious for drunken looting sprees and attacks on refugees, civilians and aid workers.

The conflict stems from the regional power struggle between Hutus and Tutsis. The extremist Hutu government in Rwanda led the slaughter of more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 before a Tutsi guerrilla army won control of the country. Burundi erupted in ethnic clashes three years ago, and the ongoing civil war there has killed an estimated 150,000 people.

Zaire’s Banyamulenge are ethnic Tutsis who migrated in successive waves over the past two centuries from present-day Rwanda and Burundi. As local ethnic tensions rose, they were targeted for arbitrary arrests, summary executions and, last year, loss of citizenship.

The “ethnic cleansing” prompted many Banyamulenge to arm themselves. Fighting broke out this month after the Zairian regional administrator in Uvira ordered them to leave Zaire within a week or be “hunted down” by the army.

The Banyamulenge fought back instead, attacking two Hutu refugee camps and a missionary hospital caring for wounded Hutus. They also badly bloodied Zairian troops in at least two battles. The Zairian military responded, in part, by taking out their anger on foreign relief workers.

On Oct. 8, for example, 10 Zairian soldiers stopped Roger Aube, CARE’s relief director in Uvira, and shoved a gun in his mouth. “They took my vehicle, they assaulted me, and they took my money,” he said.

After sleeping in their vehicles inside a U.N. compound last weekend, Aube and 45 other expatriates drove in a convoy Monday to the landing strip to await an evacuation plane that never arrived. On the way back, a mob of Zairian soldiers and civilians blocked the road.

“They were waiting for us with rocks, spears and machetes,” Aube said. About 70 guards hired to protect the workers tried to reason with the crowd, but to no avail.

“One demonstrator threw a rock in the face of a guard,” said Aube, 38, who is from Canada. “Others threw rocks and spears at our windshields. It was clear our lives were in big, big danger.”

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The U.N. guards fired into the crowd, killing five Zairians and creating enough confusion for the convoy to race away. On Tuesday, word arrived that about 200 Zairian soldiers were waiting to avenge the deaths. “They said we killed five people, so we must all be killed,” Aube said.

The group escaped in a Red Cross truck that was supposedly on a mission to deliver medicine. Many knelt and prayed in the back as the truck roared past angry crowds. This time, the plane arrived.