As Babies Die, the Threat of War Rises

Tito Nankimbesha trudged slowly across the grassy field, his bony arms cradling a small bundle wrapped in red cotton cloth. Ahead, two men with hoes chopped short, shallow rectangles in the hard earth. Another twisted sticks into four tiny crosses. A searing wind blew down from the hazy heights of Zaire’s eastern escarpment.

“He died of thirst,” the 50-year-old peasant said as he put down the body of his son, Habimaiya, 2. He knelt to shut the boy’s eyes, then gently adjusted the makeshift shroud one last time.

“All day yesterday, no water,” Nankimbesha said softly. “Today, no water. Just now, 10 minutes before we came here, he died.”

Thus did the burial of babies mark the arrival of 400 more refugees from an ethnic-based rebellion raging just across the border in Zaire. That vicious conflict threatened to become a regional war Wednesday after Rwandan commandos reportedly crossed into Zaire.

The overnight military incursion into the provincial capital of Bukavu came after a mortar and machine-gun duel Tuesday between Zairian troops in Bukavu and Rwandan soldiers across the border in Cyangugu. It was the first such exchange since an uprising by indigenous Tutsi guerrillas erupted in eastern Zaire three weeks ago.

Zaire shelled houses and farms as deep as three miles inside Rwanda, killing one civilian and wounding two. Officials said a military barracks and a mortar position were also hit, wounding eight soldiers. Rwanda fired more than 100 mortar rounds back across the border. Casualties on the Zairian side were not known.

The battle in Bukavu claimed the life of eastern Zaire’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Associated Press reported. The Rev. Christophe Munzihirwa Mwene Ngabo, a 70-year-old ethnic Tutsi, was slain Tuesday “during a military attack on the city,” a Vatican spokesman said.

There were conflicting reports of further cross-border shelling Wednesday.

Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s vice president and military strongman, warned of the escalating tensions at a news conference in his capital, Kigali.

“If I am slapped in the face, I will hit back,” he said, adding: “If Zaire brings the war to us, we shall fight Zaire. That is not a big problem for me. We are ready to fight even though we seek no war with Zaire.”

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Rwanda has about 54,000 soldiers in a well-disciplined army that took power in 1994 after beating an ethnic Hutu regime that had launched a genocidal war against minority Tutsis and their sympathizers, killing an estimated 800,000 people.

Zaire has about 50,000 troops, but they are poorly armed, poorly led and notoriously poorly disciplined. No roads exist from the Zairian capital, Kinshasa, to the eastern border, and only two airports--including the now-besieged airstrip in Bukavu--are available to reinforce or resupply troops there.

A Zairian army base at Rumangabo, about 20 miles north of Goma, was also shelled by mortars, according to Paul Stromberg, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Zairian officials, who canceled all commercial flights into Goma on Tuesday, barred a U.N. plane from landing in the tense city on Wednesday, he said.

Several thousand Banyamulenge rebels, ethnic Tutsis opposed to the Zairian regime, have already chased Zairian troops from the town of Uvira. The once-bustling Lake Tanganyika port was heavily looted and badly damaged, with scores of bodies in the streets and floating in the lake, refugees said.

Analysts in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, say the rebels appear well-organized, aggressive and highly motivated. An aid worker who spent a year in Uvira said the rebellion began after Zairian officials launched programs against the Banyamulenge, who first migrated to Zaire generations ago.

“I saw Banyamulenge being thrown out of their homes, their goods being confiscated, Zairian soldiers” stealing their cars, he said. “I saw mobs demonstrating against the Banyamulenge. And then, the governor announced they should leave or be exterminated.”

Some of the estimated 300,000 Banyamulenge are prosperous traders and smugglers, known for carrying contraband cigarettes, food, oil and arms back and forth across the border to Burundi.

Burundi’s biggest industry is the covert reexport of gold smuggled from Zaire. One expert said the trade was worth $300 million last year, with the gold moving on weekly Sabena Airlines flights to Brussels.

The conflict has obviously hampered that trade. But the porous borders remain. Sanctions imposed on Burundi by six regional countries a week after a military coup toppled the constitutional government here July 25 have had a mixed effect at best. One reason is an apparent deal between Burundi and neighboring Rwanda.

A source in Bujumbura said eight trucks, each carrying 40 to 70 apparently armed men, left southern Rwanda on the night of Oct. 11, crossed northwest Burundi and entered eastern Zaire. He said at least three other similar convoys had been reported.

“Either they were carrying Banyamulenge men who trained in Rwanda or they were carrying Rwandans going to join the fight,” the source said.

In exchange, the source said, Burundi is suddenly awash in fuel carried in heavily guarded convoys of 20,000-liter trucks from Rwanda. Oil imports to Rwanda from neighboring Kenya and Uganda, in turn, have jumped by a third.

“We noticed traffic jams a week ago,” the source said. “Vehicular traffic has returned to pre-embargo levels.”

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Burundi has profited another way. The emptying of refugee camps near Uvira since the war began has closed the sanctuaries and supply bases used by Hutu guerrillas battling to topple Burundi’s Tutsi-led junta.

An estimated 150,000 people have died since civil war erupted here in 1993. Hutu guerrillas, members of Leonard Nyangoma’s benignly named Front for the Defense of Democracy, apparently now are trying to cross Burundi for bases in Tanzania.

“They’ve got no bases left in Zaire,” a diplomat said.

In the last two days, about 3,000 refugees have trickled back to this dusty border town. Most are sad-faced women and exhausted children laden with huge bundles of pots, bedding and other goods. A few brought bicycles, but most did not even have shoes.

Relief workers rushed to meet them, handing out seven-day rations of maize meal, beans, salt and cooking oil. Long lines formed by water trucks. The air soon filled with the pounding of tent stakes, the chopping of firewood and, above all, the wail of hungry children.

Most had lived in the Kagunga refugee camp, several miles inside Zaire. But when the Banyamulenge attacked the area last week, fleeing Zairian soldiers herded the refugees 20 miles south, robbing and beating them as they ran.

As panic spread, the refugees turned and headed back, trekking nine or 10 days through the war zone. When they reached rebel lines, the insurgents gave them food, politely escorted them to the border and told them to go home.

“The Banyamulenge treat us very well,” said Leonidas Barayambara, who arrived with nine family members.

But Lachel Ngengesere, 35, sat glassy-eyed and grieving beside the body of her 21-month-old son, Patrick. He had died in her arms as she crossed the border Wednesday. Another woman tenderly folded the child’s tattered clothes--a tiny pair of blue pants and a torn red T-shirt--into his brown shroud and wrapped it tight. The infant then was laid in his grave.

As for Nankimbesha, he knelt and threw a handful of earth on his son as others helped push dirt in the holes. Soon, five men stood as one offered a quiet prayer. Then they all walked back to get in the growing food lines, and only the cruel wind was left.