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Refugees in Zaire Swept Away by Outbreak of Violence

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Hundreds of thousands of refugees were apparently moving deeper into Zaire on Sunday, cut off from all outside assistance or communication and caught in a civil war between the fleeing Zairian army and advancing rebel forces.

U.N. officials, Western governments and African leaders responded with frantic pleas for a cease-fire, urgent calls for international intervention and a flurry of diplomatic initiatives.

But the search for political or military solutions to the mounting humanitarian crisis produced no discernible action. It was far from clear what the international community could--or should--do to help the refugees and to restore a semblance of peace to the turbulent Great Lakes area of Central Africa.

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Paul Stromberg, spokesman here for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, said many refugees may already be suffering from exposure, exhaustion, hunger and disease.

“I think it’s likely people are dying right now,” he said.

Stromberg said the agency had no idea of the whereabouts or condition of about 220,000 refugees who fled camps in the Uvira area of Zaire two weeks ago, or of about 300,000 other refugees who abandoned the Kitale and Kibumba camps north of the Zairian town of Goma last week.

Stromberg also said an official in rebel-held Goma sent word that the nearby Mugunga camp, which held about 400,000 refugees last week, had begun to empty. Most of its refugees were heading west, deeper into Zaire’s rugged mountains and rain forests and away from Rwanda, he said.

It was unclear if the refugees, mostly ethnic Hutus who flooded into Zaire after Rwanda’s genocidal war in 1994, were fleeing renewed fighting or were being herded west by the retreating Zairian army and Hutu leaders.

Analysts speculated that the river of refugees was moving to Masisi, a rugged and barely accessible region about 30 miles northwest of Goma.

A virtual blackout had fallen around the border city of Goma, long the center of relief operations, which fell to insurgents Saturday.

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The last expatriate aid workers were evacuated Saturday from eastern Zaire along the Rwandan and Burundian borders. Journalists were barred Sunday from crossing the frontier. Scattered gunshots could be heard in the distance.

Relief workers, diplomats and Rwandan government officials said they do not know who leads the guerrillas in the Goma area, how to communicate with them or how much control they have over their own fighters.

“We are still trying to get in touch with someone responsible,” said Maj. Emmanuel Ndahiro, a Rwandan army spokesman and advisor to Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s vice president and defense minister. “We actually don’t know who is in charge across the border.”

U.N. and aid officials said their immediate goal was to gain permission from warring parties to create “safe corridors” to assist the refugees. Clinics, food and aid stations could be placed along the route for those willing to return to Rwanda, from which most of the refugees fled in 1994.

In Paris, the French government proposed creating an international intervention force but said it would not act without U.N. approval.

The European Union agreed to send emergency supplies as soon as a route can be created for getting aid to the refugees.

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The Organization of African Unity is planning a meeting Tuesday in Nairobi, Kenya, to seek a solution to the crisis; but with Zaire refusing to participate, the session has little chance of success.

The only consensus among most diplomats and aid officials here was that any effort to resolve the crisis must avoid the reestablishment of about 40 now-emptied refugee camps that hugged the borders of Rwanda and Burundi for two years.

“We want to work in a different way with the refugees,” said Alison Campbell, spokeswoman for CARE International, one of the largest aid groups. “We don’t want to get back to large-scale feeding programs, warehouses, fleets of trucks, large groups of expatriates. It’s dumb for us and dumb for the region.”

Many of the vast tent cities were run by the extremist Hutu leaders accused of carrying out genocide against ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Hutu militias and former Rwandan soldiers launched guerrilla forays into Tutsi-led Rwanda and Burundi from the camps.

Rwanda has always insisted that the only long-term solution was the return, by force if necessary, of the refugees to Rwanda. About 80,000 Rwandan refugees were repatriated from Burundi without major incident earlier this year.

The insurgency in eastern Zaire appears to involve an ad hoc alliance of at least two rebel groups.

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In the south around the city of Uvira, ethnic Banyamulenge Tutsis launched an offensive last month to resist persecution by the Zairian government and militant Hutus.

But 120 miles north in Goma, a murky guerrilla front of half a dozen ethnic groups, religious cults, mountain bandits and others apparently has banded together in what may have been a separate rebellion. This northern group, known collectively as the Ingilima, overran Goma on Saturday.

The various rebel groups now control every major town and airstrip along Zaire’s border with Rwanda and Burundi.

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