Aid Groups Seek Access to Refugees in Zaire War Zone

United Nations agencies and other aid groups scrambled Thursday to prepare emergency cross-border relief operations, but international diplomatic efforts again failed to gain access to more than 1 million Hutu refugees cut off in embattled eastern Zaire.

Renewed fighting apparently erupted at the Mugunga refugee camp, about 15 miles west of the border city of Goma, Zaire. Journalists heard machine-gun fire and mortars pounding the area, and heavy smoke could be seen rising above the vast sea of shanties from a hillside on the Rwandan side of the border.

The battle broke a unilateral cease-fire declared Monday by a rebel alliance after its guerrillas had routed the Zairian army. Rebel leaders have said they hoped the insurgency will spread across Zaire and topple the 31-year regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko.

An emergency session of European Union aid ministers in Brussels on Thursday agreed to provide humanitarian assistance, but called on the U.N. Security Council to assure protection for the rescue effort. Other diplomatic initiatives in Europe and Africa also were stalled over the question of deploying foreign troops in the conflict.

U.N. officials were to meet today in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, to discuss how an international force could be put in place to secure routes for aiding refugees.

It wasn’t known how many refugees might still be in Mugunga. It became the world’s largest refugee camp early last week after refugees fled fighting near other camps and flooded into Mugunga, doubling its population to more than 400,000 people. But there were unconfirmed reports that nearby fighting emptied Mugunga last weekend.

No outsiders have visited the camp in more than a week, and roads to the area are blocked by heavily armed guerrillas on one side and, farther along, by gunmen believed to belong to rival Hutu militias defending the camp.

Razing the giant camp would be a severe blow to aid groups, which had hoped to use hospitals, feeding stations, warehouses and other facilities at Mugunga as a staging area to reach the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been driven into dense rain forests and volcanic mountains by fighting that began last month.

Hidden by the warfare from Western observers and television cameras, the refugees are believed to be suffering from hunger, thirst and disease. “This is a hidden holocaust,” warned an aid worker.

Humanitarian groups stranded outside Zaire have mobile clinics, food and feeding stations in nearby countries. Emergency teams of doctors, nutritionists, logistics experts and others were put on standby as they awaited permission to cross into Zaire.

“We’re getting assessment teams ready to go,” said Alison Campbell, spokeswoman for CARE International.

Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said tentative plans call for creating three “humanitarian corridors” into the war zone from the Zairian border towns of Uvira, Bukavu and Goma, all of which are now in rebel hands.

In theory, the routes would be used to channel life-saving aid to the refugees and ultimately to ferry them back to the homes in Rwanda and Burundi that they fled over the past two years.

The U.N. refugee office has access to 200 trucks and buses in the area and can increase the fleet to 500 vehicles if necessary, Wilkinson said. The refugees would be registered at 14 existing transit centers before being taken home.

He said the “best-case scenario” would allow the U.N. to repatriate 10,000 to 12,000 refugees from Zaire each day for 100 days. The key goal, he said, is to finally close the refugee camps that have festered inside Zaire for more than two years, destabilizing the region by providing cover for Hutu militias to attack Tutsi-led Rwanda and Burundi.

In reality, however, no one knows if the refugees can be persuaded to go home once they are found. So far, few have done so.

Aid workers hope the ongoing conflict and growing hardship may finally persuade the refugees to return home.

“The status quo has been broken,” Wilkinson said. “They’ve had two years of living in stinking holes. They’ve had another mini-war. They’re on the road again. The camps have been broken up. They can’t go back. We must convince them it’s safe to come home [to Rwanda and Burundi].”

In a separate development, a new U.N. report alleges that Zaire acted as a conduit for illegal arms shipments to the Hutus from illicit dealers in Eastern Europe and South Africa over the past two years.

The report says funds were raised for the effort through counterfeit money, sale of food and other relief supplies and “war taxes” levied on refugee families and international aid workers.

The illicit arms deals, flights and deliveries involved numerous countries, the report says. The arms-buying network reportedly was based in Kenya.