U.S. May Reduce Role in Africa Relief Effort

As an astonishing column of Rwandan refugees silently trudged home to an uncertain future in the land they fled in chaos and panic more than two years ago, the Clinton administration signaled Saturday that it was rethinking the size and scope of the role that U.S. troops would play in a proposed international mercy mission in the region.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry described the exodus of ethnic Hutus from refugee camps in Zaire--an estimated 120,000 crossed the border into Rwanda on Saturday--as a positive development that had given pause to planners in the United States and other Western nations poised to help stabilize the chaotic situation in the camps.

Speaking to reporters at a Pentagon briefing, Perry said no decisions had yet been made on whether to reduce the American role in the U.N.-authorized mission to help feed and protect the refugees, who were liberated from the camps after the apparent rout of Hutu extremists who had held them virtual captives.

On Friday, the U.N. Security Council authorized the dispatch of 10,000 to 12,000 soldiers to Central Africa on the humanitarian mission. The Clinton administration had been considering a U.S. contingent of as many as 5,000 troops for the four-month effort.

But with the situation on the ground changing by the hour, the Pentagon was clearly reluctant to commit a large force if it was no longer needed.

If the refugees continue to flow out of the camps, Perry said, “it will change substantially the nature of the humanitarian problem in the region. It will not eliminate the need for humanitarian support, but it will substantially change the nature of that need.”

Saturday’s astonishing exodus from Zaire to neighboring Rwanda brought the 30-hour total of returning refugees to more than 200,000 people, with hundreds of thousands more still tramping in eerie silence on the road behind them, according to a spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The unexpected influx overwhelmed border guards and aid workers, who gave up all attempts to register or search the refugees for weapons as they quietly poured across the Rwandan border at Gisenyi. At one point, aid workers estimated that 12,000 people were crossing each hour.

“The road of death is now the road of hope,” said Ray Wilkinson, a U.N. refugee agency spokesman in Gisenyi.

“The flow is unstoppable,” Wilkinson said. “If we try to stop this, try to bring buses or trucks in, try to do the humanitarian thing, we’ll probably make things worse. All we can do is go with the flow.”

Perry said Saturday that a 40-member U.S. survey team was in Zaire trying to determine just how much of a U.S. presence would be required for the humanitarian mission.

“It is possible that our plan and the allies’ plan . . . will be modified as a result of these developments,” Perry said.

When President Clinton tentatively approved a U.S. role in the proposed humanitarian force last week, Republican lawmakers in Congress cautioned that the administration would have to avoid the kind of mistakes made in the humanitarian mission in Somalia. But in his weekly radio address Saturday, Clinton argued that the United States cannot disregard such overwhelming human tragedies.

“As the world’s most powerful nation, we cannot turn our back when so many people, especially so many innocent children, are at mortal risk,” Clinton said.

For its part, the Rwandan government said Saturday that the mass repatriation meant the rescue mission was no longer necessary, and it urged the United Nations to send aid to help resettle the returning refugees.

Food isn’t a problem. The U.N. World Food Program has stockpiled enough food inside Rwanda to feed 700,000 people for 45 days, with additional supplies warehoused in nearby countries. Other aid groups have also laid in emergency provisions.

But many of the returning Hutus will find that ethnic Tutsis have occupied the homes, farms and villages they abandoned when they first fled Rwanda in mid-1994, fearing reprisals for that year’s Hutu genocide of the country’s Tutsi minority.

“The major issue by far is going to be housing,” said Michele Quintaglie, a World Food Program spokeswoman. “If you have hundreds of thousands of people suddenly coming in and wanting their houses back from people already living there, you’ve got a real problem.”

Other difficulties, however, were more immediate Saturday. Two U.N. transit camps set up to house, feed and assist the refugees near the border were quickly inundated, and frantic aid workers encouraged everyone to keep moving.

The vast column was 30 miles long, an unending sea of shuffling families, clanking wheelbarrows and overstuffed bundles, stretching from Sake in Zaire to the Nkamira transit center inside Rwanda. Despite the mass movement, aid workers described an eerie calm along the road.

“It’s so silent, you can almost hear a pin drop,” marveled Kate Straub, a nurse-midwife from the American Refugee Committee. “There’s just this grand calm, with everybody just plodding along the road.”

At nightfall, most simply opened the bedrolls they carried on their heads and lay down on the roadside.

Most of the refugees were barefoot, and Rwandan authorities said they had asked towns and villages to clear glass and other debris from the main road.

At the packed transit camps, men chopped firewood, women cooked beans they had brought with them and mothers bathed crying babies. Along the road, mobile clinics administered first aid, tanker trucks provided fresh water and relief workers handed out high-protein biscuits.

“Until they reach their homes, they will be given only water and biscuits, nothing more, because we don’t want to lose momentum to get them home,” said Wendy Driscoll of CARE International.

Several thousand children were separated from their parents in the long march home. They were taken to a school near the border where aid workers called over loudspeakers for parents to collect them.

Aid workers said most of the returnees appeared surprisingly healthy after weeks of being cut off from outside support amid apocalyptic warnings of mass starvation and death.

Those warnings may yet prove accurate because 700,000 refugees remain in Zaire. The majority are believed to be in South Kivu province, but their whereabouts have been unknown since they fled fighting that erupted near their refugee camps last month. Tens of thousands of Zairians have also been displaced by the conflict.

*

The influx from North Kivu started at dawn Friday, a day after Hutu soldiers and Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe, fled before a withering bombardment by Zairian Tutsi rebels of their positions near the Mugunga refugee camp.

By nightfall, an estimated 80,000 people had packed up their belongings and children and had streamed into Rwanda. The entire camp, the world’s largest last week, is now virtually deserted except for those too sick, too old or too disabled to trek home.

The Hutu refugees have utterly confounded the outside world since they first fled Rwanda en masse in mid-1994, herded by the Hutu leaders and soldiers who had carried out the mass slaughter of Tutsis before fleeing a Tutsi-led guerrilla army.

In the two years since, all attempts to lure the refugees home from Zaire ended in failure. After an initial cholera epidemic killed up to 40,000 people, the survivors sat in a string of squalid camps where the same Hutu leaders killed or threatened would-be returnees and spread propaganda that Rwanda’s Tutsi-led army would slaughter any Hutu crossing the border.

The stalemate broke after a rebellion backed by Rwanda suddenly erupted in eastern Zaire last month. The insurgents routed the Zairian army, and more than 1 million refugees abandoned their camps for nearby forests as the fighting spread.

As the crisis grew in recent weeks, aid workers had publicly insisted that the refugees must return home but privately doubted they ever would.

“Nobody expected this,” Quintaglie said. “Nobody. It’s just unreal. It’s unfathomable. A few days ago, we were saying there’s no chance in hell these people would come back, that it doesn’t matter what incentives you offer. I mean, this is a shock to everybody. Nobody ever guessed these people would come back en masse.”

Drogin reported from Nairobi and Risen from Washington.