Returnees Inundate Rwandan Frontier

And still they came.

For the third straight day, through drenching rain and blinding sun, all day long and through the cold night, crowds of refugees returning from Zaire cascaded through this border town Sunday and poured into western Rwanda in an unbroken stream that stretched as far as the eye could see.

For 40 miles inside Rwanda, the solemn column of people clogged the single, narrow road that snakes up steep hills, past cloud-shrouded volcanoes and through lush green farms. A few buses and trucks were pressed into service, with people clinging to the roofs, but the vast majority of returnees just walked.

Those too exhausted to continue simply stopped on the roadside, and at midday smoky cooking fires pumped a choking blue haze into the air. When rain poured down from leaden skies, the refugees suddenly disappeared under a colorful array of plastic sheeting.

The crush was relentless, the confusion intense. Parents bundled sleeping infants fore and aft, carried crying toddlers on their shoulders and tied torn rags to the wrists of small children, tugging them along in the crowds.

Gnarled men and haggard women hobbled with canes, slowly picking their way. A few were pushed--or propelled themselves--in battered wheelchairs. One man staggered on crutches, metal surgical pins sticking out of his leg.

Anyone old enough to walk carried a plastic pail, a burlap sack, a foam mattress, a blackened pot, usually perched on a coil of cloth atop the head. One man marched with a hot pink electric guitar.

Some slipped into farmers’ fields and local gardens to forage for food. They dug for sweet potatoes, pulled cabbage-like greens, plucked ears of corn or stripped bunches of bananas from trees.

Local villagers pulled out chairs and sat chatting and pointing at the passing parade. Except for crying children, the loudest sound was the drumming of thousands of shuffling feet on mile after mile of pavement.

And still they came.

Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, estimated that 350,000 to 400,000 ethnic Hutus had returned to Rwanda since early Friday, with an additional 100,000 or so still trekking toward Rwanda’s border. The refugee agency sent several dozen buses into Zaire late Sunday, he said, to pick up stragglers, the sick and others too weak to walk.

No one knew how many really had returned, because all attempts to count, feed or register the arrivals were overwhelmed. But if the estimates were even close to accurate, they meant that the bulk of the 700,000 refugees in the camps that once surrounded the Zairian city of Goma were on their way home.

The rest of that group--made up mostly of 40,000 former Rwandan army soldiers, tens of thousands of radical Hutu militiamen and their families--were being chased deeper into the remote mountains of Zaire by the Tutsi-dominated rebel alliance that has already seized control of a 200-mile-wide strip of eastern Zaire.

Still, 500,000 other Hutu refugees remained unaccounted for, lost in the maelstrom of fighting and fleeing that followed the first rebel offensive in South Kivu province last month.

Unless they too appear suddenly at Rwanda’s border, their rescue is expected to become the chief goal of the Canadian-led multinational force approved by the U.N. Security Council on Friday. U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry said Sunday that no final decision had been made on dispatching American troops to the region.

Aid groups here gave up all attempts to feed the refugees, fearing they would disrupt the column. Brenda Barton, spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program, said food supplies were being trucked instead to the the country’s northwestern quadrant, where most of the refugees are from.

But many refugees complained of hunger as they walked, and they bitterly blamed the relief agencies for ignoring their plight.

“I have no milk,” cried 35-year-old Vivien Mukamana, pulling out her withered breast as her infant son cried softly on her hip. She bit her lip, then added that she had lost her husband and three of her children in the confusion.

“Where are the doctors?” pleaded Marcelini Mukanuel, 28, leading two children by the hand. “I am very sick. Who will help me?”

The flood of refugees here was rivaled only by their exodus more than two years ago when they fled en masse into Zaire, fearing reprisals for the Hutu-directed genocide of minority Tutsis in their homeland. The refugees then were herded by Hutu leaders, their defeated army and Hutu militias, who later ruled the refugee camps and intimidated civilians to prevent them from returning.

“The radio in the camp said our eyes would be gouged out if we came back to Rwanda,” said Patricia Nyirahabineza, 32. She lay under a plastic tarp, pregnant with her third child, as her husband cooked cassava on a campfire.

Now, as in a movie rolling in reverse, those same Hutu refugees are calmly plodding back home, hoping to resume the lives they abandoned in terror for the agony of life in refugee camps.

Why they have suddenly returned to Rwanda is unclear. Some said fighting forced them to flee, others that they were hungry after aid workers were evacuated because of the war, and still others that the advancing rebel troops just told them it was time to go home.

Perhaps the most likely explanation came from Mraita Nishimwe, a 26-year-old mother who rocked her infant son on her back in the lee of a windy mountain pass. After two years in the Mugunga refugee camp near Goma, she was heading back to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, where her mother still lives.

Why did she stay so long? And why did she suddenly leave?

“When I was in Mugunga, I saw the other people didn’t leave, so I stayed,” she said. “Then I left when everyone else did.”