Amid Exodus’ Chaos: Lost Children

Unitilte Uwihaye says she is 5 years old, but she sounds much older.

She got separated from her parents and sisters, she calmly explained, when they went to fetch water during their brutal trek home from war-torn eastern Zaire. She then spent five long days and nights alone amid the terrible tumult of half a million refugees on the march.

“I was very afraid,” admitted the tiny child, draped in a soiled purple dress. “And hungry. I just had some beans. No water.”

But on Tuesday, someone took Unitilte by the hand and brought her to an International Committee of the Red Cross lost-and-found station for unaccompanied children. She soon had a new plastic cup, a box of high-protein biscuits, a plastic wrist-tag with her name and hopes that she will find her parents again.

So far, aid workers have found and registered 2,200 children--from newborn infants to adolescents--who were lost in the repatriation of Rwandan refugees from Zaire, one of the largest, quickest mass migrations of modern times.

Nina Winquist, a Red Cross spokeswoman, said 80,000 unaccompanied children were registered in refugee camps in eastern Zaire before they emptied from fighting that erupted in the area.

Some may have stayed in Zaire, some may have been adopted by other refugees, and some, she fears, are just missing. “There must be thousands that passed us on the road,” Winquist said.

For now, most of the unaccompanied children are being kept in a school here or are being bused to Nkamira transit camp 15 miles up the road in hopes of leapfrogging their parents. Aid workers with bullhorns call into the surging crowd of refugees there in case family members are passing by.

The United Nations refugee agency built the transit camp, a large, walled compound filled with tents, clinics and water tanks. Workers had promoted it as the first major point where returnees could get food, clean water, medical care and shelter as they hiked home.

But the metal gates were closed Tuesday, as they have been since the exodus from Zaire began five days ago. Only parents searching for lost children were allowed inside. Tens of thousands of refugees milled on the road outside, creating a giant traffic jam.

Aid workers say the Rwandan government, deeply suspicious of the motives of the international community, had ordered the transit center shut in an attempt to keep the refugees from stopping on their way home.

Officials from the Rwandan Ministry of Rehabilitation also closed a Red Cross camp for 350 ailing, elderly and pregnant refugees several hours after it opened Monday. The Rwandan officials, who said they did not want even sick refugees staying near the border, had the patients trucked to another hospital.

Aid officials also complained Tuesday that the Rwandan government had commandeered U.N. and Red Cross trucks on the road, directing drivers to pick up refugees and take them to Kigali, the capital, or Biyumba, a northern province.

It was not immediately clear if the growing Rwandan control of the operation was slowing the refugee flow, or more important, endangering lives.

Criticism has been widespread here that U.N. agencies have been slow to assist the refugees, many of whom have been on the road without aid for weeks.

At a makeshift aid station set up at Mukungwa, about 40 miles from the border, shoving and shouting matches erupted as boxes of high-protein biscuits were handed out. Aid workers waved sticks to maintain order among thousands of hungry refugees who lined up across the muddy field and down the road.

It was one of the few sites where even biscuits were available.

The World Food Program had initially planned to hand out 60-pound packs of food, enough for a month, to each person at the border.

When the mass flight on foot overran the border, the agency decided to hire nongovernmental organizations to truck the food, instead, to each commune and village so food packs would be available when the refugees arrived.

But it didn’t happen.

And on Tuesday, five days after the exodus began, Rwanda’s government said the world food agency alone was supposed to truck the food to the communes.

Each delay takes its toll on the ever-weaker refugees.

At Kora, between Nkamira and Mukungwa, nurses at a clinic run by Doctors Without Borders said that each day they see more people collapsing from exhaustion, diarrhea and other problems.

“They suffer because they walk and walk without food,” Dr. Javier Gabaldon said. “It’s worse than yesterday.”