U.S. Sharply Cuts Relief Plans for Central Africa

The Clinton administration, clearly relieved by a surge of Rwandan refugees heading home, sharply scaled back its Central African relief program Tuesday, canceling plans to send a battalion of paratroopers and deciding instead to dispatch a small contingent of support personnel.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry said last week’s planned deployment of about 1,000 combat troops backed by 3,000 to 4,000 other military specialists into a potential combat zone in eastern Zaire has been cut to fewer than 1,000 pilots, cargo handlers and air traffic controllers.

He said the unexpected migration of up to 600,000 refugees from Zaire to Rwanda “is a very positive development. We are modifying our plans based on this dramatic change.”

At the same time, administration officials said that a Canadian-led multinational force will still be needed to deliver food and medicine to the refugees.

But there now seems to be far less danger that the international troops will be sucked into a complex ethnic war.

Canada called a meeting at the United Nations today of representatives of the 14 countries that have agreed to contribute troops. The participants are reviewing the rapidly changing situation.

Military commanders from the same countries are to meet Thursday in Stuttgart, Germany, to complete the planning, though a State Department official said that session may slip back to Friday.

In Ottawa, Canadian officials said the rescue mission will be reconsidered at the U.N. and Stuttgart meetings.

“Decisions are not being made until those evaluations are finished,” Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy said. “You don’t start making a judgment until you have the right information. We know some of the major objectives have been obtained. But we’re still not sure, no one is sure, because you’re getting different points of view, as to what the situation of [the] refugees [is] in eastern Zaire.”

In Tokyo, where he is paying a state visit to Japan, French President Jacques Chirac said the international force was still needed despite the movement of the refugees.

“We must provide security and food aid for these refugees and take all the necessary steps to hold a conference under the auspices of the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity” to sort out the complex situation with the governments of Rwanda, Zaire, Burundi and Uganda, as well as the ethnic-based rebel groups opposing the Zairian and Rwandan regimes, Chirac said.

France was among the first nations to call for international military intervention in Zaire.

But France, like most of the other countries that have offered to send troops, made it clear that it would not participate unless the United States was involved.

Last week, President Clinton announced that Washington will contribute forces because, he said, the world’s most powerful nation is morally obligated to prevent innocent women and children from starving if it can do so.

But U.S. officials were clearly wary of the operation, which they considered potentially as hazardous as the intervention in chaotic Somalia, which ended shortly after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in one notorious incident three years ago.

Although the administration demanded a “de facto cease-fire” as a condition for going ahead in Zaire, officials acknowledged that they had little confidence in promises from some of the factions.

The danger abated, however, when militant Hutu fighters, many of them accused of genocide after the slaughter of more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians in Rwanda two years ago, fled the refugee camps, allowing civilian refugees to begin the trek home.

“We realized that there were the possibilities of hostilities and that our forces might have faced the risk of being caught in cross-fires between competing rebel groups,” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said.

“That risk has now gone away,” he said. “So we are reorganizing our force. We don’t have to send in a force prepared to protect itself. We don’t have to move into an airport near an area where mortars have been fired.”

Under the new plans, the Pentagon intends to fly supplies from Uganda and Kenya to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Air Force crews will fly the planes, handle cargo and supervise air traffic control at the airports.

Bacon said about 500 U.S. personnel will be stationed at Entebbe air base in Uganda, about 200 in Kigali and another 100 in Mombasa, Kenya. He said those numbers might increase somewhat when the operation gets underway, but he said the total number of Americans will not exceed 1,000.

Assistant Secretary of State George Moose, the department’s top Africa specialist, estimated that more than 500,000 refugees have crossed into Rwanda in the last several days. He said several hundred thousand more are still in eastern Zaire, though it is unclear just where they are.