100,000 Refugees Return to Rwanda

Women balanced heavy bundles on their heads and men pushed bicycles piled high with possessions Monday on the road from Tanzania to Rwanda, which was crowded with Hutu refugees as far as the eye could see.

By evening, more than 100,000 people, some carrying ducks and chickens, others herding goats and cows, had crossed into their home country after 2 1/2 years in Tanzanian refugee camps.

Some took shortcuts through fields of bright yellow sunflowers. Others pushed bicycles so loaded with goods there was no room for a rider. A baby was strapped atop a load on a wheelbarrow. Women stopped amid the exodus to give birth.

The refugees--ordered to leave Tanzania by Dec. 31--are the largest group to return to Rwanda since hundreds of thousands of Hutus came home from Zaire last month.

International Committee of the Red Cross spokesman Carl Naucler said he thought nearly all the 535,000 Hutu refugees in Tanzania will return to Rwanda by week’s end.

“Everything is very orderly. There is no problem on the Tanzanian side,” he said.

But earlier, Tanzanian troops fired into the air to force thousands of refugees to return home, and police in trucks kept the stragglers moving along the road to the border.

At one point, Red Cross workers with mechanical counters were clocking 330 refugees a minute crossing the bridge over the Kagera River that forms the boundary between the two countries.

Aid workers said 25 babies were born Sunday on the road to Rwanda.

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More than a million Hutus fled Rwanda in 1994 and scattered into neighboring countries, including Zaire and Tanzania, fearing retribution for a Hutu-led genocide of minority Tutsis.

Last month, 640,000 Rwandan refugees returned home from eastern Zaire when attacks by Zairian rebels freed them from the control of Hutu militias in the refugee camps.

At one station in Tanzania on Monday, Red Cross workers used twine to tie the hands of children to their mothers as refugees from the Benaco camp moved along the road.

The large camp was all but empty as the refugees headed for the border 11 miles away. Aid workers swept through the camp, finding very ill people who could not travel and had been left to die.

Red Cross worker Justin Cockerell said 134 lost children spent the night in a roadside tent.

As dusk fell, soldiers and aid workers loaded sobbing, scared children aboard trucks to take them across the border to be reunited with their parents. When one truck started, the vibrations seemed to soothe the children, and they all stopped crying.