Refugees in Tanzania Return to Camps

Thousands of Rwandan refugees who had fled into the bush to escape being sent home are streaming back to the stripped-down camps they had abandoned, and some of the weaker ones are dying of hunger, thirst and exhaustion, a U.N. official said Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Ngara near the border with Rwanda said up to 5,000 refugees were returning to Kitali and Keza camps every hour.

The spokesman estimated that at least 50,000 refugees were either inside the camps or milling around in the nearby countryside after leaving en masse last week.

In addition, 43,000 refugees crossed back into Rwanda on Tuesday morning, the spokesman said.

Tanzania has ordered all its 535,000 Rwandan refugees to leave by Dec. 31.

Tanzanian authorities allowed aid workers back into the camps Tuesday, but insisted that they could feed only refugees from neighboring Burundi, who have been arriving for nearly three years to escape fighting between the Tutsi-dominated army and Hutu rebels. Tanzania opposes the Burundian military that seized power July 25. Government officials say that in Burundi, unlike Rwanda, ethnic and political violence is too rampant to permit a safe return of the refugees.

In all, more than 200,000 refugees have returned to Rwanda from Tanzania. Aid workers expected all of them to have crossed the border by week’s end.

The refugees who had fled into the bush were being corralled by Hutu militants who had earlier forced them to leave the camps but ordered them not to go to Rwanda, aid workers said.

“People are being manipulated, and they have been moving around in circles for nothing,” the spokesman for the U.N. agency said. “The vulnerable [are] starting to die.”

The Hutu militants fear going back to Rwanda because some of them were responsible for a genocide of Tutsis there in 1994.

Hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled Rwanda in 1994, fearing retribution from a new Tutsi government after a Hutu-led massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Last month, 640,000 Rwandan refugees left Zaire and returned home.

The refugees from Tanzania are generally in better shape than those who returned from Zaire. They have been carrying ducks and chickens, herding goats and cows or pushing bicycles so loaded with belongings that there was no room for a rider.