In Zaire, Lost Refugees Raise Fears of Genocide

At least 85,000 Rwandan refugees have vanished mysteriously from two camps in eastern Zaire, raising fears that they have been killed or sent on a death march that could begin a new chapter of genocide in Central Africa, aid officials said Friday.

“There was a departure in panic,” said Paul Stromberg, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in the eastern city of Kisangani, where he was interviewed by telephone. “Some people [who have surfaced] said that they left so quickly that they left babies behind.”

The eerily deserted camps were emptied between Monday and Wednesday, a period during which journalists and international relief workers were barred from visiting the refugees by rebels--allied with ethnic Tutsis--who have taken control of half of Zaire in just seven months and are now marching on the capital, Kinshasa. The Rwandan refugees are ethnic Hutus.

Frustrated, angry humanitarian officials were at a loss to explain what happened to the refugees. On Friday, several hundred dispersed Rwandans were spotted by aid workers conducting an aerial search for them on the trail leading from the camps, and a few had wandered back toward Kisangani but gave only fragmentary accounts of what happened.

“People came into the camps with machetes and began beating and killing the refugees,” said Veronique Niynguba, who escaped with her child. She spoke to reporters briefly before being dragged away by local villagers, who said they had instructions that no one should speak to journalists.

Nine thousand of the refugees were so ill or weakened by hunger and old age that they could not have moved far on their own, officials said. Yet the aerial search Friday along the refugees’ most likely route of departure turned up few clues.

Although rebel authorities blamed the U.N. agency for not arranging for the repatriation of the refugees earlier, U.N. officials noted that the rebels have repeatedly thrown up obstacles to a plan to airlift the refugees back to Rwanda.

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The 85,000--actually as many as 90,000, according to U.N. officials in New York--were the largest known group among an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 refugees who are believed to be wandering in desperate circumstances, fleeing from rebel and Tutsi fighters, in a country that is about the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. They are the remnants of the more than 1 million Hutus--including armed soldiers and government leaders--who fled Rwanda after the genocide of more than 800,000 Tutsis there in three months in the spring of 1994, the swiftest act of genocide this century.

Most of the Rwandans have since gone back, but officials are concerned that the ones who stayed in Zaire are facing almost certain death by starvation, disease or killing. They are resented by the local Zairian population and have the additional disadvantage of having backed the side that is losing in Zaire’s civil war.

Those forces are allied with Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko, while the rebels, led by Laurent Kabila, are supported by Rwanda’s new Tutsi-led government. In fact, the civil war began in October as a bid by ethnic Tutsis to rid Zaire of the Hutu refugees, some of whom were threatening to re-invade Rwanda at the time.

Although it is acknowledged that the Hutu refugees include many of the killers from 1994, the majority are women, children and elderly people not directly implicated in the genocide.

In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a statement accusing Kabila’s rebels of “slow extermination” of the Hutus.

“Those responsible must be held accountable,” he said.

Annan spokesman Fred Eckhard said there is mounting evidence not only that assistance is being blocked but that “people are being attacked in an organized way.” Annan said he fears that Rwandan Tutsi officials are seeking to kill off the Hutu refugees as a reprisal for the 1994 massacre, U.N. officials said.

The possible refugee tragedy threatens to tarnish the image of Kabila, who many Zairians view as a potential liberator from the 32-year dictatorship of Mobutu. With his forces closing in this weekend on Kikwit, the last major city in his path to the capital, military victory now appears within Kabila’s grasp.

Diplomats and U.N. officials say Kabila will be held responsible if, as it appears, a new genocide is occurring in the areas held by the rebels.

“The expression final solution is not exaggerated,” World Food Program spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume warned in Geneva.

A diplomat in Kinshasa said Kabila might one day be regarded as Africa’s Pol Pot, the ex-premier of the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. But rebel officials say the media are guilty of biased reporting about him.

Kabila, in a interview given with Reuters news agency, was quoted as promising a full investigation into the refugees’ disappearance.

“I seek nothing but the truth,” he said from his current headquarters in Lubumbashi, in southeastern Zaire. “I will immediately be asking the United Nations and aid agencies to set up an independent probe team on the saga.”

So far, U.N. officials have stopped short of accusing the rebels at the now-deserted Kasese and Biaro camps, south of Kisangani, of carrying out atrocities, but they are clearly worried.

Stromberg said: “We have been very, very concerned at reports we have heard of attacks and killings in the camps . . . especially now, when we are confronted by an empty site.”

During a 30-minute visit Thursday to the larger camp, Kasese, officials saw a newly dug mound of dirt and an empty trench but were driven off by gunshots when they tried to take a closer look. Rebel soldiers then forced the officials to leave the area.

Raising further questions, the entire camp--which a few days earlier had housed 55,000 people--had been “picked clean” of belongings and debris, Stromberg said.

Some armed Hutus have managed to stay ahead of the steady rebel advance and remain in the shrinking areas controlled by the Zairian government.

One group of several hundred has crossed Zaire’s entire width--like walking from New York to St. Louis--and is helping government troops defend Mbandaka, on Zaire’s western frontier, U.N. officials say.

Times staff writer Craig Turner at the U.N. contributed to this report.

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Refugee Mystery

Refugees have abandoned camps in Zaire before but have always left behind people too weak to walk. These two camps appeared to be empty.

Kasese: 35,000 people missing

Biaro: 55,000 people missing

Sources: United Nations, Associated Press