Rwandan Refugees Ordered From Zaire by Rebel Leader

The leader of Zaire’s rebels ordered up to 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees out of the country Sunday, giving the United Nations two months to track them down and send them home.

Laurent Kabila promised that international officials will have full access to search for the tens of thousands of refugees, whose fate remained unknown after they dispersed into the jungle when their camps allegedly came under attack last week.

A few hundred refugees had been found. Some of these said Zairian villagers attacked the camps with machetes, killing hundreds, and that Kabila’s forces opened fire on at least one camp.

Authorities evacuated the first 40 of the refugees Sunday, flying them directly from Kisangani to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, according to representatives of the U.N. refugee agency.

Kabila’s fighters previously had blocked a planned U.N. airlift of the starving refugees, saying in part that the flights would interfere with his troops’ movements.

But in talks with U.N. officials Sunday in Kisangani, Kabila abruptly gave the U.N. two months to collect and evacuate the refugees, Filippo Grandi of the refugee agency said. Kabila said the airlift could use any airport except the rebel-held airport in Goma on the Rwandan border, Grandi said.

It was not clear what will happen to the refugees if they remain after the 60-day deadline, the countdown for which starts Thursday.

The refugee camps, crammed with 100,000 starving, exhausted and disease-ridden refugees days earlier, were found eerily deserted last week, five days after rebels sealed off the area to foreign aid workers and journalists.

Flying over the jungle Sunday, aid workers spotted heavy smoke at two sites west of the abandoned camps. International officials thought the smoke might have been from campfires of large groups of refugees too frightened to come out of the jungle, said Paul Stromberg, a spokesman in Kisangani for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

“The problem is, the forest is so dense it’s virtually impossible to see anything from the air,” he said.