Kidnapping of Children Latest Horror in Zaire

U.N. officials Monday called it an act of “utmost barbarism”: In the middle of the night, soldiers burst into a hospital in eastern Zaire where 50 severely malnourished Rwandan children were receiving emergency food and threw them “like sacks of potatoes” onto the back of a truck to be driven away to an unknown fate.

The soldiers, wearing uniforms like those worn by the Zairian rebel alliance, also beat up two nurses and an aide at the hospital in Lwiro so badly that they had to be hospitalized, and berated them for “caring for our enemies,” said a spokesman for UNICEF.

The revelations constituted the latest allegation of serious human rights violations against Rwandan Hutu refugees committed by the Tutsi-allied rebel forces of Laurent Kabila. They followed charges in recent days that rebel soldiers and Zairian villagers have killed hundreds of refugees and driven tens of thousands of others away from internationally supervised camps where they were being fed.

On Monday, between 5,000 and 10,000 of the refugees--among more than 85,000 missing since last week--emerged exhausted, frightened and hungry from forests and drifted back to camps south of the city of Kisangani that they had fled last week after what they described as brutal attacks by villagers and rebel soldiers.

Humanitarian workers were able to enter one of the camps, at Biaro, for the first time in a week and discovered 20 bodies lying in a heap at the field hospital.

Some of the corpses looked as though they were former patients who had succumbed to hunger and illness, but others appeared to have been hacked to death with machetes, said Paul Stromberg, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in Kisangani.

Aid workers have demanded a full and impartial investigation of all the alleged rights violations and are preparing to begin a long-delayed emergency airlift today aimed at repatriating Hutu refugees to Rwanda as quickly as possible, Stromberg said in a telephone interview Monday night.

The disappearance of the refugees from the camps last week set off an international outcry, including a charge from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the rebels were carrying out a “slow extermination” of the Hutus, whom they blame for participation in the mass executions of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

At a tense face-to-face meeting Sunday with Kabila, aid agencies won his assent to take the refugees home. But Kabila also set a 60-day deadline for the refugees’ total repatriation to Rwanda.

Annan’s spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said in New York on Monday that the 60-day deadline was “unrealistic.” Repatriating the refugees within 60 days could be accomplished only if they first were found, moved to a secure place, fed and given medical care, he said.

U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns, in Washington, called the rebel leader’s deadline “unreasonable . . . and unacceptable.”

But given the perilous situation of the refugees in Zaire, Stromberg said, the airlift home was scheduled to begin immediately. Several hundred of the refugees would be flown today from Kisangani to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, he said.

Laughlin Monro, program coordinator for UNICEF in eastern Zaire, gave a detailed account of the attack at the hospital in Lwiro, 22 miles north of Bukavu near the Rwandan border. He said 50 Hutu children were taken in all, plus about 10 of their parents. Other patients in the hospital have since run away, fearing the soldiers will return.

No children have been returned and no bodies have been found, Monro said. The attack began at 4 a.m. when the 20 soldiers arrived in a truck, fired their guns in the air and began carrying the children out, he said, expressing concern that the children might not have survived, given their “extremely poor physical and nutritional state” and “the extremely crude and barbarous way” they were abducted.

“I don’t know whether this is the action of a rogue commander or a rogue bunch of troops,” said Munro, interviewed by telephone by BBC Radio. “What I do know is that whoever it was, from whatever side . . . it was an act of utmost barbarism.”

The children, most of whom were orphaned or had been separated from their families, had been gathered up by the humanitarian group Save the Children along the refugee trails in eastern Zaire in November and December.

“These were children, not even teenagers--they had nothing to do with the fighting or the genocide in Rwanda,” said UNICEF spokesman Roger Botralhy.

Kabila, who has been thrown on the defensive in the past five days by reports of rebel atrocities against Hutu refugees, has consistently denied that his troops have been responsible. He has blamed Hutu refugees for making up stories at the instruction of Rwandan Hutu military commanders, who fled into Zaire with the refugees in 1994 after taking part in the genocide of more than 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Amid the mounting refugee crisis, Bill Richardson, a special envoy of President Clinton and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, arrived in the country to try to bridge the divide between the two sides in Zaire’s civil war.

“There’s a humanitarian crisis here, and the international community must respond,” Richardson said. “There have been some reports of massacres and human rights abuses. This must end.”

Richardson, a veteran trouble-shooter for Clinton, was to meet with President Mobutu Sese Seko in the capital, Kinshasa, today and then fly immediately to rebel-held Lubumbashi in the southeast for talks with Kabila. He told reporters that he would be urging Kabila and Mobutu to come to peace terms, even as Kabila’s troops continued a rapid advance on Kinshasa.

“The United States firmly believes that there can be no military solution to the crisis, but rather a negotiated settlement leading to an inclusive transitional government and free and fair elections,” said Richardson.

But U.S. officials acknowledged that Richardson will have to work quickly to bring about a meeting between Mobutu and Kabila. Unofficial reports reaching the capital put the rebels inside or just on the outskirts of Kikwit.

The capture of that city, 240 miles east of Kinshasa, would put the rebels on Mobutu’s doorstep.