AFTER the refugee train disaster, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees put the service hack on with improved security and control measures. A maximum of 1,000 refugees were loaded into the wagons and taken to Kisangani. The train was able to make two trips. In addition, six trucks carried the sick and unaccompanied children by road.

By the end of the day over 2,500 refugees had been brought out of the forest into the transit centre; 3,000 others had been moved out of the centre that morning. They were airlifted back to Rwanda, giving just enough time to clean up and get ready for the next arrivals.

The transit centre, a disused cattle farm, is full every evening to capacity. There is no room to move. The flow of the refugees is constant; they arrive every evening in their thousands and leave the next morning. They have to be offloaded, then reorganised into categories - the sick, the malnourished, the unaccompanied. Everyone has to be fed, given water, a blanket, access to toilets.

The children who are severely malnourished have to be registered, washed, given medicines, wrapped in blankets to keep them warm and begin the first of their eight feeds of the day.

They lie on plastic sheeting, on the floor of what used to be the cowshed. Over 100 of the worst are being coaxed gently and slowly into drinking the therapeutic milk. It is a pitiful sight.

We have seen a few children arrive at our centre with bullet and machete wounds. A three month old baby girl was carried in last night by a woman who was herself six months pregnant. She had found the baby in the forest clinging to the body of her dead mother.

A 10 year old boy lies in the hospital with a bullet wound in his leg. Beside him lies his mother. She has deep festering wounds, which have started to go gangrenous, on her feet.

In the meantime, the politicians at home debate the rights and wrongs of Irish aid to the Rwandan government. The Opposition has demanded that more guarantees are extracted from Rwanda, and claim that the Government has been blindly supportive of the Kigali leadership.

The reality is that there are no guarantees. How can there be in a region that is at war and that has witnessed the horror of one of the worst genocides in history? Rwanda, and its entire region, is steeped in blood and revenge. It has for the past three years been an arena of killings, violence and human rights abuses on a scale that we fail to comprehend.

We all know that Rwanda, Uganda and other neighbouring countries have facilitated and supported Mr Laurent Kabila's success. We know that there are Rwandan soldiers in Zaire and that they are reported to be rounding up refugees.

We know there are people dead or dying in the forest from killings, hunger or disease. This is a war, the final play out between the RPA, the rebel Alliance against what remains of the former Rwandan military and the Interahamwe, the main Hutu militia.

The war is not over yet, but it is the women and children, as always, who are the victims.

Last week I watched the UN try to set up a food distribution system in Biaro camp. Thousands of refugees converged on the distribution centre. Pushing and shoving their way to the front were the men, the fittest and the strongest. It was the women, emaciated and thin, the children weak and malnourished, who were pushed to the back. This is how these men have survived.

These are the same men who stole food from the women and children in the Goma camps in 1994. They are the same men who held the populations hostage in the camps for over two years to protect themselves, by instilling fear and through physical threats.

Many of these young men are former soldiers, many participated in the genocide. Are they a threat to the AFDL or the Rwandan government? Probably not any more. Their strength as a military force has been exaggerated and after six months on the run they are not an army any more, merely refugees.

As refugees and human beings they are entitled, as is everyone else, to a safe passage home, fair trials and justice. Whether we like it or not that is their right, a right which they are unlikely to get.

Rwanda stands accused of participating in the attacks on the refugee camps. In turn Rwanda accuses the west of what it sees as applying double standards. Kigali says we are obsessed with the fate of the 80,000 refugees in Kisangani, having ignored the 800,000 who perished in 1994.

The Rwandan government accuses the UN, and in particular the International Tribunal, of failing to bring to justice even one of the perpetrators of the genocide. They are right about the genocide, and we are about the refugees.

We need to do what we can to help the people of Rwanda, and to achieve this we must continue to work with the governments in the region. The Rwandan government, the AEDL, are new administrations. The RPA in 1994 took over a country that had been devastated by war. They have been in existence for only three years and have made enormous progress in developing the country, absorbing over 1.5 million refugees and achieving some degree of reconciliation.

My own belief is that the leadership in Rwanda is sincere about reconciliation of the population, but only on their terms and in their territory. They have little or no sympathy for the refugees. Can we expect them to?

We must continue to work with, influence and direct these administrations and governments. This is the only way we can gain and maintain access to the refugee population, the prisoner and the vulnerable.

There are no guarantees. We can hope for them, but it is naive of us to demand them. There are only relationships, contacts, influences, negotiations and support - not blind support by any means, nor continued aid at any price. But if we cut aid to Rwanda, we lose our line of influence. Our only guarantee to bring positive change to all Rwandans in need, those in Zaire and those back home, is in continued engagement, support and dialogue.