AT LEAST 400,000 Rwandan refugees have abandoned their camps in northwestern Tanzania, voting with their feet against a plan to repatriate them by the end of the year, United Nations officials say.
In Benaco refugee camp in Tanzania, once the largest in the country with 160,000 to 180,000 Rwandans, only a few stragglers lingered in the debris yesterday.
Although it had been widely predicted that the refugees would move, the exodus away from Rwanda has taken relief agencies completely by surprise. Major humanitarian and political problems loom if reports that the refugees are headed for Kenya, Uganda or Malawi are true.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Rwanda in Zaire, where up to half a million other Rwandan refugees may still be adrift in equatorial forests, Zairean rebels declared a unilateral ceasefire in their campaign to overthrow the government in Kinshasa.
The Minister of State for Overseas Development, Ms Joan Burton, expressed disappointment at the news from Tanzania. It appeared the refugees, unlike their counterparts in eastern Zaire, had been unable to break free of extremist Interahamwe control, she said.
"If they have moved further into Tanzania and Uganda, they will have to be resettled and given small plots of land rather than come under extremist influence in refugee camps again."
Concern, which has 12 expatriate staff working in the Tanzanian camps, said last night the refugees were undertaking "a near impossible journey". Mr Mike McDonagh described how "a sea of people" passed by the agency's team in Lumasi camp.
"We asked them where they were going. `Anywhere but Rwanda' was the firm reply," he said.
In Benaco, one refugee, Theoneste, gave Reuter his reasons for moving: "I'm leaving because some of the refugees repatriated yesterday were killed in Rwanda. I'm sure if I go back I will be killed also".
UN officials said the five other scamps in the area were also deserted, giving a total of between 400,000 and 500,000 people on the loose in the Tanzanian bush.
The exodus started on a small scale last Sunday and began to snowball as word spread through the camps that refugees in other areas had struck camp and headed into the bush.
Members of the Hutu militia the Interahamwe, do not want to go home for fear of prosecution or reprisals for the massacre of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994. They want the other refugees to stay with them on the grounds there is strength in numbers.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had hoped it and the Tanzanians could persuade the refugees to go home willingly, following the example of more than 600,000 who have gone home from Zaire since mid November.
Instead the plan seems to have backfired. It may end in bands of Rwandan refugees wandering across the Tanzanian bush, just as others are in the forests of Zaire.
Aid workers quoted refugees as saying they decided to leave when they heard that the Tanzanian military and a delegation from the Rwandan army had passed by Benaco.
The Rwandan military team was on its way to the town of Ngara to co ordinate the repatriation with the Tanzanians but the sight of them put the refugees in a panic, they said.