ONE MILLION people could die in Zaire, Ms Emma Bonino, the European Union's Humanitarian Aid Commissioner, said yesterday in calling for swift action from a world she accused of standing aloof from the unfolding tragedy.
"For the moment, 500,000 people are missing, we don't know where," she told reporters. "With the return of barbarism - they are firing on the Red Cross - the lives of one million people are in danger." In Geneva, the UN refugee agency said about 600,000 Rwandan and Burundian Hutus were cut off from foreign aid in eastern Zaire.
Ms Bonino said the world had looked on as international conventions intended to protect humanitarian aid workers and UN protected camps were brushed aside in the fighting in Zaire. She urged the United Nations to protect its refugee camps.
"The basis of humanitarian law has been totally violated, without there being a rebellion by the United Nations and the world community," she said. "I wonder at what point they are going to act," she said.
Lorna Siggins reports.
A "cataclysmic and major disaster" is how Irish aid agencies have forecast the situation in Central Africa in a further appeal to the Government yesterday to act quickly on behalf of the EU Presidency.
The Government should make an "urgent and dramatic" plea to the UN to bring the situation in eastern Zaire under control, Refugee Trust said, while Mr John O'Shea of GOAL said that the UN should send in the troops.
However, the Minister of State for Overseas Aid, Ms Joan Burton, said that the EU was making every diplomatic effort, and expressed the hope that African nations would take an initiative at their summit in Tanzania this weekend.
The EU special envoy to the Great Lakes Region, Mr Aldo Ajello, met the Rwandan president and vice-president yesterday and will meet Zairean leaders today. Ms Burton is to meet the Rwandan Foreign Minister, Mr Gasane, in Dublin today.
Dr Dominic McSorley, who has been working with Concern in Bukavu said that there had been heavy shelling yesterday morning, and the Concern office in the city had been completely looted. There were reports of complete destabilisation in eastern Zaire.
"Unless there is a safe corridor established between Rwanda and Zaire, the refugees will not be able to pass," he said in a very bleak report yesterday to Dublin.
"Agencies are being told to gear up for what may be a massive return of over a million refugees."
Calls from the UN Secretary General to appoint a mediator and start regional meetings should be supported, he said, but in reality such initiatives were too late and too slow to avert the current humanitarian disaster. Only a regional conference that embraced Rwanda, Zaire, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda might yet prevent the entire region slipping into war.