AS THE Minister of State, Ms Joan Burton, arrived at one side of the Gisenyi border crossing yesterday, about loo Hutu refugees arrived at the other.
Ms Burton, two Rwandan Ministers, one representative each from Italy and Holland and a European Commissioner, brought a stream of journalists in their wake. Aid workers maintained that the authorities had kept the refugees for three hours at the other side, so that the return could be witnessed by the world's media and the European delegation.
But while their entry might have been contrived, their stories were not. The bedraggled group - many with no shoes and cut feet - may just have had the most distressing fortnight of their lives. Having fled Rwanda two years ago fearing reprisals for the genocide of up to a million Tutsis by Hutu militias, hunger had driven them back.
Muhamed Bicamumpaka said he has lost four children and his wife on the trek through the forest to Rwanda. They could walk no more (his wife was lame) so he took the youngest child and left the others behind. He does not know if they are dead or alive.
He has stayed for two years, he said, because the word in the camp was that everyone who returned had their children taken away to be killed and they were then killed themselves. Now hunger had driven him back.
He, like all his group, had come from Katale camp this day a fortnight ago when fighting started. They had lived there for almost two years, under the control of armed Hutu militias. They left the camp at 1 a.m., fearing that the armed men would try to stop them. People leaving camps for Rwanda are reported to have been shot dead.
Most of the refugees fleeing the fighting have gone deeper into Zaire. Those who had arrived in Gisenyi yesterday - just over 1,000 out of the 1.2 million refugees in Zaire - had ignored the propaganda of the past two years in the camp, stories that they would face certain slaughter should they return to Rwanda.
If Cecile Mukantabana, with a child on her breast, had feared the worst, she must have been relieved when she crossed the border and met her former university teacher. Joseph Nsengimana, now Rwanda's Minister for Higher Education, greeted her warmly. The pair seemed delighted to meet, and amused by the irony.
Her child suckled at her breast as she spoke. The Hutu militias who ran Katale camp, had told them all to go in the other direction towards Mugunga, another camp still being defended by armed men. Some of her family, she discovered, had gone there, but she had chosen the route to Rwanda.
Yes, she says, she feels safe now. For two weeks they had walked through the forest bringing rations that lasted just a few days. When it rained, they dug trenches and scooped rainwater out of them to drink.
Those who arrived yesterday brought a very small number of children, considering the typical large family size here. The children were mostly those small enough to be carried on their backs. Others had got lost or had been left behind because they could walk no more.
Francois Sinibagiwe's eyes were bloodshot and sunken in. He, his wife and seven children had made it to Rwanda, but three children had been lost in the forest.
No, he said, he did not know if he was safe now, but the alternative to coming for food was to stay in the forest and die of hunger. "The authorities here will decide my fate."
"There must be no more camps," Ms Burton told a press conference at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees building a few hundred yards up the road. "To go back to camps would be to continue the wretchedness and misery we have seen on the roads today."