THERE is growing concern about the fate of 85,000 Rwandan refugees in the jungle of Zaire's remote interior. Amid fears of massacres by rebel forces, the UN said yesterday that it still had no news about the refugees, many of whom are sick and dying.
An aircraft search of the area in which they were last seen failed to yield positive results. UN officials said they were horrified on Thursday to find Kasese refugee camp, 10 km south of Kisangani, empty of its 55,000 inhabitants.
"I am absolutely shocked," said Mr Filippo Grandi, a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). "There was a camp here a few days ago. People were sick, hungry and too weak to walk. Now where are they? We are very concerned about their lives and we need answers from the rebels about their fate."
A UNHCR spokesman said 9,000 of those who disappeared from Kasese would be unable to walk, including 2,500 badly malnourished children.
The UN refugee agency said yesterday it had unconfirmed reports from villagers that another 30,000 Rwandan refugees had evacuated Biaro camp, 15 km south of Kisangani. An aid worker reported seeing thousands of refugees from Biaro being marched southwards by uniformed soldiers.
No aid workers or journalists have had access to the Rwandan refugees since last Sunday. Visiting Biaro on that day. I saw dozens of men, women and children lying sick and helpless in the oozing mud which covered the camp. Their emaciated bodies wracked by coughing, they begged for water in the midday heat. There was little medicine and their food stocks were running out. More than a dozen corpses wrapped in plastic bags lined the track leading into the makeshift settlement.
The air was filled with the crying of children and birdcalls from the overhanging jungle canopy. Locally recruited gravediggers, wearing long rubber gloves and facemasks, said that more than 60 refugees were dying every day. "We're too tired to walk any further," said Mr Innocent Onyabenda as he buried his 80 year old mother.
The rebels sealed off the camps early in the week after six Zairean villagers were killed in an attack alleged to have been carried out by armed Rwandans from the camps. There is growing speculation that the rebels used the incident as a pretext to launch a massive "cleansing" operation against the refugees, who are seen as both a security and a health threat.
Members of Rwanda's Hutu majority, the refugees are all that remain of the huge tide of humanity which poured into Zaire after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Most of Rwanda's refugee population returned home last year but some fled into the Zairean interior. Those still in Zaire are believed to contain a hard core of Hutu militiamen who participated in the genocide of at least half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.
The refugees' plight is turning into a diplomatic and public relations disaster for the rebel leader, Mr Laurent Kabila. But rebel officials in Kisangani accused the media of biased reporting and blamed UN agencies for not repatriating the refugees earlier.
Speaking in Lubumbashi, Mr Kabila said he would invite the UN and aid agencies to investigate the refugee crisis. "I seek nothing but the truth about the refugee crisis in Kisangani," he said. "I will immediately be asking the United Nations and aid agencies to set up an independent probe team on the saga.