RWANDA-REFUGEES: Kigali Worried By Expulsion Threat

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Jean-Baptiste Kayigamba and Moyiga Nduru

KIGALI, Feb 11 1996 (IPS) - Threats by Zaire’s government to forcibly repatriate Rwandan refugees has raised concern in the Central African nation, which is battling to overcome the legacy of more than three decades of ethnic and political tragedies.

While the Kigali government maintains that it wants Rwandans camped in Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi to return home, it says the repatriations should be voluntary and progressive.

“The fact that refugees will be returning is something we would like to see happening,” Vice-President and Minister of Defense Major General Paul Kagame told journalists here Friday. “However, we will be concerned by the manner in which refugees will be returning.”

“We are concerned in the sense that if there is forced massive repatriation, it will certainly cause some problems, mainly to refugees,” he indicated, while admitting that his government would also have difficulty coping with a sudden massive influx.

Zaire threatened at the end of January to close refugee camps in Bukava and Goma, in the east of the country, which have about one million Rwandan refugees. It had made a similar threat in August last and began carrying it out.

By the time the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) managed to persuade it to suspend the repatriations, about 15,000 Rwandans had been forcibly sent home. They have since been resettled with the help of the UNHCR.

UNHCR representative in Kigali, Roman Urasa, said on Jan. 31 when Zaire announced its intention to close two camps in Goma that his agency was prepared for the new influx. “We are ready,” he said “We have means of transport, we have transit camps and required services waiting.”

But there are fears here that, this time around, the rate at which the refugees are repatriated may be higher than the 20,000 which the Rwandan government says it is prepared to take in each day.

Another aspect of the repatriation issue has to do with past upheavals in Rwanda.

Since independence, successive pogroms against the country’s Tutsi minority caused thousands of them to flee mainly to Zaire, Uganda and Burundi. After the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA), then a mainly Tutsi rebel group, defeated the former government forces in July 1994, many returned.

Some took over property left by Hutus who fled when the former government forces were defeated.

The Rwandan government maintains that no one who has been a refugee for 15 or more years ago should claim or occupy property and that anyone who does so must vacate it as soon as the previous owner returns. ERMDHRE RWANDA-REFUGEES: Kigali Worried By Expulsion Threat(2)

When, early this month, some 5,000 recent refugees returned from Burundi, people who had moved into their houses were reportedly made to leave them, mainly in the Butare area in the southeast, where the bulk of the returnees resettled.

However, this has created a headache for local authorities which do not have money to finance the resettlement of those evicted.

Food is also an issue.

Although Rwanda is hoping for a 24 percent increase in its agricultural production this year, the amount is not enough to feed its 6.6 million people.

Farming was disrupted by the 1994 war and genocide, in which an estimated one million people were killed, although Dr Sam Kanyarukiga, advisor on agriculture to Rwandese President Pasteur Bizimungu, says “there has been a positive response from the population to the government’s appeal to resume farming activities”.

“It’s discernable that everything is being done to bring the food deficit to a minimum by the end of the first half of 1996,” he told IPS last week during a visit to Nairobi.

However, according to a joint report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), Rwanda requires some 71,000 tonnes of cereal and 26,000 tonnes of pulses in the next six months,

The WFP has appealed for relief aid for Rwanda as well as neighbouring Burundi, whose agriculture sector has also been affected by political and ethnic upheavals that have displaced thousands of peasants.

“We urgently need an additional 155 million dollars to continue providing relief assistance for the refugees, returnees and internally displaced people,” Yohannes Mengesha, WFP Regional Manager for East and Southern Africa, said in Nairobi last week.

The WFP said that once donors respond positively to its appeal, the food would be distributed to some 1,920,000 Rwandan and Burundian refugees in Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi prior to their possible repatriation and to some 520,000 displaced people in Rwanda and Burundi. However, if the Rwandans are repatriated en masse, that could disrupt its distribution programme.

In the meantime, Rwanda’s authorities say they could have another crisis on their hands since they are now preparing for an influx of Zaireans of Rwandan origin, the descendants of people who settled in Masisi, a region in eastern Zaire, at the end of the 19th century.

According to the official Agence Rwandaise de Presse (ARP), ethnic Rwandans in Masisi are being forced from their land and homes by the Zairean military and the ‘interahamwe’ (Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after the fall of its previous government).

The ARP reported that, between Jan. 1 and 12, about 1,166 ethnic Rwandans sought refuge in the border town of Goma.

In an interview with Radio Rwanda, some of the displacees said they had been harassed by the interahamwe and fellow Zaireans from other ethnic groups. They said some people had been killed, their farms taken away, and cattle rustled.

“What we will do first is to receive them because they are fleeing, and we will take the matter to Zairean authorities,” said Kagame. “You cannot expel these people without returning the land because when you deport people and hold their land, I think, in the long run they will seek to resettle it.”