GREAT LAKES-POPULATION: Nations On Alert To Refugee Influx

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Nov 5 1996 (IPS) - The movement of people fleeing the fighting in eastern Zaire has put other African countries on the alert to refugees crossing into their territories.

At the moment, the majority of the refugees are fleeing into the interland of Zaire. Others are crossing into neighbouring Tanzania.

The countries, not bordering eastern Zaire, touched by the crisis are: Zambia, which has reported the arrival of more than 1,000 Rwandan refugees since the fighting started; and Sudan, which claims that the fighting may affect some 145,000 Sudanese refugees in Zaire.

Sudan’s Commissioner General for Refugees, Mohammad Ahmad Hussein Abdul Aleim, said last week that the country was expecting Hutu refugees.

The Hutu, an ethnic group which made up the majority of the 1.2 million refugees in eastern Zaire before the present crisis erupted, fled neighbouring Rwanda after Tutsi-dominated rebels of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) seized power there in 1994.

They make up 80 percent of the total population in both Rwanda and Burundi, where the Tutsis, a minority in both countries, are in power.

Many of the Hutus, implicated in the 1994 genocide in which up to one million people, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered in Rwanda, are reluctant to return home for fear of reprisals.

So far, only Zairean nationals have crossed into Uganda, which the Hutu claim is sympathetic to the regimes in Kigali, Rwanda and in Bujumbura, Burundi.

Peter Kessler, spokesperson of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Nairobi, Kenya, said Monday there were a total of 9,000 refugees, mostly Zairean nationals, on the Ugandan border at Kisoro, Ishasha and Butogota.

A World Food Programme (WFP) report said Monday that people continue arriving at Kigoma, Tanzania and other ports. “Unconfirmed reports put arrivals at about 2,000,” said the report.

But ‘World Vision’ on Monday put the number at 4,500 over the last five days. WFP also reports 10,000 people arriving at Ishasha and 6,800 at Kisoro in Uganda. WFP and World Vision say the vast majority of these people are Zairean nationals.

Tanzania already hosted some 700,000 refugees from Rwanda and Burundi before the present crisis.

The current flow of refugees cannot cross into Tanzania en masse, since the strategic entry border towns like Uvira have been captured by the Banyamulenge rebels.

The Banyamulenge are ethnic Tutsis who arrived in eastern Zaire up to 200 years ago from what are now Rwanda and Burundi.

Zaire has accused Rwanda of training and arming the Banyamulenge, who number about 400,000, and the Banyarwanda, another ethnic Tutsi group living in eastern Zaire. In response, Rwanda accuses Zaire of supporting the 40,000-strong ethnic Hutu former army of Rwanda, overthrown by Tutsi rebels in 1994.

Laurent-Desire Kabila, the spokesman of the rebel Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL), believes that the solution to the refugee crisis lies in their return home to their respective countries.

He announced a three-week cease-fire on Monday to allow international aid agencies to repatriate the 1.2 million refugees.

Kabila, speaking from Bukavu which faces the Rwandan town of Cyengungu, said the unilaterally-declared cease-fire would take effect from Monday evening.

He warned that the rebels would not hesitate to strike back if attacked – but that the three towns controlled by the ADFL (Bukavu, Goma and Uvira) were “calm” because Zairean soldiers and government officials had fled.

If the cease-fire holds, refugees have been given three weeks to repatriate to their country of origin. Kabila said those who refused to leave would be “re-grouped” and put in camps away from “exiled” Hutu extremists implicated in the Rwandan 1994 genocide.

Sadako Ogata, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, has also been calling for an international force to be sent in to open a safe passage from eastern Zaire for the refugees to return home to Rwanda.