The United Nations must begin to plan for fresh intervention in Central Africa’s Great Lakes region, or else suffer from yet another bloodbath in the area, three major humanitarian aid groups told the U.N. Security Council Wednesday.

Oxfam, CARE, and Doctors Without Borders all drew special attention to the needs of refugees in eastern Zaire, where fighting between government troops and a rebel alliance is taking place close to more than 160,000 Rwandan refugees.

The United Nations must help relocate swiftly more than 120,000 of those refugees trapped between government and rebel lines in the Zairean town of Tingi Tingi, argued Pierre Salignon, a Doctors Without Borders field coordinator who recently left the region.

“It seems that U.N. agencies are unable to supply all the camps with food,” Salignon said. In Tingi Tingi, he argued, more than 20 people are dying daily from starvation, with the majority of deaths striking children under five and women also especially vulnerable to malnutrition. Worse, Salignon added, the battle lines are coming even closer to the camp, offering the prospect that even less food will be available.

“Only 30 percent of the food needed in Tingi Tingi is arriving,” said Doctors Without Borders President Jaques de Milliano. He argued that few nations have received as low a level of food assistance without seeking U.N. action.

The agency says that many of the refugees at the camp would like to leave but are being used as “human shields” by former Rwandan Army (ex-FAR) and paramilitary forces, who have wandered through eastern Zaire since being ousted from Rwanda in 1994.

“The current crisis cannot be solved unless the most vulnerable refugees are separated from the ex-FAR soldiers and Interahamwe (Rwandan extremist) militias among them and moved away from the front line,” de Milliano argued. “If this problem is not solved quickly, the whole vulnerable population is going to die.”

The aid groups prodded the Security Council to provide safe corridors for the population to travel out of the heavy fighting to areas where they could receive food and medical attention, said David Bryer, director of Oxfam. Yet he doubted that the United Nations would respond by dispatching peacekeepers to the region anew, saying that such an approach was “not timely.”

Bryer argued that there have been several occasions when U.N. troops could have separated the refugees from the ex-FAR and militias — most recently last October, when the Zairean rebels routed those groups from refugee camps in eastern Zaire, forcing most refugees back to Rwanda.

But now, he said, the more important task was to plan for future intervention rather than continue with the current ad hoc U.N. approach to begin such planning only after fresh crises erupt in Rwanda, Burundi, or Zaire. “There is a need for coherence,” Bryer argued. Although the Council responds when crises start, he added, “when they come off the television screens, they cease to have political backing.”

The U.N. record throughout the Great Lakes region has been spotty at best. “For the past several years, the United Nations has failed systematically in this part of the world to act in a timely and politically coherent way,” de Milliano said.

In April 1994, when the ex-FAR and Interahamwe participated in the genocide of perhaps as many as one million Rwandans, the United Nations actually pulled out its peacekeeping mission to that country, returning only after a new government had restored stability.

The Security Council for the past two years has also resisted military involvement in Burundi, despite an ongoing civil war there which escalated following a military coup last July. It allowed a short-lived, Canadian-led peacekeeping effort to take care of refugees in eastern Zaire last November, but the troops departed swiftly after the massive refugee exodus back into Rwanda.

Most recently, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan sent a special U.N. and Organisation of African Unity envoy, Algerian diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun, to the region to convene a conference among all the Great Lakes states. De Milliano hailed the appointment, but noted that Sahnoun would still need clear support from the United Nations to be effective.

The larger problem is that the Security Council, which must authorise all major U.N. crisis management, remains divided on its approach to the region’s problems.

The United States, which holds veto power in the Council, is wary of any long-term peacekeeping in Africa, and has been content to allow the Zairean rebels to expand their now 600-mile zone of influence. But France, another veto-wielding member, supports Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s efforts to reassert the territorial unity of Zaire.

The aid groups have argued that nothing will be achieved in the region until a common political approach is first worked out. Already, Bryer argued, the death toll from fighting in recent years in Burundi, Rwanda and Zaire has been five times as great as that in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Yet despite that, he added, humanitarian groups “have felt sometimes that we were a fig leaf” for the lack of a common policy in the Great Lakes.