ZAIRE-POPULATION: No Sign of Rwandan Refugees

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Dec 9 1996 (IPS) - While aid agencies and the international community debate the merits of going ahead with the multinational military force, the whereabouts of some 165,000 Rwandan refugees in eastern Zaire has become a mystery.

According to Lt-Gen. Maurice Baril, commander of the Multinational Military Force, some 640,000 Rwandans had returned home leaving about 165,000 still in eastern Zaire.

“It is difficult to know exactly where they are. The groups have broken up. We don’t know what their intentions are. And we don’t know what their state of health is,” said Baril.

He told journalists in eastern Zaire’s rebel-held town of Goma on Sunday that the refugees had apparently moved further into the interior of Zaire, but there is no real certainty of their exact location.

Last Friday, before he left for eastern Zaire, Baril said that the refugees had been “spotted on the hill just some kilometres away from Lake Kivu. They have been in the bush up on the mountain for weeks.”

But two days later when he arrived, Baril said he had not seen any movements of the refugees.

Baril is in the region as head of Canada’s land forces which are a part of the proposed multinational military force to provide a safe haven for Rwandan refugees still trapped inside Zaire.

Aid agencies reported in October that the Rwandan refugees were caught in the conflict in eastern Zaire and unable to safely return to their country.

The refugees however, began returning to Rwanda from Zaire in mid-November when Mugunga, the main refugee camp held by the former Rwandan army (FAR) and the militia that led the genocidal killings in Rwanda in 1994, fell to Zairean Tutsi rebels.

The safe passage of the refugees to Rwanda has fuelled debate on whether there is still a need for the multinational force. Baril himself admits that “the situation in the region has improved”.

Baril added that Zaire’s prime minister Kengo Wa Dondo had also reiterated at the weekend his government’s objection to the force.

Last week, a leading British charity, ACTIONAID, called on the international community to first examine the root causes of the conflict in eastern Zaire before sending in troops.

“Not all humanitarian interventions have been successes, and some have actually contributed to conflicts rather than solving them,” said Robert Dodd of ACTIONAID.

“We need to take a more in-depth approach that gets to the roots of the problems in search of enduring solutions,” added Dodd at a high-level conference on ‘Understanding the Great Lakes Crisis’ held in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, last week.

Pointing to the case of Somalia where over 30,000 peacekeepers were forced to leave the Horn of Africa, Dodd said: “There was no analysis of the Somali situation. The United Nations did not understand what was going on there. And things went terribly wrong”.

Dodd urged the international community to consider setting up an agency in eastern Zaire similar to the UN Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), which caters for over three million persons displaced by Sudan’s protracted civil war.

The UN Secretary General’s Representative for Displaced Persons, Francis Deng, told the meeting on the crisis in Central Africa that intervention “nearly always takes the form of first- aid treatment.”

“When the response requires the use of force, such intervention is conditioned by the clarification of short-term objectives, all of which falls far short of the kind of in-depth approach that should be based on a sound understanding and appreciation of the context – historical, cultural, political and economic – essential elements of nation building,” Deng said.

Meanwhile, Gaspar Onokoko-Onasal, a Zairean human rights activist, appealed on Monday to his country’s belligerents to accept the growing international demand for a cease-fire.

The fighting between rebels and government troops is claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the region, he said.

Onokoko-Onasal criticised the international community for focusing only on the plight of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi while ignoring the displaced in Zaire.

“Nothing is said about the hundreds of thousands of displaced Zaireans who have become hostage to the political discussions in the metropolis of America and Europe,” said Onokoko-Onasal.

He urged the international community to provide food, shelter and medicine to displaced Zaireans.