Goma Falls To Rebels Refugees Stranded As Aid Workers Leave

Fearful of growing chaos and a widening war, the United Nations safely evacuated the last international aid workers from this embattled city Saturday after bands of rebel fighters backed by Rwandan government soldiers routed the Zairean army and captured the key border enclave.

The fall of Goma, and the emergency withdrawal of about 130 terrified expatriates by road to nearby Rwanda, means that no U.N. or other foreign aid groups are able to assist more than 1 million ethnic Hutu refugees and displaced Zaireans scattered along a broad swath of eastern Zaire.

Their fate is now in the hands of the defeated Zairean army, the largely powerless Zairean government, and ethnic Hutu refugee leaders and extremist militias, many of whom have been accused of masterminding the genocide of minority Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

Aid workers warned that many of the disabled persons, elderly, children and others in vulnerable groups are at risk of perishing due to exposure or disease in the rugged mountains and volcanic fields, now drenched each afternoon with seasonal rains.

“There will be no assistance for the foreseeable future,” Guy Avognon, the area coordinator for the U.N. Office of High Commissioner for Refugees, warned after the evacuation convoy of about 40 white vehicles crossed the Rwandan border to Gisenyi. “It is a catastrophe.”

Even if security returns to the region - a dubious prospect, as Tutsi-led rebel forces now control every major town and airstrip along eastern Zaire’s border with Rwanda and Burundi - humanitarian agencies and donor nations are reluctant to restart the highly controversial $1-million-a-day refugee camps.

Aid workers confirmed that 25 to 100 Rwandan troops, wearing the army’s distinctive black-marked olive drab fatigues and black berets, had patrolled in Goma on foot Friday afternoon. Another dozen Rwandan soldiers crossed the border and drove into the silent city early Saturday in a pickup truck.

“They were very polite,” said a relief official. “They came in, looked at the situation and moved on.”

Rwanda’s involvement in the Zairean rebellion has raised the stakes in what has become a regional conflict. But some Western diplomats privately applauded the move, saying a military solution had become the only way to push marauding Hutu extremists, long based in the refugee camps, away from the border.

Rwanda’s government repeatedly has denied that its well-trained army crossed the border Friday during a thundering cross-border artillery duel with Zairean troops, or that they had joined the fighting that turned this once-prosperous capital of North Kivu province into an urban battleground.

Panos Moumtzis, a UNHCR spokesman, defended the aid workers’ flight and the abandonment of the refugees. “We are relief workers,” he said in Gisenyi. “We are not a police force. We are not an army.”