Mass Starvation Looms In Zaire Aid Director Says 80,000 Children Could Die This Month

Using clubs and rifle butts, exhausted Zairian aid workers and Tutsi rebels beat starving people back from boxes of high-protein crackers as Central Africa’s refugee crisis hit the boiling point.

The head of the U.N. World Food Program said more than 80,000 children in eastern Zaire could die by the end of the month unless they receive food and clean water shortly. The food aid program in the refugee-packed region has collapsed.

“The small children are the most vulnerable and typically are the ones who are the first to go,” Catherine Bertini said Friday in Rome. “Without quick action, we will definitely start seeing people starving.”

She said children between 18 months and 3 years old were at the highest risk of dying.

Rebel soldiers fired rifles in the air to disperse mobs of Zairians clawing the ground and each other for boxes of crackers at a nearly empty warehouse in Goma. When that failed to keep the hungry away, they beat at them with clubs and the butts of their firearms.

Last week, the rebels routed the Zairian army and ethnic Hutu militias from this eastern Zairian city of 300,000 after Zaire tried to force local Tutsis out of the country.

The warfare shattered the food program and brought the danger of starvation to residents of Goma as well as the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled its U.N. camps. The refugees are thought to be in even worse shape.

U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali urged support for a French proposal to set up an international force to secure aid corridors. France and Britain agreed Friday to commit up to 1,500 soldiers to the force, but U.S. officials said the Clinton administration had serious reservations about the plan.

The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders estimated Friday that more than 13,000 people have died and 1.2 million mostly Rwandan Hutu refugees have been left without access to food, water or medicine since fighting began in eastern Zaire three weeks ago.

Refugees have told of dozens of people dying of thirst, and many eating roots to stay alive. Mothers have lost their children in stampedes as refugees fled U.N. camps.