Refugees Facing Perils, Uncertain Future

Fidele Baliguoma’s first steps into Rwanda on Saturday were wobbly ones: His swollen feet were covered with dried blood after walking 10 days and nights through forests with his wife and 10 children.

Baliguoma and fellow Hutu refugees fleeing fighting in northeastern Zaire between the Zairian army and rebel Tutsis climbed trees to keep their bearings and survived on roots and water squeezed from the mud.

When the deadly sounds of war reached his refugee camp, there was no time to gather food and water. “We ran, we hardly took anything with us. That’s why many people died,” he said.

Baliguoma said he counted at least 10 bodies lying on forest paths during his journey. Without immediate, large-scale foreign intervention, aid workers fear many of the 1.1 million refugees will begin dying of starvation.

The journey is perilous even beyond the lack of food and water. Another arrival, Didas Ntibankaundiye, said many refugees were injured in the panicked flight, falling or getting lost on the steep, winding paths.

About 400 Zairian refugees drowned when their boat capsized while fleeing across Lake Tanganyika into Tanzania, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The boat from Uvira, Zaire, 90 miles from the Tanzanian lake port town of Kigoma, was overloaded and capsized Friday in high winds, arriving refugees told the Kigoma newspaper, Kalulu.

The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders estimates that more than 13,000 people already have died since fighting began in eastern Zaire three weeks ago.

Ntibankaundiye, the 26-year-old refugee who told of the panic in fleeing Kahindo camp, made the difficult choice to go home to Rwanda. He stood ramrod straight at the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi, despite the long journey with a baby tied to his back and a rolled-up mattress balanced on his head.

While wandering south two nights ago, uncertain where to go, a group of armed men - he wasn’t certain who they were - gave him a choice.

“They told us we had two options: Either we could stay wandering in the forest and try and survive, or we could return home where we would get help,” he said. “We decided to come home.”