Unstoppable Exodus
An astonishing column of Rwandan refugees silently trudged home Saturday to an uncertain future in the land they fled in chaos and panic more than two years ago. The influx brought the 30-hour total of returning refugees to more than 200,000 with half a million more reportedly lined up miles into Zaire, awaiting their turn.
The refugees overwhelmed border guards and aid workers, who gave up all attempts to register or search them for weapons as they quietly poured across the Rwandan border at Gisenyi. At one point, aid workers estimated that 12,000 people were crossing each hour.
“The road of death is now the road of hope,” said Ray Wilkinson, a U.N. spokesman in Gisenyi.
“The flow is unstoppable,” he said. “All we can do is go with the flow.”
“It’s so silent, you can almost hear a pin drop,” marveled Kate Straub, a nurse-midwife from the American Refugee Committee aid group. “There’s just this grand calm, with everybody just plodding along the road.”
Many families were split up as the refugees swept through Goma and over the border. At least 3,000 lost children were taken to a school near the border, where aid workers called over loudspeakers for their parents.
The U.N. World Food Program said it would feed the refugees for at least a month once they reach their homes.
The refugees are members of the Hutu ethnic group, which tried to eliminate the Rwandan Tutsi-minority tribe in 1994, leaving at least 500,000 dead.
After a Tutsi-led rebel force halted the massacres, some 1.1 million Hutus fled to eastern Zaire, most settling in refugee camps near the border town of Goma.
In recent weeks, all but one of the camps in eastern Zaire had dissolved after fighting erupted, pitting Zairian Tutsi rebels - backed by the Tutsi-led Rwandan army - against the Zairian military and Hutu extremists in the camp.
The only site that remained was the Mugunga camp, bloated with 500,000 refugees in an area roughly 10 miles west of Goma.
Then Friday, something extraordinary happened. After two years as de facto hostages of Hutu militants who controlled Mugunga, hundreds of thousands of refugees abandoned the camp and began their long walk to Rwanda.
The Hutu militants were reported moving in the opposite direction, heading for Masisi, a mountainous region farther from the border. The sound of machine guns echoed west of Mugunga as Zairian rebels chased Hutu fighters deeper into Zaire, Reuter news agency reported.
Saturday the line of refugees, trudging with their possessions through Goma on a road called The Avenue of the Heavy Weights, stretched an estimated 25 miles as the Hutus continued to come home.
The flood of refugees was peaceful, although most of the 50,000 who entered Friday spent the night at a transit center near the border squeezed into a space designed for 20,000.
The endless flow of refugees offered a stream of moving and poignant images: a Rwandan soldier with his automatic rifle in one hand and the hand of a lost little girl in the other; an entire column of marchers patiently stopped and waiting for an old woman bent over in the road with her hand on her aching back; hungry mothers hoarding roadside weeds in their purses.
Aid officials said Saturday that the lack of water and cramped conditions at the center have led to an outbreak of diarrheal disease. There were no reported cases of cholera.
Hundreds of people were suffering from dehydration, and thousands waited in lines for cups of water and highprotein biscuits.
“Right now the problem is that people aren’t being moved out fast enough,” said Rebecca Trafford-Roberts, a spokeswoman for the Medical Emergency Relief International Aid Group.
But by early evening, tens of thousands of refugees walking to their home communities overwhelmed the road leading out of Gisenyi, across the border from Goma.
Places such as Kabiza saw streams of refugees throughout the day. By 3 p.m., about 300 weary refugees filled the village church.
Residents said they did not know how many people Kabiza had lost to the refugee camps, but one villager said, “I think everyone here had someone in the camps.”
As the refugees arrived home, knots of people stood in the village center. And as each family entered Kabiza, hugging and kissing and shaking hands with those greeting them, a roar went up from the villagers.
Children rushed through this village of tin shacks and narrow dirt trails crying, “Mommy is coming, mommy is coming.”
Men had tears in their eyes.
The scenes were remarkable for people known for their stoicism.
“It’s like people had their right arm cut off,” said Wendy Driscoll, a spokeswoman for CARE International, as she watched the scene, “and suddenly, they’ve gotten it back.”
But many of the returning Hutus will find that ethnic Tutsis have occupied the homes, farms and villages they abandoned when they first fled Rwanda in mid-1994, fearing reprisals for that year’s Hutu genocide of the country’s Tutsi minority.
“The major issue by far is going to be housing,” said Michele Quintaglie, a spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program.
“If you have hundreds of thousands of people suddenly coming in and wanting their houses back from people already living there, you’ve got a real problem.”