Thousands Flee Fighting As Tutsis Advance In Zaire
Tutsi fighters advanced on the eastern Zairian city of Bukavu Sunday, trading mortar and small-arms fire with Zairian defenders in the most serious fighting in months in the heart of Africa.
The governor of South Kivu province made a radio address urging residents to remain in their homes in Bukavu, the provincial capital at the south end of Lake Kivu.
But the fighting sent thousands of panicking residents fleeing west and north as Zairian troops clashed with Tutsi fighters, known as Banyamulenge, positioned only three miles to the south.
Rwandan soldiers near Cyangugu exchanged cross-border fire with Zairian troops until a thunderstorm struck.
Meanwhile, the exodus continued of some 200,000 people from the Kibumba refugee camp in Zaire’s Goma region, about 125 miles north of Bukavu.
The flight began after a barrage of artillery and mortar fire hit the camp on Friday and Saturday. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said at least four people were killed and 100 wounded. Witness reports that many more had died could not be confirmed.
About 1,500 Rwandan refugees and 3,000 Zairians sought shelter Sunday by crossing into northern Rwanda. Nine Zairians were being treated for wounds at a hospital in Gisenyi, aid officials said.
The remaining Kibumba refugees were said to be arriving at Mugunga camp, west of Goma, at a rate of 5,000 an hour.
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata called Sunday on combatants to stop attacking refugees and to open humanitarian corridors for those caught in fighting.
“What hurts me most are reports that women and children are again caught in this terrible tragedy,” Ogata said in a statement. “The first refugees to reach the hospital in Goma after the attacks this weekend were 36 women and children, all of them suffering from shrapnel wounds.
“There was one report of a woman giving birth along the road to Goma,” she said.
In total, half a million refugees displaced by the fighting were roaming the mountainous corridor in eastern Zaire.
Ogata said the refugee situation could rival the crisis the aid agency faced in 1994 when ethnic fighting sent hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees into the Goma region.
The fighting along Zaire’s eastern border with Burundi and Rwanda, an area that until now had been spared of Hutu-Tutsi power struggles, threatens to destabilize Africa’s Great Lakes region.
Zaire repeatedly has accused Rwanda of supporting the Banyamulenge rebels, a charge the Tutsi-led government denies.
In the north, an unidentified source said elements of the Rwandan army had carried out the attack on Kibumba, during which a mortar hit the camp hospital.
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