Militias Flush Refugees From Camps Driven By Hutu Militants, Panicked Rwandans Flee To Avoid Repatriation

Panicked by Hutu militants, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees abandoned their camps Thursday to hide in the nearby hills and avoid repatriation.

The mostly Hutu refugees were moving east across the windswept plains of northwest Tanzania, which borders Rwanda and holds the largest remaining population of Rwandan refugees - 535,000 people. Tanzania has demanded that all refugees leave by the end of the year.

Aid workers blamed Hutu militants for causing the mass exodus through a campaign of intimidation in the area’s refugee camps.

“It’s clear that the (Hutu militants) have spooked the refugees, and they are using these people as shields,” said Peter Kessler, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Nairobi, Kenya.

His colleague, Paul Stromberg, said more than 200,000 refugees have “fled east into the Kitali hills, away from the Rwandan border.”

“It’s going to be hard to stabilize the situation now,” Stromberg said. “There are lots of people on the road … hundreds of thousands.”

Refugees from four of seven camps in the Ngara area, southwest of the Rwandan border, were packing up and going, said Michele Quintaglie, spokeswoman for World Food Program.

“It’s like a domino effect,” she said. “Once some people leave, others follow.”

The Lumasi and Kitali camps, which used to have 113,000 and 35,000 people, were now empty, she said, and tens of thousands of Rwandans were pouring out of the Mushuhura and Benaco camps, which used to hold 81,000 and 160,000 refugees.

Up to 8,000 refugees fled camps in the Karagwe area, 75 miles north of Ngara, following a similar campaign of intimidation by Hutu extremists.

So far, U.N. and Tanzanian authorities failed to convince the refugees either to return to the camps or home, Quintaglie said.

“The refugees said they definitely are not going back home and they are not going back to camps, even if humanitarian services - food and water - are cut off,” she said.

In the past, Tanzanian authorities have forcibly repatriated refugees caught away from their camps. Aid workers said the Tanzanians have deployed thousands of extra soldiers to the area in recent days.

Nearly 1.2 million Hutus fled Rwanda in 1994 after extremists in the former Hutu-run government orchestrated the slaughter of at least 500,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis.