Missing Refugees Found Gunmen Block Makeshift Camp From Food, Aid Supplies

Hundreds of thousands of refugees missing since war forced them out of Goma were spotted Tuesday just a few miles from the camp they left behind - and catastrophically far from the emergency workers trying to help them.

A flight chartered by Associated Press Television located the refugees, whose makeshift camp of white and blue sheeting stretched like ribbons along both sides of a highway.

Armed Hutu militiamen - and perhaps some Zairian soldiers - stand between them and the food and medicine international aid agencies are trying desperately to deliver.

For a week, the town of Goma has been under the control of Zairian rebels. But the Hutu militiamen mixed among the refugees at the new camp are able to hit the town with mortar fire.

The new camp extends northwest six miles from the Mugunga camp along Highway R529 and appears to hold about 300,000 people in makeshift shelters. Aid workers unable to reach them fear mass starvation.

In the last week of October, Rwandan Hutu refugees fleeing camps north of Goma swelled Mugunga camp to some 400,000 people, about the population of Minneapolis.

When fighting first flared in the area around Uvira on Lake Tanganyika early last month, 1.1 million Rwandan Hutu refugees living in about 40 camps along Zaire’s eastern border began to flee.

Perhaps half of the 700,000 refugees registered in the five Goma-area camps in September may be at the new camp west of Mugunga. The others have moved into neighboring Uganda, are wandering in northeastern Zaire or have gone as far west as Kisangani, 325 miles away. Some - maybe several thousand - have decided to end their exile and return home to Rwanda.

The Rwandan Hutus fled to eastern Zaire in mid-1994 after the Hutu government orchestrated the slaughter of at least half a million people, most of them minority Tutsis. Rwandan Hutus feared retaliation when the government changed to Tutsi hands.

From the air, Mugunga camp appeared to have been completely looted and burned.

Men holding assault rifles could be seen on the green hilltops.

Refugees who managed to flee the area have said that the armed Hutu militants will not allow the refugees to leave the camp.