Panic Aboard Train Kills 100 Refugees
At least 100 Rwandan Hutus were trampled to death or suffocated late Sunday when panic erupted on a train packed with thousands of refugees hoping to be airlifted home from central Zaire. Fifty others were injured.
Paul Stromberg, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said it wasn’t immediately clear if the tragedy occurred during a stampede to board the train or whether the refugees were crushed in overcrowded boxcars.
“Despite the fact the doors of the wagons were open, there was obviously a panic and people died,” he said in Kisangani.
Rebel forces in control of the Kisangani area have been packing all the refugees they can find onto trains and dumping them on aid workers at a transit camp, where the United Nations is rushing to fly the Rwandans home.
“This will not stop repatriation, but we need more control over the movement of people,” said Stromberg. The UNHCR has flown about 5,000 refugees to Rwanda since the airlift started a week ago.
The dead were discovered when the train reached Kisangani. Aid workers said they were shocked by the scene of 100 people lying over each other. The injured refugees were being cared for at Kisangani University hospital.
Rebels, who control three-fourths of the country, agreed last week on the biggest refugee airlift even attempted in Africa. Rebels gave aid workers until June 30 to clear out the refugees.
At Biaro, a squalid refugee camp 25 miles south of Kisangani, about 30,000 Rwanda refugees have gathered. They are desperate to get away from the filth and disease of the camp, and fear new attacks by Zairian villagers and rebel troops.
The majority of 80,000 Rwandan refugees believed to be south of Kisangani are still unaccounted for, more than a week after they fled into the jungle.
Refugees who have come out of hiding consistently tell of Zairian villagers with machetes attacking the camps, and of rebel troops firing into the camps.
About 1 million Rwandan Hutus, fled into Zaire to escape retaliation for the Hutu government-led slaughter of 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Most have since returned to Rwanda.
The train on which the refugees were found dead Sunday was bound from Biaro to the Kisangani transit camp. In recent days, refugees have swarmed onto any U.N. truck or rebel train they see in hopes of making out of the camps, where at least 60 people a day are dying of disease and starvation.
Last week, rebel troops, many using whip-like bamboo sticks, and aid workers pushed back dozens of refugees trying to climb aboard an already-full U.N. truck bound for the transit camp.