Rwandan Refugees Held Hostage by Hutu Militants: How Long Can It Go On?

As UN officials, African diplomats and other envoys opened that conference in Burundi in mid-February 1995 to discuss the problems of the millions of refugees, returnees and displaced in and around Rwanda, I tried to provide some additional perspective in this report after visiting the camps in Bukavu and Goma.

Six trucks carrying about 400 Rwandan refugees are heading out of the sprawling Kibumba camp outside Goma. They are heading for the nearby Rwandan border. Within a day, the refugees should be back in their homes.

One of those in the convoy is Lazar Tirikwendira, a 74-year-old farmer wearing a tattered suit and standing on crutches. He shrugs off a reporter's question about whether he feels safe in returning to Rwanda and says he believes God will help him.

But speaking through an interpreter, he later admits his decision to return is based on more than just his hopes for God's protection.

"Some people come from there and they tell him everything is okay there."

UN refugee agency officials say more and more refugees are asking for repatriation these days. From the Kibumba camp they say there is enough demand to send one thousand back to Rwanda daily. But the officials say they can't handle that many. Even if they could, it would still take years to repatriate all of the more than two million Rwandans now living in camps like Kibumba in eastern Zaire.

And UN officials suggest they do not have the time or the money to wait that long. Patrick de Sousa is the head of the UN refugee operation in the Zairean border town of Bukavu, south of Goma on the shores of Lake Kivu.

“It cannot continue. It's not a question of years. It's a question of months within which this problem must be resolved. The days when we had camps in Thailand for 10 years and camps for Afghans in Pakistan for 12 years, those days are over and certainly it is not going to be the case here.”

One of the main deterrents to any mass repatriation is the high level of intimidation which relief workers say still goes on in the camps. Convoys like the one taking Mr. Tirikwendira and his family out of Goma are heavily guarded by Zairean army troops. Because of threats, people who want to return home and make their wishes known to UN officials are also routinely removed from the camps where they live and taken into a kind of protective custody pending their departure.

Some of the refugees, nearly all of whom are ethnic Hutu, are reluctant to return because of genuine concerns about their safety following allegations of killings and detentions by the predominantly Tutsi troops of the former Rwandese Patriotic Front, who now control Rwanda's army.

But aid workers indicate much of the fear is mere propaganda, spread by officials of the ousted Hutu-led Rwandan government and enforced by former soldiers and extremist Hutu militia, the same groups blamed for the massacres carried out in Rwanda last year and who now largely control the camps. For them, it remains politically important to hold on to as many innocent civilians as possible as a bargaining chip. These camp leaders believe that will give them the power they need to force the new government in Kigali to negotiate with them on such issues as power-sharing. But the government has said repeatedly it will not negotiate with those who planned the genocide.