February 19, 1997, Wednesday
Zaire's refugees: a bleak existence of leaves, roots, and uncertainty
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
KALIMA, Zaire _ The silver DC-3 took a nose dive toward the grass airstrip, scattering people like specks of sand before soaring skyward again and looping around to land on the now-cleared runway.
About 25,000 people live along a desolate stretch of rocky, sandy terrain hugging the runway, which most hope one day will produce a plane to take them away or, at least, deliver enough food to last until their next stop.
Caught halfway between the rebel-held town of Shabunda, 60 miles to the east, and government-held Kindu to the west, Kalima's refugees are some of the most pitiful of the estimated 200,000 winding their way through eastern Zaire's dense forests.
They fear the rebels too much to go back but are blocked from going forward by the Zairian government, which is so fed up that it refuses even to use the term "refugee camp" to describe places like Kalima.
Instead, in official jargon, this is a "site."
It is a thorny, inhospitable patch of desert-like terrain, where most of the leaves and roots have been devoured by crowds who began trickling in shortly after Shabunda was overrun by Laurent Kabila's rebel army Feb. 5. Before Shabunda, they had fled civil strife in their native Rwanda and Burundi and had been refugees in Goma.
"We're angry because we're stuck here without anything. It's not normal - we must move to another place, another country," said Cyprien Itamgishaka, 30, who fled Burundi's civil strife for Zaire last year.
"Perhaps one country could take 10,000, another 10,000 and so on so that Zaire wouldn't have to bear all the burden," suggested a Rwandan refugee, Emmanuel Habimana, 32.
"They can go on with their conquest. I don't care," he said of the rebels. "But someone should arrange an international agreement for other countries to take us."
Word that Kabila and an envoy of Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko might meet in South Africa has brought hopes of a cease-fire in the five-month war, but it is unlikely to change things here anytime soon. Most refugees are Hutus from Rwanda and Burundi who fled conflict between majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.
Now they're afraid of reprisals if they return, particularly for the 1994 Hutu-orchestrated slaughter of a half-million Rwandan Tutsis.
The Zairian government doesn't want them and is bitter over the Goma situation, in which nearly 2 million refugees fled to the eastern Zaire town in 1994 and refused to budge. When Zaire tried to force them out, it faced international condemnation and was forced to stop.
Many Goma refugees fled home on their own after Kabila began the war. But, to the Zairian government's dismay, those who didn't moved further into the country.
"They don't want to recognize the camps, but the fact is, when you have 25,000 people you have to deal with it," said Ariane Quentier of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The organization tried unsuccessfully to persuade Zairian authorities to let the Kalima crowd move to a more livable space.
Unlike Tingi Tingi about 95 miles to the north, where more than 150,000 refugees have a well-run compound of sorts and receive regular aid deliveries, Kalima is too disorganized for major food distribution or clinics.
The unloading of just a few sacks of flour and some empty pots from the back of a plane brought cheers Wednesday from the haggard thousands along the runway.
The appearance of real food probably would cause a stampede. Weakened adults stagger along the gullies and slopes, carrying malnourished children and displaying them plaintively to visitors.
A hospital sits a few miles away in the town, but the government has refused general access to the refugees. On Wednesday, though, it said the most desperate cases could be accepted.
At the refugee site, meanwhile, efforts to set up a soup kitchen stalled when refugees hired to do the work called a strike Wednesday, saying they hadn't been paid.
Habimana, the Rwandan refugee, scoffed at the idea the kitchen ever would be built. The rebels, he said, probably would run the refugees out of Kalima anyway.
"Who's going to build a kitchen that will just be left after a few weeks?" he said.
Comments