WARFARE between ethnic Tutsi rebels and Zairean government troops has forced up to half a million Rwandan Hutus to flee refugee camps just inside eastern Zaire.
Eighteen aid workers yesterday flew out of Goma in a UN plane after the Zairean authorities briefly closed the airport, UNHCR officials said.
Most refugees have trekked deeper into Zaire but aid workers said at least 1,500 crossed yesterday to Rwanda, where the Hutu refugees are afraid of persecution or punishment for the mass killing of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994. More than one million Rwandan Hutu refugees have lived in a string of camps in eastern Zaire since the 1994 genocide.
Aid workers said that during the weekend at least four people died in an attack on Kibumba camp and one Zairean guard was killed and three wounded in an attack on Katale camp.
The head of the UN refugee agency yesterday called on combatants to stop attacking refugees. The UNHCR High Commissioner, Ms Sadako Ogata, raising the spectre of an even worse tragedy, said: "A catastrophe greater than the one we knew in 1994 is what worries me most. I appeal to the combatants: please spare the refugees and local populations."
Ms Michele Quintaglie of the World Food Programme said that about 1,500 Rwandans had crossed into Rwanda from Zaire.
She said about 3,000 Zaireans had also fled to Rwanda. Most of the Rwandan refugees preferred to head west. A stream of about 200,000 fled westward after one of eastern Zaire's biggest camps was reported to have been shelled from Rwanda on Saturday and several refugees were killed.
"There is a stream of people about 15 miles long ... I saw pregnant women, handicapped people, little children," a UN official, Mr Panos Moumtzis, said from the town of Goma.
Mr Moumtzis, a UNHCR spokesman, said that refugees claimed that sustained artillery attacks on the Kibumba camp had come from the direction of Rwanda. "We saw four dead bodies in Kibumba, but refugees told us there were a lot more dead ... We were told there were at least 100 wounded," said Mr Moumtzis, who visited the now abandoned camp 15 miles north of Goma yesterday.
Most refugees are on the move after a series of attacks by Tutsi rebels fighting Zairean troops in eastern Zaire. The rebels, from the 300,000 strong Banyamulenge community that migrated 200 years ago from what is now Rwanda to Zaire, are resisting orders that the Banyamulenge Tutsis leave Zaire.
Burundi state radio reported yesterday that five civilians and 10 Hutu rebels were killed during an attack on a camp for displaced people in Burundi's central Muramvya province.
. Two Irish aid workers in eastern Zaire were evacuated to Nairobi yesterday afternoon. Ms Nora Doheny from Kilkenny and Ms Siobhan Lagan from Belfast were among five Concern workers evacuated by air from the town of Goma.