Relief workers with the aid agency Concern in the former Zaire are today seeking clarification after the government there ordered all international agencies dealing with refugees to leave the eastern part of the country. As United Nations employees prepared to leave the border area with Rwanda, it was not yet clear whether the expulsion order would also apply to non-governmental relief organisations such as Concern.
The agency has one expatriate worker, Mr Pierce Gerrity, based in Goma, near the frontier with Rwanda, as well as six local staff.
It has stockpiled large supplies of foodstuffs in the town in anticipation of an expansion of its feeding programme there, a spokesman in Dublin said last night.
This programme had not been stepped up because the necessary permission had not come from Mr Laurent Kabila's government in Kinshasa, he said.
The agency ended its feeding programme in Kisangani, further east, in July after the Rwandan refugees there returned home.
Amid reports of increasing military activity in the area, the government in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo has also ordered the closure of the frontier with Rwanda in the North Kivu area and the expulsion of Rwandan refugees there.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ms Sadako Ogata, described the withdrawal order as regrettable. She said the UNHCR was deeply concerned over the latest development and its implications for Rwandans, who had been crossing in recent days to avoid renewed fighting in the west of their country.
Irish aid agencies, including Concern and Trocaire, closed their operations in western Rwanda earlier this year after a number of Western aid workers and human rights monitors were killed.
Sources believe the government might be planning military action against remnants of former Rwandan Hutu militias who are believed to have linked up with forces opposed to Mr Kabila's new administration.
The order came as the three leaders of a UN team investigating alleged massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees in the former Zaire left Kinshasa, saying the government had made it impossible for them to carry out their work in the field.
The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, ordered the three to withdraw, leaving 12 other members of the mission in place to carry out their work in the capital. The move was part of efforts to get the Kabila government to clarify its position on the investigation.
North Kivu and the Goma area were home to up to a million Rwandan Hutu refugees after they fled their country in 1994 in the wake of mass killings of Rwandan Tutsis, which was followed by the seizure of power by a Tutsi rebel army.
When Mr Kabila's forces launched their revolt late last year against the administration of then president Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, the Rwandan Hutus fled their camps, some returning home but many others fleeing westwards before the rebel advance.
Human rights groups now allege that many Hutus were killed by the rebels, who included many local Tutsis and were widely believed to have been supported by the Rwandan army.
Mr Kabila's men swept from eastern Congo to Kinshasa in a five-month offensive, forcing Mobutu to flee when they reached the capital in May. Relations between the UNHCR, as well as the UN in general, and the Kabila administration have been increasingly strained recently over its handling of surviving Rwandan Hutus and the conditions it set for the world body's massacre inquiry.
Ms Ogata, a former Japanese diplomat widely tipped as a likely future deputy to Mr Annan, suspended many UNHCR operations in the new Congo in mid-September.
This week the agency closed down its operations in the central city of Kisangani after Rwandan Hutu refugees remaining there were sent home.
