Cry the Forsaken Country

By NANCY GIBBS

In the Munigi cholera camp in northeastern Zaire, the very ground is infected by the dying. Nurse Isabel Subiros, wearing jeans and pink rubber gloves, steps carefully around the contaminated diarrhea and vomit and bloody needles. She accidentally pricked herself this morning. She tries not to think about it, or anything that is happening around her. "It is best just to work," she says.

She bends over a teenage girl dressed only in a red knit sweater, a shrapnel wound on the back of her leg reeking of gangrene. Her name is Faida, her eyes are empty, waterless like the rest of her body, and Isabel can not find a vein to insert the intravenous tube that could save her. "The blood vessels close down as they are dying," she explains, failing to find a vein on one arm and trying the other. The girl resists: "Leave me alone." Isabel withdraws. "This one wants to die," she says, and the wound will kill her anyway.

/ The worst part of the triage is knowing that most of the sick never make it close enough to the medical tents to stand a chance. The refugees of Rwanda's civil war stretch for miles in every direction, building what are fast becoming death camps. The old, the young and the weak drop where they are. "You have to choose," says the young nurse, turning away from an older man crying out for help. There are always more voices, pleading with her, pulling at her legs. "You can't get to everybody."

Until last week, the world did not get to everybody either. It certainly did not get to Rwanda, a country so infected by tribal hate and civil war that it seemed beyond saving. Three months of fighting between followers of the majority Hutu government and the mainly Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (R.P.F.) left at least 500,000 dead. Most of the victims were Tutsi civilians slaughtered by Hutu militiamen. Of those who survived the genocide, at least 2.2 million have fled the country, including a million Hutu refugees who pushed northwest into the Zaire town of Goma in just five days last week. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of earlier refugees, Hutu and Tutsi alike, languish in camps across the eastern border in Tanzania and across the southern border in Burundi. If the exodus continues, half the country's population of 7.5 million will soon have died or dispersed.

That finally propelled President Clinton to action. Since the beginning of April the U.S. has contributed just over $150 million in aid to Rwanda but stoutly resisted leading a full-scale relief effort. On Friday Clinton ordered a round-the-clock airlift of food, water and medicine and dispatched the first of what could soon be up to 4,000 soldiers to distribute it throughout the border regions. The President was moved, he said, by the reports that Rwandans in the camps were dying at the rate of one a minute. "In the days to come," said the President, "as Americans see this heartbreaking, unfolding tragedy, the suffering must not only touch our hearts, it must move us as a nation to take the practical actions that this crisis demands."

Meanwhile, at the U.N., Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was revising his figures upward as he urged a massive relief effort. The early estimate was $274 million, but "at this very moment, as I am speaking," he said on Friday, "Rwanda's needs are constantly growing." He put the new figure at $434 million, but who could precisely calculate the cost of a catastrophe that $ kept growing? That same day, U.N. relief agencies were busy redrawing their maps after 200,000 more refugees crossed the northwest frontier into Zaire in just 24 hours.

They came like pallbearers, carrying everything from sweet potatoes to sofas in the naive hope that things of value would not be stolen by soldiers or bandits along the way. By last week, when the R.P.F. declared victory and installed a new multi-ethnic government, Rwanda had become "a nation without people," said Panos Moumtzis, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "The whole country is coming out of its borders." Unless the refugees can be persuaded to return, to harvest the crops now rotting in the fields and rebuild the schools and hospitals out of the rubble, disease and starvation will exact a toll that even the most savage soldiers could not.

Madness spreads like an eager germ through the camps that have doubled, then doubled again in size. Between the town of Goma and the airport, a woman dances naked down the highway, cursing at the listless crowds and at the corpses lying on mats by the roadside. A man at the edge of a mass grave laughs in delight when he manages to toss the lifeless body of a child squarely into the middle of the burial pit. A team of laborers is moving bodies from a field to the trucks nearby, when a young man lying among the corpses rolls over. "Get up! Get out of there!" yells the gravedigger. But the man wants to stay. He figures he will end up in the improvised graveyard one way or another.

"This is the beginning of the final days," declares Deogracias Bivunde, who watched at least 40 refugees be trampled in a stampede by his home outside Goma. "This is the apocalypse." Two weeks ago Goma was a quiet place on the shores of a lovely lake, tucked amid banana groves and thick woodlands in the shadow of a spectacular volcano that lit the northern sky at night. The town was home to 80,000 residents; now it has more than a million sick and starving newcomers. Outside the airport, a sign extols The Pleasure of Traveling.

They camp on doorsteps, in schoolyards, in cemeteries, in fields so crowded that people sleep standing up. Men and women search for fresh water only to find a thick, slimy brew so fouled by human waste that it does more to spread disease than quench thirst. For miles around, the trees have been disappearing, fed into pitiful cooking fires. If the refugees could burn corpses, there would be fuel enough for weeks.

Cholera is proving more efficient than carbines. It kills in hours, draining the body of fluid so fast that nurses without equipment for transfusions cannot rehydrate victims in time. Along the roadways and in the camps it has become hard to tell the sleeping from the dead until the bodies swell up in the tropical sun. Refugees wrap their faces in scarves and rags and surgical masks, hoping to filter the stench from the rotting bodies everywhere.

The Munigi camp is about six miles up the road from Goma. Two relief workers lift a girl in a pretty turquoise dress and feel her neck for a pulse. Finding none, they carry her over to the pile of corpses, which they will douse in chlorine to disinfect them. But as they put her down, her head turns. Quickly they take her back to the tent where they are treating victims, but do not bother to set up an IV. She is too sick to save, the workers explained. "But she's moving," says one, "so you can't just leave her with the dead."

A woman at the camp gave birth four weeks prematurely. Early the next morning the mother seemed alert as a nurse set up a drip to treat her cholera; but she continued to bleed, and died before noon. Her husband arose and left, and the baby, still caked with blood, was left alone on the mat. "Without breast-feeding she is going to die," said one relief worker, swaddling the baby in a cloth wrap and leaving her in a cardboard box in the corner of a tent.

The hunger and the sickness conspire to kill as many as possible, but the hate still works as well. Hutu continue to attack Tutsi in the Goma camps. These bodies are different -- not passive, wasting corpses, but twisted wrecks of crushed skulls and flaking blood. A Tutsi woman is accused of brewing poison tea and giving it to 60 Rwandan soldiers, killing them all. She is beaten to death. One group of Hutu fall upon a Tutsi man along the road to the airport, beat him senseless, then lay him on his stomach and stomp on his spine until it snaps. No one bothers to cover his body. There is no time to count the dead, much less bury all of them.

Everywhere are the children, alone and terrified. At a camp west of Goma, Adrien Ntahobari, 12, sits with his niece Florinne, 6. They sob together. "I lost my mother. I don't know where she is," says the boy. The day before, the children had wandered for hours through the vast crowds looking for her in vain. They returned at nightfall to sleep in the open, curled up together in - Adrien's oversize sweater. "I am hungry and my head is hurting," he says, wiping flies from his swollen eyes. Neither child has eaten in two days, and Adrien is running a high fever, probably from malaria.

At the Ndosho orphanage nine miles outside of Goma, they hang onto the clothes of any adult in sight, and when night falls and the air grows cold, they cry for their mothers. "You hold them and they don't want to let you go," says Julienne Mukeba, 24, a law student from Kinshasa who is volunteering at the camp. They arrive by the hundreds, some orphaned, some wrenched from their parents during the crush at the border crossing, some abandoned by the starving. Many are too young to tell their stories; the staff make up names. And many don't last long. "Our morgue is filled with babies," said Dr. Nimet Lalani. "We've lost them all."

Sylvestre Gasigwa, 14, lost both parents and three brothers in last week's rush. Tears run down his face as he clutches a bloody wound on the crown of his head, where another child had struck him with a rock in a fight over food. "The food is not enough," he says. "I want to go home." And still there is no safety. Early last week relief workers spotted a Hutu soldier going from tent to tent with a grenade in his hand, looking for Tutsi children to kill.

So great an exodus could only have been born of an epic betrayal. Western governments and relief officials lob charges back and forth; if a few hundred paratroopers had dropped into Rwanda's civil war last April, says a high- ranking U.N. official, all of this could have been avoided. Now the fighting has stopped, and the needy are outside the war zone, but where is the food, the medicine, the will to save? Analysts decried the seeming indifference of the international community, exhausted by "compassion fatigue" from missions in Somalia and Ethiopia and Bosnia.

But the greater betrayal lay closer to home. During the last weeks of fighting, the Tutsi rebels chased the Hutu army west, pushing more than a million refugees ahead of them. The Hutu leaders hid in the safe haven set up more than a month ago by French forces sent to provide humanitarian relief. Once protected, the defeated despots kept broadcasting messages of hate and revenge over Radio Milles Collines, warning their countrymen to flee or be killed.

Theirs was a brutal strategy of sacrifice; the idea was to cede the land but take the people with them. "The only power remaining in their hands was the population," said one veteran aid worker. "This was why they created the panic." A mass of refugees would pressure the world community to intervene, and show that while the R.P.F. may have won, it had no country left to govern. "It is the former ((Hutu)) government that killed half a million Tutsi," says Nigel Fisher, the UNICEF representative for Rwanda, "and then instilled fear in its own people: 'You better escape because the Tutsi will kill you in revenge, and if you don't escape, then you're a traitor and we'll kill you.' "

The deadly message did its work. Up and down the rows of refugees in Goma, they tell the same stories, share the same fears. The moderate Hutu members of the new government are traitors and terrorists. Tutsi promises of peace are not to be trusted. "They want to govern us from on top, like they did for 400 years," argues Emmanuel Zabandora, 33, a former professor of physical education in Rwanda's capital, Kigali. "The R.P.F. will govern without a people. They want to live alone." Hutu refugees stand at a mass grave, watching their neighbors being buried by French bulldozers near a banana grove. "It was the Tutsi who poisoned our food," one declares. "We bought it by the side of the road, and now we are dying. God will judge this."

At a run-down hotel in the center of Goma, some former Hutu government ministers are holed up, plotting. Jerome Bicamumpaka, a Brussels-trained economist, joined the government after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana. "We are their government," he says. "Of course they will follow their government. I could live in Nairobi or Paris. But I will stay here because this is where my people are." He repeats the warning of R.P.F. reprisals. "If the French leave, there will be no protection," he says. He asserts his right to spread panic and fuel the exodus. "You cannot oblige us not to talk. It is freedom of the press."

In fact, relief officials counter, the Tutsi victors showed great restraint in their conduct of the four-year civil war and their prescriptions for peace. "The one remarkable thing that we've seen is enormous discipline by the R.P.F. and the Tutsi who have stayed inside Rwanda," says Peter McDermott, senior emergency officer at UNICEF. In a gesture of reconciliation last week, the R.P.F. named moderate Hutu as President and Prime Minister, though the real power seems to be in the hands of R.P.F. General, and now Vice President, % Paul Kagame, who masterminded the military victory. More than half the government posts went to non-R.P.F. members.

"Politically the R.P.F. has no interest in seeking reprisals," comments Jose Kagabo, a specialist on East Africa at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. "It has already fought its war, and now seeks to prove that it was right -- giving it greater moral and political authority. That makes national reconciliation a must, and I think you'll be seeing Hutu members and supporters of the government traveling to refugee camps soon to ask Rwandans to return home."

Tutsi leaders did call on the French to arrest members of the old Hutu government who had escaped by helicopter into the safe haven, so they could be charged with war crimes. But the French, who had long propped up Habyarimana's regime, refused to turn on their former allies, saying that they were waiting for U.N. guidelines on how to handle war criminals. "All the criminals are now outside the country in the camps," an aid worker contended. "And you can bet the R.P.F. is going to screen them all before they are let back in."

Many Hutu leaders only grow more belligerent in defeat. "We will reattack, and we will win this time," vows former Cabinet Minister Bicamumpaka. "It might take one month, three months, six months, but we will arrive in Kigali." Such continued resolve only confirms the views of some U.N. officials that casting the refugees purely as victims suggests a lack of moral memory. "These are the people responsible for most of the murders," says one official in Nairobi. "Yes, we have to feed them. But we also have to pursue justice. I can still smell all the bodies in Kigali. Imagine these killers now as helpless victims. It's obscene."

In fact the refugees include both the swaggering remnants of the Hutu army and the civilians, Hutu and Tutsi alike, on whom the armed men prey. Many Hutu militiamen were renegades, their drinking and raping and viciousness tolerated by army officers. As relief workers struggled to get food to the spreading camps, the Hutu, equipped with cars and radios, kept track of where the next food distribution would occur and raced to get there first. The militia, many of them drunk or stoned on marijuana, stopped convoys to demand bribes and a portion of the supplies, wildly firing their weapons.

The most determined fighters in the camps are the medical commandos of the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, the French relief agency that dispatches physicians and instant field hospitals to the world's most vicious war zones. They are fighting the spread of one killer after another: cholera, dysentery, measles, even, some U.N. workers fear, bubonic plague.

On Wednesday the first confirmed case of cholera appeared; within 24 hours 800 people were dead; then it became too hard to keep count. Aid workers set up isolation tents to control the epidemic, but know they cannot. Every minute another patient arrives, calling for help, for water, and then giving up and settling helplessly on the ground, staring at the few workers who bustle around. At the rate the disease is spreading, between 7,000 and 70,000 are almost certain to die in coming days. "I've never seen anything like it," said Dr. Koen Henckaerts. "But then I haven't seen a million refugees either."

It would take an extra million gallons of purified water a day just to counter the dehydration. Last week about 50,000 gallons a day were arriving. The volcanic soil around the camps is so hard it is impossible to drill new wells or dig latrines without heavy mechanical equipment, which is still days away. "What do you mean, I must make sure to boil the water?" refugee Dafrose Kabutumwa asked a reporter. "Can't you see we're all going to die here?"

Even if the doctors manage to treat the diseases, survivors need to be fed and sheltered. Goma alone requires 600 metric tons of food a day, 1 million blankets, 200,000 rolls of plastic sheeting, 200,000 jerricans, 80 water tankers and 90 to 100 trucks to carry food the 497 miles from the Ugandan capital of Entebbe -- and these numbers are sure to grow. When the Red Cross began its food distribution, a child was trampled when the crowd, desperate that there would not be enough to go around, surged forward. "If it runs out, or if it doesn't arrive soon enough, the violence will follow," warns Red Cross worker Nina Winquist, "and then it is always the weakest who lose out."

The World Food Program was able to fly four loaded planes into Goma during the first desperate weekend. But two more relief planes were turned back because of mortar fire, and, unimaginably, a strike by Zaire air traffic controllers arguing with the French over who had responsibility for running the airport. Zairian officials were demanding bribes for landing rights, and blocked some relief flights so that commercial planes could continue to use the airport.

Relief officials all agree the only real hope for the Rwandan people is for them to return to their country, retrieve their farms and rebuild their homes and their lives. "The longer the refugees stay here, the more explosive it becomes," says the World Food Program's Daan Everts. "It's like a time bomb. The exodus has to be undone." The newly installed government called for all refugees to come home and promised that no revenge would be sought on the civilian population. "I'm not interested in leading a country that is considered a desert," Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu declared. He has only to look around his capital to see the scale of the problem. There is no electricity, no water, no telephones, only soldiers and guns and checkpoints. Even his four little children, who fled with him to Brussels two months ago, do not want to come back.

Triggering a mass return will take more than words of reassurance from the new leaders. It is too much to ask a country to forget a holocaust; it will require international assistance sufficient to overpower the memory of what has already occurred. But the terrible images of disease and death will fade fast from the world's attention, erased by the next catastrophe. Once that happens, those Rwandans who did not die in the war will not necessarily have much hope of surviving the peace.

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Marguerite Michaels/Kigali and Andrew Purvis/Goma