DEATH CRIES OF A NATION

By Kevin Fedarko

We landed at a very fine airstrip at the town of Costermansville situated on Lake Kivu...The lake is one of the most beautiful that I have ever seen...It is certainly much more beautiful than Lago di Como and I am quite sure that it contains less dead bodies, of human beings at any rate. --Ernest Hemingway, 1954

The town at the edge of the lake--no longer called Costermansville, but Bukavu--was anything but idyllic last week. And the bodies were piling up. The streets of the Zairean provincial capital were patrolled by Tutsi rebels. Bukavu's Catholic Archbishop was ambushed and murdered. And the town's "very fine airstrip" had become a fulcrum in an undeclared war between Rwanda and Zaire, a conflict that could precipitate the dismemberment of Zaire, a country the size of Western Europe. Caught in the cross fire were more than half a million Hutu refugees who have been huddling in squalid camps along Lake Kivu for the past two years. By week's end, the fighting had cut almost all of them off from emergency relief, and aid workers were, as one put it, "running out of adjectives" to describe a disaster in which 700,000 refugees have no food, no clean water, no medicine, where orphaned children dash down roads for safety from incoming artillery shells. As for Hemingway's lovely lake, the expected epidemic of cholera would certainly adorn Kivu's shore with a necklace of corpses.

The crisis has its immediate roots in the ethnic convulsions that swept over Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu extremists butchered hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, hacking many of them to death with machetes. Fearing Tutsi revenge, 1.7 million Hutu then fled their homes. Those who eventually clustered in Zaire's teeming camps, however, were no ordinary refugees; they included thousands of militiamen, government officials and soldiers dodging punishment for their roles in the Tutsi genocide, which many still seemed determined to carry to its end. Since then the camps have provided these groups with a base from which to wage their struggle to overthrow the Tutsi-dominated government that replaced them in Rwanda. For its part, the Rwandan government has been anxious to root out the guerrillas. After several deals with Zaire to close the camps, each of which fell through, a chance for more forceful action finally arose with the plight of the Banyamulenge.

A group of ethnic Tutsi who have been living in eastern Zaire for more than 200 years, the Banyamulenge have achieved enviable success in a number of lucrative ventures, especially mining. This has made them wealthy and enabled them to arm themselves lavishly, but it has also opened them up to scapegoating by local Zairean demagogues eager to augment their power by whipping up resentment against a people they still see as outsiders. Adding poisonously to this mix was the Hutu refugees' deep hatred for the Tutsi. The Hutu immediately began raiding the mines and goading Zairean leaders to launch pogroms against the Banyamulenge. The Zairean authorities responded with zeal; they organized demonstrations and incited mobs. Finally, in September, the deputy governor of South Kivu province gave the Banyamulenge "foreigners" six days to leave Zaire.

Rwandan officials had already been giving military training to the Banyamulenge, and three weeks ago, on Oct. 17, the Banyamulenge militias in Zaire rebelled. They seized the town of Uvira and then marched north through the moist hills and banana plantations toward Bukavu, scattering Hutu refugees as they advanced. In Bukavu the Zairean army was busy looting the town and lobbing shells into the Rwandan city of Cyangugu, just across the Rusizi River. Last Wednesday, as Zairean and Rwandan soldiers traded fire, Rwandan Vice President Paul Kagame told journalists "there is every indication that we are going in the direction" of open war. By last Friday, the Banyamulenge had taken Bukavu.

In a move apparently designed to dovetail with the Banyamulenge attack on Bukavu, Rwandan gunmen last week also made a cross-border raid against the refugee camps on the south end of Lake Kivu. It was not the first time the Rwandan army has struck at these camps, which have spawned many of the Hutu guerrillas' incursions into Rwanda. By Tuesday, the fighting had dispersed hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly from a camp in Kibumba, near Goma. A few began heading back to Rwanda, but the great majority shuffled down the rough road that winds beneath several dormant volcanoes and converged on the camp at Mugunga, creating in two days the largest and most densely populated refugee settlement in the world.

The price for disrupting the Hutu guerrilla movement is that tiny Rwanda now seems to be at war with Zaire, the second largest country on the continent south of the Sahara. But if there is to be full-scale war for control of North and South Kivu provinces, the Rwandan David and its well-disciplined army may give the Zairean Goliath a solid drubbing. Zaire was created in 1960 out of Belgium's vast colony in the Congo, and for three decades the country has been tenuously lashed together by Mobutu Sese Seko, a shrewd and rapacious despot who allowed regional chieftains to plunder their fiefdoms at will so long as a share of their loot flowed upward. But for three months, Mobutu has been laid up in a $2,000-a-night luxury hotel room in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he is being treated for, and may be dying from, cancer.

Zaire's condition seems no less terminal. The army is underfed, unpaid and wildly unpopular, thanks to its habit of looting civilians. Already regions such as the copper-rich Shaba province virtually rule themselves. Then there is the fact that Zaire's provinces are separated by thousands of miles of dense, roadless rain forest. This means that Zaire can reinforce Kivu only by air. But by Saturday, Goma had fallen in fierce fighting, and its airport, the last one in the area not in rebel hands, was shut down. If the airstrips are not recaptured, North and South Kivu will effectively cease to be part of Zaire, the first step in what could become a wider disintegration. Larger powers are watching: France has championed Francophone Zaire and the Hutu who used to run Rwanda. Britain and the U.S. are sympathetic to Rwanda, which has strong ties to Uganda, a former British colony.

Meanwhile, death stalks the camps. "We are on the brink of a catastrophe," says Sadako Ogata, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Unless we can deliver food, water and other basic assistance to the people in the camps...they will end up dying. There is no time to waste." In 1994, when refugees converged on Goma and cholera broke out, Ogata issued a similar warning. By the time the world responded, some 50,000 of them, mostly women and children, were dead.

--Reported by Peter Graff/Cyangugu and Marguerite Michaels/New York

With reporting by PETER GRAFF/CYANGUGU AND MARGUERITE MICHAELS/NEW YORK