HOW SHOULD WE HELP?

By Johanna McGeary

Americans can be forgiven if they are frequently confused about foreign policy. Like last week, when the pictures and the words looked remarkably out of synch to anyone trying to make sense of events in Africa. There was Bill Clinton announcing that the U.S. would participate "in principle" in an international military force to rescue more than half a million sick and starving Rwandan refugees caught up in brutal tribal war. Even as he spoke, hundreds of thousands of them appeared on TV screens, marching safely out of Zaire back across the border to the homeland they had fled two years ago. They were tired and hungry but not on the brink of death. So was this a humanitarian mission that needed to happen or not?

The Clinton Administration seemed uncertain about that from the start, beset as it is by two conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, Clinton and his advisers share a moral impulse to go in when innocent lives are at stake, to see military intervention as a mechanism for individual salvation. On the other, the devastating experience of Somalia and public skepticism about foreign entanglements virtually prohibit any use of American troops for more than the feeding of desperate civilians. While everyone was eager to save Rwandan lives, no one wanted to touch the complex tribal rivalries putting those lives at risk. The trouble is, humanitarian crises like this one are impossible to unknot from the political conflicts that provoke them. You can't usually solve one, at least not for long, without solving the other. And as the speed of events last week exposed, a would-be interventionist has to define very clearly what he is going to do and why before leaping in.

The crisis in Zaire has erupted suddenly but not unexpectedly. It grew, in fact, directly out of past humanitarian intervention. Two years ago, more than 1 million Rwandan Hutu, including the militiamen and former soldiers who had massacred more than half a million of their country's Tutsi citizens, fled in fear of reprisal and were succored in U.N.-sponsored refugee camps across the border in Zaire. When the tens of thousands of armed men took control of the camps and, through propaganda and intimidation, prevented the rest of the refugees from returning home, aid agencies and relief workers kept them fed and housed. The militiamen exacted "taxes" from relief organizations and sold food aid for weapons, holding on to the civilians as a shield.

Over time, the Hutu guerrillas turned the refugee camps into safe bases from which to maraud into Rwanda in hopes of overthrowing the Tutsi regime there. The destabilizing effects spilled over into Burundi and Zaire, provoking their Tutsi populations to fight back. By Nov. 1, at least four factions of rebels and regular soldiers were at war. As the clashes intensified, aid workers were driven from the camps, leaving the refugees to fend for themselves.

Last week the U.S. found itself abruptly rushed into action. The rising hullabaloo from aid workers, news reports and foreign governments warned of an imminent holocaust among the Hutu refugees. The advocates clamored for immediate military intervention to save them. The news and pictures out of Zaire certainly looked sickening. Some 500,000 Hutu were said to be huddled in the Mugunga camp, held captive by Hutu militias, cut off from food deliveries. As they do so often, the images began to galvanize political leaders. Aid officials called for immediate help, France demanded action, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali got busy. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, watching the dire forebodings on TV, decided Canada should lead a humanitarian mission--provided the U.S. would take part too.

Under the assault, Clinton quickly decided he could not refuse to join in. Even then, however, it was not clear what the interventionists were volunteering to do. They agreed to dispatch armed troops, yes, but before committing itself fully, Washington wanted to make strict, limited rules and stick to them. The list of not-to-dos ran long. U.S. soldiers would be there for four months only. "We are not planning a mission to go in and disarm the factions," said Defense Secretary William Perry, "or to separate military from refugees." The troops would not protect aid convoys, not conduct forced entry into camps, not police camps, not help in surveillance. They would not even go into Zaire without "assurances" that hostilities would stop.

What they would do was vague: "facilitate" delivery of food and the voluntary repatriation of the refugees. How they would do that was equally unspecified. About 1,000 U.S. troops would take over the airport at Goma, the Zairean city nearest the fighting, held by Zairean Tutsi rebels. They would open a three-mile corridor between Goma and the Rwanda border to protect refugees walking home--though the border is in fact only a few hundred yards away. An additional 2,000 or 3,000 Americans would go to Rwanda and Uganda to airlift in supplies and the other 10,000 foreign troops, whose jobs no one seemed ready to explain at all.

If this was the plan, it had some sizable holes in it. Mugunga was nine miles farther into Zaire than the airport at Goma. Those inside Mugunga could not leave because they were being held in place by militant Hutu militias. And the camp was under siege by ethnic Tutsi rebels from Zaire, probably assisted by the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda. Another huge portion of refugees was presumed to be scattered in Zaire's forests. If Canadian, American, French, British and other soldiers simply sat on the tarmac in Goma, how would food ever reach the people who needed it most?

As if on another wavelength, most U.N. officials, aid workers and the leader of the Tutsi rebels, Laurent Kabila, talked of a more grandiose mission entirely. They expected not just simple handouts but a major effort to settle the violent tribal and political quarrels. Kabila told a news conference that any force that came in without a mandate to disarm the Hutu militias "would be useless." Others figured events and pressures on the ground would induce mission creep. "Let's get them in on one mandate," said a U.N. official in New York City, "and see what happens when they get shot at."

By Friday, however, it was embarrassingly evident that mission planners had known even less than anyone realized about the reality on the ground. The attacking Tutsi rebels finally routed the Hutu militias, who fled west from the Mugunga camp. Freed of their coercive overseers, thousands upon thousands of men, women and children then simply stood up and began pouring down the straight tarmac road toward Rwanda. By Saturday, 200,000 had crossed the border, and 350,000 more were on the way. They "looked healthy," reported Ray Wilkinson, a U.N. spokesman on the border. The formerly intimidated masses for whom the rescue mission was planned had suddenly freed themselves and decided en masse to go home: they could now reach aid supplies on their own.

So, is there any task left to be performed by 14,000 heavily armed troops? Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu said he did not believe military intervention was necessary any longer, and he relayed that view to the U.N. Security Council--which voted to authorize the mission anyway. Canada still planned to go. But Clinton reserved judgment. "I don't think we know enough yet," he concluded, "to say that the mission won't be needed." He ordered the Pentagon to continue preparations but delayed giving a deployment order. Relief workers on the scene still insist that an armed force is vital to get food and medicine through, arguing that even if all the occupants of Mugunga were on the road home, up to 500,000 who would require help remain in Zaire--though no one has a reliable head count. "Doubts are beginning to form," says an Administration official. "The U.S. will have to determine whether armed intervention is necessary and appropriate." A final decision is not likely until this week or next--or never.

The obvious confusion about what to do is a reminder that the suffering of the refugees in Zaire, like so many apparently humanitarian crises, was essentially political. They were at risk because they were held as political pawns by their Hutu captors. The U.S. and the U.N. chose to respond to human suffering and not to the continuing war between Hutu and Tutsi forces--which holds no interest for Westerners. If the humanitarian mission had gone ahead without breaking the Hutu grip and sending the refugees home, another wave of agony was almost certain to convulse them in a few weeks or months. Now if the Hutu militants have lost their control, there may no longer be any humanitarian crisis in Zaire requiring international military response. That is fortunate for the refugees, but it adds yet another complicating lesson to the evolving textbook on what can be done to provide real help when victims of unrest stir the world's conscience.

--Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Peter Graff/Gisenyi and Mark Thompson and Adam Zagorin/Washington

For more information, see our Web report at time.com/zaire

With reporting by BRUCE CRUMLEY/PARIS, PETER GRAFF/GISENYI AND MARK THOMPSON AND ADAM ZAGORIN/WASHINGTON