Exodus From Rwanda

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The crossing gates at the Zaire border town of Goma were thrown open last week. No visas were required for entry. So there was no official count of the number of ragged, terrified people who passed through from the Rwandan side of the boundary. But the numbers were high, hopelessly high -- in the first few hours, as many as lived in the town itself. By the end of the first day, it seemed as though a fugitive city had squeezed in. By the end of the second, student Thierry Thabo Asumani, 23, observed that it was larger still. "A country is emptying," he said, "to set up a town."

Once again Africa in general, and the unfortunate nation of Rwanda in particular, has beggared Western experience and imagination. Barring unforeseen circumstances, Rwanda's civil war is nearly over. The mainly Tutsi rebels, whose people were victims of one of the largest genocidal slaughters in the last decade, have won. Two weeks ago, following a military campaign brilliant enough to make the textbooks, the Rwandan Patriotic Front took over the capital of Kigali. Last Thursday the rebels marched to within nine miles of the town of Gisenyi, the latest stronghold of their former tormentors -- members of the majority Hutu tribe who participated in the erstwhile government, the murderous remainder of the regime of Juvenal Habyarimana. By the weekend the R.P.F. vice chairman, Patrick Mazimhaka, made clear that the tables were turned. "They are the rebels now," he said. Handpicked Patriotic Front politicians gathered support from African neighbors and negotiated with the U.N. to make its rule official.

But rule over whom? In most civil wars, when the fighting dies, the warring parties stay put and reach some sort of agreement. That is not the case in Rwanda. Despite the R.P.F.'s selection of a Hutu as the country's next Prime Minister, and the rebels' assurances (thus far borne out) that they will not take mass reprisals, most of the Hutu, who now make up more than 90% of Rwanda's population, are engaged in what may be an unprecedented event -- the wholesale evacuation of a country.

The migration began three months ago, when fighting engulfed Kigali. Two hundred and fifty thousand Hutu from the eastern region fled east over the border of Tanzania, in what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees called "the biggest, fastest exodus" in the agency's history. In so doing, the Hutu created the UNHCR's largest, most crowded refugee camp. Both superlatives, unfortunately, were short-lived. As R.P.F. mortar fire zeroed in on the hills surrounding Gisenyi last Wednesday, another sea of refugees, many originally from the Kigali area, surged out. Jostling along narrow dirt roads, loaded with food, clothes, pots and pans, they massed over the Rwanda's western border. Just over three months ago, 3.5 million of Rwanda's population of 7.5 million resided in its western area. Now only 2 million remain; the rest seemed suddenly headed toward Goma. Exclaimed Panos Moumtzis of the High Commissioner's office, assessing the scene: "It's a river of people bleeding out of Rwanda!"

Hemorrhaging was more like it. On Thursday and Friday alone, up to 500,000 entered Zaire. An estimated 500,000 more were on their way. At times, they arrived at a rate of 30,000 an hour, or 500 a minute. Terror had moved them: the same Hutu-government broadcasts, which some have suggested fomented the village pogroms that took half a million lives this year, were now predicting bloody Tutsi revenge. "We are told that they ((the Tutsi)) will kill everybody: men, women, children," said Gerard Habineza, a former schoolteacher and Hutu refugee. "We have to save ourselves."

Yet Goma is no haven. U.N. officials estimated that there was only enough emergency food to last its 150,000 people a month. Water is scarce, medical supplies even more so, and the torn blankets and pieces of plastic sheeting that some refugees carried with them are no match for the mountain air. Six miles outside town, the refugees have stripped every bush and tree in sight for fuel and shelter. In the town center, the schoolyards and churches are packed, the streets impassable. Says Asumani: "Just breathing makes you sick."

Groups of Zairians are harassing the incoming refugees; Zairian soldiers, who are unpaid by their government, have been spotted shaking them down. More ominously, the Goma area has Hutu-Tutsi hostilities of its own, which claimed thousands of lives last year, and a fresh influx of half a million Hutu could well incite a new rash of violence. "It's like a forest fire," said an exasperated aid worker. "You put it out in one area, and it erupts somewhere else." U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was even grimmer. "If this exodus does not stop," he said, "the stability of the entire region will be threatened."

Boutros-Ghali was called on to help head off continued fighting in Rwanda's southwest, an area the French army fears is turning from part of the solution into part of the problem. Deployed nearly a month ago as a "humanitarian mission," 2,500 French legionnaires and marines succeeded in establishing a safe zone in Rwanda's southwest. In the process, however, they angered the Tutsi rebels, who saw the move as French intervention to protect the Hutu forces supporting the Rwandan government -- a longtime French ally. The R.P.F. threatened to pursue its war into the safety zone despite French promises to defend it militarily, but the conflict was avoided through a negotiated deal. Last week, after hearing annoying reports that the remainder of the rump government had holed up in the French-protected town of Cyangugu, the rebels again threatened to invade the safety zone unless French troops handed over the "clique of murderers" as war criminals. The increasingly uneasy French convened the U.N. Security Council on Thursday to appeal for a cease-fire and request replacement by a less controversial force.

The new government will have the immediate support of neighbors Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda, which for some time had been tacitly supporting R.P.F. leader Paul Kagame. About 500,000 Tutsi who fled the country during 30 years of Hutu domination may well come back.

But the new government's greatest challenge will be in persuading the Hutu to return. About 350,000 in the Tanzanian camps have so far failed to do so, despite relative peace in eastern Rwanda. The rebels claim -- with some accuracy -- that they have been held back by members of the same vicious anti- Tutsi militias that last month threatened to execute aid workers who refused to feed or house a notorious war criminal. A useful first step in luring them back would be the silencing of the interim government's radio station, which continue to air anti-Tutsi propaganda.

Without the return of the Hutu, the Tutsi victory, along with the landscape, will remain empty indeed. "Their country is like a desert," crowed former government official Jean Bosco Barayagwiza before going into hiding. "How do you rule a nation when there is nobody left to govern?" The R.P.F. has begun by choosing as the new Prime Minister Faustin Twangirimungu, a Hutu moderate like many killed alongside the Tutsi during the pogroms. This hardly indicates , a blanket Hutu amnesty: R.P.F. vice chairman Patrick Mazimhaka claims that genocide was "party policy" on the part of the Habyarimana regime. Yet he insists that the country's new Cabinet will also include members of the majority tribe.

"We have to persuade the Hutu people of our good intentions," admitted Mazimhaka. "If we succeed, then they will come back." That's a big if. And no one cares to contemplate the consequences if they fail.

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris and Andrew Purvis/Nairobi