Destination Unknown

By NANCY GIBBS

In the instant cities of despairing souls on the borders of Rwanda, hope proved less contagious than fear or cholera. Thousands of refugees kept dying in the ghastly camps of Zaire last week, as many as 2,000 a day. As the world struggled to assuage the suffering, word went out from the U.N., the White House, the relief agencies to 2 million sick and starving people: there is food in Rwanda and clean water and a promise of safety. Go home: that is the only real salvation. Some refugees, suspecting that they were merely choosing where they were going to die, decided to head back. But the vast, frightened majority lacked the strength or the will to follow. For relief workers, the task still felt like trying to turn back a tidal wave, one teacup at a time.

Each chapter in the fate of Rwanda confirms just how much the catastrophe is the gruesome product not so much of tribal hatreds as of political ambition. The leaders of the defeated Hutu government continued to issue warnings of reprisals, mutilation and death if the refugees went home. Having lost the country, they were determined to hold on to the population and feed its hatreds in the hope of turning it one day into an invading force. For the victorious rebels of the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, the only hope for consolidating power as a legitimate government lay in persuading the majority Hutu to return and live their lives in peace. The new leaders said all the right things. "We must build a country that belongs to Rwandans, not Hutu or Tutsi," declared Vice President and Defense Minister Paul Kagame, the Tutsi general who holds the real power in the country. The question was whether anyone would believe him.

For teams of aid workers from all over the world, it became increasingly difficult to separate the political games from the humanitarian challenge. Even as President Clinton announced on Friday that he was asking Congress for $320 million more in emergency funds in addition to the $250 million already committed, Pentagon planners were wrestling with how best to use the money. The President's promise to dispatch 200 U.S. troops to the airport in Rwanda's capital of Kigali to make it a relief supply hub was accompanied by promises that the deployment was for "the sole purpose of humanitarian relief, not peacekeeping." Even his announcement that the U.S. would formally recognize the R.P.F. was circumscribed by Pentagon warnings that American troops should not get caught up in the warfare between Tutsi and Hutu.

Everyone agreed the refugees must be encouraged to return to their homeland. At the same time, relief groups argued for increasing rescue efforts inside Rwanda and setting up roadside way stations that would support returning refugees. Others insisted that too many people were dying too fast in the Zaire camps to justify diverting aid as a means of luring people home. But if rescuers provided sufficient food, water and medical care in the camps, refugees would have less reason to leave, and so long as they remained, they could be controlled by the ruthless remnants of the former Hutu regime.

With their own units scheduled to complete their departure in three weeks, French officers patrolling the safe zone they set up in southwestern Rwanda tried to disarm as many retreating soldiers as possible. They estimate there are at least 20,000 former government troops now in Zaire who believe they have lost a battle, not the war. Hutu fighters stage nighttime raids back across the border to rob anyone they can find and drive even more people out of Rwanda. All through the Zaire camps they spread the warnings: if you go home, the Tutsi will gouge your eyes out, steal your land and make you slaves. "The Hutu refugees truly believe 500,000 Hutu were slaughtered over the past three months -- not Tutsi," says Stewart Wallis, overseas director of Oxfam, the British relief agency.

The new government in Kigali had practical as well as political reasons for working to bring the refugees home. Rwanda is a lush, fertile country of tea plantations and terraced farms, but in the next few weeks the beans, sweet potatoes, cassava and sorghum must be harvested. If there is no one to work the fields, the crops will rot, and by the end of this year the normally self- sufficient country will be forced to depend on international help to feed itself. "The great majority of the refugees did not commit atrocities," says new President Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu lawyer trained at the Sorbonne. "They can come back without any fears."

The R.P.F. government offered further gestures of reassurance. Cabinet posts are almost evenly divided between moderate Hutu and Tutsi, with only three ministries going to the military. Four different political parties are represented. The government invited international human-rights observers to oversee the repatriation process, as R.P.F. soldiers were sent back to their barracks and checkpoints were dismantled to underscore that this was a true civilian government, not a military dictatorship. "Please don't talk of R.P.F.," said Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu last week, a moderate Hutu. "We used to have a rebel army. Now we have a government." But without radio or other forms of mass communication, that message has yet to reach the frightened refugees in Zaire.

The government is instead counting on word of mouth from displaced Hutu who do dare to take the long journey home. Many of them say R.P.F. soldiers have helped them, even giving directions to those who fled farther from their villages than they had ever been in their lives. Chantal Rugenera, a 30-year- old Hutu businesswoman living in Kigali, is "full of hope for the future. The R.P.F. controls everything," she says, "but they are not asking for identity cards."

Yet there were good reasons why the Hutu refugees were reluctant to hurry back. The government was by no means promising a blanket amnesty for those who killed at least half a million Tutsi civilians during the past three months. Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice announced that they would prosecute tens of thousands of people in trials that could begin within a month. Twagiramungu said there are more than 22,000 former bureaucrats suspected of complicity in the slaughtering -- and that does not include thousands of militiamen, soldiers and presidential guards who could also face a firing squad for genocide. President Bizimungu promised that the trials would be fair and open to foreign jurists. But most of Rwanda's magistrates were either massacred or fled, and there is no police force, raising the fear that the pursuit and execution of justice may rest with vengeful soldiers of the R.P.F.

Government officials admitted that some Tutsi fighters, flush with victory after a life in exile and years of warfare, were looting warehouses and stores and stripping houses bare in the wealthy sections of Kigali. "Some of this is to be expected," said Vice President Kagame. But he promised that "everything will be given back to the owners when they return." He insists that his goal is a multiethnic, meritocratic society, without the identity cards and propaganda barrages that have turned Tutsi and Hutu against one another for the past generation.

& But even some relief officials, while praising the general discipline and restraint of Tutsi leaders, are wary of the expressions of good intention from an ethnic group that enjoyed all the educational and economic advantage for decades. "The R.P.F. ideology is self-serving, designed for Western ears," says Alex DeWaal, co-director of Africa Rights in London. "Playing down ethnicity promotes the interests of a relatively wealthy and well-educated minority and hides the enduring contempt many Tutsi commanders feel for the Hutu."

Then there is the problem of rebuilding a comparatively prosperous country that was once the most densely populated in Africa. The task requires the equivalent of a Marshall Plan, argues R.P.F. spokesman Claude Dusaidi at the U.N. "There is nothing left in Rwanda. There is a polluted environment; there is no educational system; the civil service has disappeared; there's no judiciary," he says. The capital of Kigali is without electricity; the banks have been emptied of money; and government ministers communicate by letter because the telephones are out.

This has meant a logistical nightmare for U.S. forces. The American forward base at Entebbe in Uganda, 300 miles from Goma, had only one international phone line for communication with top brass in Europe and the U.S. The disorganization, lack of fuel and congestion at all central African airports grounded many planes meant to ferry relief supplies. "There are all these aircraft sitting here, and the military just milling around," observed one of at least a dozen relief workers trying unsuccessfully to reach Goma from Entebbe last week. Several U.S. military flights that did make it as far as Goma circled the airstrip, then flew back to Entebbe after missing their landing-slot time because workers on the ground took too long to unload cargo from other planes. Government officials were demanding fees for allowing planes to land. American troops who did make it to Goma installed water- purification equipment that by Saturday was producing 120,000 gal. of water a day, but the only way to transport it was in tanker trucks.

In a cholera tent in Goma, Edithe Nyirarukundo, 34, lies on soiled cardboard. Back in Kigali she had been a secretary at the Ministry of Labor. She lost touch with her husband and three children in the war. Now she's recuperating, she says, from the cholera. "I want to go home. I don't understand why we can't settle things in a country as small as ours." Edithe lays her head on the mattress of her friend Claudette Ruhumuliza, 27, a teacher. "I think I'm going to die soon," Claudette says, staring at her husband Prosper. Once they had a house and farmland. He says, "If the foreigners would help us go home and protect us, we would be happy." Glancing at his wife, Prosper says, "People are dying like animals."

With reporting by Lara Marlowe/Goma and Marguerite Michaels/Kigali