THE INDIFFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

For two and a half years, the international community watched the situation in the Zairian camps grow worse. It paid the enormous bill for feeding the refugees, but took no responsibility for separating those suspected of genocide and those engaged in military activity against Rwanda from noncombatants who were eligible to be considered real refugees. As a result, the Interahamwe and ex-FAR were able to continue intimidating refugees in the camps and hiding behind the noncombatants to launch incursions across the border into Rwanda.

When the ADFL used force to disperse the camps and to require unwilling Rwandans to return home, governments and international agencies applauded. Their tolerance for such forced repatriation, as for that earlier from Burundi and that later from Tanzania, has weakened the fundamental principle of international agreements protecting refugees.

A multinational force voted by the U.N. Security Council in November to assist refugees and to facilitate their safe return home was never deployed. It was canceled a month later on the pretext that so many refugees had returned home that it was no longer needed. The United States led the group of governments claiming that there was no significant number of refugees requiring aid left in Zaire, a claim that was patently inaccurate. Of the slightly more than one million refugees present in Zaire in September 1996, a maximum of some 650,000 had returned to Rwanda, leaving hundreds of thousands more still in need of humanitarian aid.

After large numbers of deaths by force, hunger, disease or exhaustion, the remnants of the refugee population are clustered near Ubundu. The international community is once again faced with the problems of how to protect genuine refugees by separating them from militia and ex-FAR and how to identify and arrest those suspected of genocide in Rwanda. At a minimum, persons bearing arms must be excluded from any new camps that are established.

The international community must also insist on full investigation of abuses, including massacres, of civilians carried out in eastern Zaire since September 1996. Measures to bring to justice those responsible for such abuses must be incorporated in the settlement ending the Zairian conflict.