Refugees Rwanda

Backing down from earlier assertions that it had nothing to do with alleged massacres of Rwandan refugees, Congo's government now acknowledges that some may have been killed in cross-fire during the recent civil war. President Laurent Kabila's government is hoping that the admission, while far from an acknowledgment that his forces committed atrocities, is enough to secure aid for his ravaged land during a visit today by envoy Bill Richardson, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The U.N. refugee agency urged Congo President Laurent Kabila and other African leaders Tuesday to take steps to protect Rwandan refugees in the wake of the killing last week of an aid worker and four refugees in the eastern Congo. Spokeswoman Pam O'Toole said the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is suspending its aid work at Karuba, near Goma, where Kabila's soldiers reportedly carried out the May 29 shooting.

Rebel leader Laurent Kabila, responding to a plea from the United Nations, agreed to delay a threatened attack on the nation's largest refugee camp. Kabila had threatened to assault the Tingi-Tingi camp, which is on the rebels' northern front, this week unless the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees drove out Rwandans he says are armed by the Zairian government.

In an ominous development threatening more than 100,000 exhausted Rwandan refugees facing starvation and disease in eastern Zaire, rebels blocked the United Nations on Friday from starting a massive airlift to carry them home. The Hutu refugees have been on the run since 1994 and are on their last legs, dying at a rate of about 60 a day, although that rate is half that reported earlier this month. Officials of the Office of the U.N.

Negotiators for Zaire's warring factions sounded diplomatic Saturday at the start of their first face-to-face talks, throwing out terms like "peace" and "democracy." But the rebels, who control a third of the country and are still taking ground, seemed unwilling to compromise, and government negotiators stared stonily ahead when rebels said: "We want freedom, and we shall never negotiate that."

A United Nations plan to repatriate Rwandan Hutu refugees, already delayed by logistics problems, disease and local opposition, was further postponed until at least May. Yagi Sitolo, governor of the eastern Upper Zaire province, said the repatriation should not start until May 5 because of a cholera epidemic. Sitolo intervened last week to delay a plan to start an airlift this weekend of up to 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees from two camps south of Kisangani in eastern Zaire.

The mysterious flight of more than 85,000 Rwandan refugees into the Zairian rain forest began when machete-wielding villagers stormed their camps Monday, followed the next morning by uniformed troops opening fire without warning, according to accounts given to journalists Saturday. For a second straight day, international aid workers failed to find the main body of ethnic Hutu refugees despite a series of aerial searches.

U.N. officials Monday called it an act of "utmost barbarism": In the middle of the night, soldiers burst into a hospital in eastern Zaire where 50 severely malnourished Rwandan children were receiving emergency food and threw them "like sacks of potatoes" onto the back of a truck to be driven away to an unknown fate.

The leader of Zaire's rebels ordered up to 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees out of the country Sunday, giving the United Nations two months to track them down and send them home. Laurent Kabila promised that international officials will have full access to search for the tens of thousands of refugees, whose fate remained unknown after they dispersed into the jungle when their camps allegedly came under attack last week. A few hundred refugees had been found.

At least 85,000 Rwandan refugees have vanished mysteriously from two camps in eastern Zaire, raising fears that they have been killed or sent on a death march that could begin a new chapter of genocide in Central Africa, aid officials said Friday. "There was a departure in panic," said Paul Stromberg, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in the eastern city of Kisangani, where he was interviewed by telephone.