Refugees Zaire

The Clinton administration, clearly relieved by a surge of Rwandan refugees heading home, sharply scaled back its Central African relief program Tuesday, canceling plans to send a battalion of paratroopers and deciding instead to dispatch a small contingent of support personnel. Defense Secretary William J.

Advancing Tutsi rebel forces captured new territory Sunday in eastern Zaire as heavy fighting sent Zairian troops and panicked civilians in chaotic retreat and increased tensions in an area suffering the worst fighting in months in strife-torn Central Africa.

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.

Fearful of growing chaos and a widening war, the United Nations safely evacuated the last international aid workers from this embattled city Saturday after bands of rebel fighters backed by Rwandan government soldiers routed the Zairian army and captured the key border enclave. The fall of Goma, and the emergency withdrawal of about 130 terrified expatriates by road to nearby Rwanda, mean that no U.N.

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.

Foreign aid workers abandoned Zaire's third-largest city of Kisangani on Saturday, anticipating an exodus of tens of thousands of refugees fearing an attack by approaching rebels. The aid workers' departure leaves about 170,000 refugees without the daily food distributions that have sustained them since December at the Tingi-Tingi camp, 150 miles southeast of Kisangani. The rebels took up arms after the government tried to expel ethnic Tutsis from eastern Zaire.

Rebels said they captured the Tingi-Tingi refugee camp and the nearby town of Lubutu in eastern Zaire. The fighting drove tens of thousands of refugees north toward the government stronghold of Kisangani, which the rebels said was their next target. Rebel leader Laurent Kabila appealed to the U.N. to help about 170,000 refugees fleeing the fighting. Meanwhile, President Mobutu Sese Seko decided to delay his return from France for a few days to pursue a solution to the crisis, an aide said.

Thousands of Rwandan refugees reached the border town of Goma after new rebel attacks on Hutu militias broke their hold over the refugees. The 5,000 road-weary refugees followed Hutu militias deeper into Zaire when rebels attacked two weeks ago. But when rebels challenged the Hutu militias at Walikale, 80 miles west of Goma, the fighters fled west and the refugees fled east, toward home.

With the international community threatening to intervene, Zairian Tutsi rebels declared a cease-fire Monday in eastern Zaire and agreed to allow aid agencies to try to get Hutu refugees home to Burundi and Rwanda. Fighting between Tutsi-led rebels and Zairian troops has forced hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee their U.N. camps, venturing deeper into Zaire and farther from the reach of aid workers.

On this day, there are only 20,000 to 30,000 of them on the road out of southwestern Rwanda: children carrying babies on their backs, old women trembling on weak knees, mothers carrying reed mats for sleeping--and perhaps dying--on. All have the same wide-open, fearful stare. For 100 mountainous miles to the east and 75 miles to the north, long columns of refugees are traveling the two roads out of the U.N.-protected "safe zone" in Rwanda and toward the remote Zairian border town of Bukavu.