Zaire Relief

President Clinton agreed Wednesday to commit as many as 5,000 U.S. military personnel, including a battalion of paratroopers, to airlift food and medicine to more than 1 million sick and starving refugees living in squalid conditions in eastern Zaire.

Ambassadors of the United States and 13 other countries meeting in Canada's capital gave approval Friday to a multinational humanitarian mission to aid refugees in eastern Zaire. "Now, the multinational force is formally constituted," said Paul Heinbecker, a Canadian foreign affairs official who chaired a meeting of the ambassadors.

The United States put troops on alert Wednesday for participation in a potential airdrop of relief supplies for hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees in Zaire. The airdrop proposal was put forth by Canada as part of a broader Canadian plan that also includes the establishment of a multinational base of operations in Central Africa to coordinate relief efforts.

A Canadian general met with Zaire's rebel leader Thursday to discuss how to deliver food to Rwandan refugees stuck in rebel-held parts of eastern Zaire. Canadian Lt. Gen. Maurice Baril, head of the proposed multinational intervention force, and rebel leader Laurent Kabila met for an hour at Lake Kivu. Meanwhile, thousands of new refugees streamed into Sake, west of Goma, where they were picked up by U.N. aid agency trucks and driven to the Rwandan border.

Zairian gangs looted aid supplies after American troops pulled out of a base near the Goma airport Thursday during a day of violence that left at least two Zairians dead and 10 wounded. No one was hurt in the raid on the unguarded base, but it created new fears among the 800 foreigners working for 45 aid groups in Goma and further disrupted relief efforts. "We seem to be operating in the camps in a virtual state of war," said Ray Wilkinson, a U.N. refugee agency spokesman.

After three weeks hiking through thick jungle and across jagged lava fields, Misti Bihirimati and hundreds of other hungry and exhausted refugees straggled into this beleaguered border town Thursday. But his plea for help was for those left behind in the Zairian interior. "There are many people in the mountains without food," the 43-year-old Hutu said. "They are very tired. And many are dying." The question is how many--and where? But the answers are politically charged and far from clear.

Fifty-eight relief workers were evacuated Tuesday from eastern Zaire where they had been trapped by fighting between Zairian troops and ethnic Tutsi rebels, the United Nations said. Sadako Ogata, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, warned that if the fighting doesn't end, "we are . . . heading toward another humanitarian catastrophe." The aid workers were flown from Uvira, a town near Zaire's border with Burundi and Rwanda and the site of four days of heavy fighting.

Unidentified attackers stoned a house where 10 foreign aid workers live and fired one shot at the building, raising new security concerns for expatriate workers aiding Rwandan refugees, a U.N. spokesman said Saturday. None of the workers was injured, said Ray Wilkinson, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Fearing that another Goma is about to consume their country, Zairian authorities threatened to close the border from Rwanda and to try to halt an ever-growing tide of refugees, the U.N. refugee office said Friday. Already, about 136,000 Rwandans have moved across the Rusizi River from Rwanda into Bukavu, Zaire--with only 56,000 of them now contained in camps and the rest clogging this onetime resort city. Raw sewage is running in the streets, and diseases are spreading. The Office of the U.N.

Plans for a Canadian-led international relief mission to Central Africa moved ahead Wednesday despite a continuing dispute over whether it is still needed. "The brakes are not on, the operation is not on hold," Canadian Deputy Foreign Minister Gordon Smith told reporters here after a meeting of U.N. officials, representatives of nations contributing to the proposed expedition and African delegates.

The United States put troops on alert Wednesday for participation in a potential airdrop of relief supplies for hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees in Zaire. The airdrop proposal was put forth by Canada as part of a broader Canadian plan that also includes the establishment of a multinational base of operations in Central Africa to coordinate relief efforts.

After three weeks hiking through thick jungle and across jagged lava fields, Misti Bihirimati and hundreds of other hungry and exhausted refugees straggled into this beleaguered border town Thursday. But his plea for help was for those left behind in the Zairian interior. "There are many people in the mountains without food," the 43-year-old Hutu said. "They are very tired. And many are dying." The question is how many--and where? But the answers are politically charged and far from clear.

Plans for a Canadian-led international relief mission to Central Africa moved ahead Wednesday despite a continuing dispute over whether it is still needed. "The brakes are not on, the operation is not on hold," Canadian Deputy Foreign Minister Gordon Smith told reporters here after a meeting of U.N. officials, representatives of nations contributing to the proposed expedition and African delegates.

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.

As an astonishing column of Rwandan refugees silently trudged home to an uncertain future in the land they fled in chaos and panic more than two years ago, the Clinton administration signaled Saturday that it was rethinking the size and scope of the role that U.S. troops would play in a proposed international mercy mission in the region. Defense Secretary William J.

Hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, unexpectedly liberated from the radical militia that had held them virtual captives in eastern Zaire, began returning to their native Rwanda on Friday as the U.N. Security Council authorized an international military rescue mission in the region. U.N. officials and representatives of private humanitarian agencies described a mass, orderly migration of refugees along muddy roads eastward from the Zairian town of Goma toward the Rwandan border.

United Nations agencies and other aid groups scrambled Thursday to prepare emergency cross-border relief operations, but international diplomatic efforts again failed to gain access to more than 1 million Hutu refugees cut off in embattled eastern Zaire. Renewed fighting apparently erupted at the Mugunga refugee camp, about 15 miles west of the border city of Goma, Zaire.

The existence that passes as living for the 1 million Rwandan refugees in this country grew better Thursday, and, of course, worse--and all the while more tangled and troubling. Finally, the rising tide of cholera, which killed so many thousands, was declared medically contained. The squalid camps spread north and south of here even began to show the faint sparks of vigor. But with vigor has come new tensions, killing and the threat of spreading political discontent.

Canada named its highest-ranking soldier Thursday to lead an international force in eastern Zaire, as diplomats and military planners searched for ways to prevent about 45,000 armed militiamen--many of them accused war criminals--from disrupting the planned humanitarian airlift. Canada's designation of Lt. Gen.

President Clinton agreed Wednesday to commit as many as 5,000 U.S. military personnel, including a battalion of paratroopers, to airlift food and medicine to more than 1 million sick and starving refugees living in squalid conditions in eastern Zaire.