Zaire Relief

Morning arrives swiftly in equatorial Africa. There is hardly a sunrise before a gray-white glow illuminates the sky like a dirty fluorescent bulb. But the sky itself is barely visible. Right now, Zairian farmers are burning brush lands so the grass will grow green in the coming rainy season. Not far from the highway, the flat-topped volcano Nyiragongo spews its gases. Powdery dust rises with every relief convoy, every footstep.

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Daniel Schroeder, a ramrod-straight soldier with a closely shaved head and a razor-sharp manner, paused only once in his rapid-fire answers to a gaggle of reporters at a recent briefing here. Schroeder, head of the task force running Operation Support Hope, the U.S. attempt to alleviate the suffering of more than 1 million Rwandan refugees, said he was considering using an American truck company to transport food and refugees in Rwanda.

The leader of Zaire's Tutsi rebels, who are surrounding Rwandan Hutu militants in a camp overflowing with hundreds of thousands of refugees, said Monday that his forces will attack the camp if an international force does not intervene quickly.

Plans to dispatch an international military contingent to aid starving refugees in Central Africa crept forward Tuesday when Canada agreed to command the expedition and the United States edged toward participation in some form.

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.

Many of the old, the pregnant and the very young died. The sick were left behind, but soon others became ill. Frantic with fear and exhausted from their flight, some dropped life-saving food and blankets as they ran. Hiding in a rain forest, the refugees were still parched, forced to suck moisture from tree roots.

A new refugee exodus appeared under way after 5,000 Hutus crossed into Bukavu, Zaire, from the Rwandan border town of Cyangugu. U.N. officials said that, in the coming week, a million Hutus could stream out of the French-protected zone in southwestern Rwanda and into eastern Zaire. International relief workers in the French "safe zone" distributed food, shelter and medical supplies--as well as leaflets urging people not to leave--in a desperate effort to avert a new tragedy.

Leaders of seven East and Central African countries adopted a strategy Saturday to combat insecurity in the aftermath of Rwanda's genocide and to encourage more than 2 million refugees to go home. Meanwhile, shooting broke out Saturday in a refugee camp in southern Rwanda, killing at least 12 people and wounding 36, a U.N. source said. The incident was the worst single case of violence yet in the refugee camps throughout the region.

Edgy Rwandan government troops, intoxicated on beer and marijuana, systematically looted this onetime resort town on the border with Zaire on Saturday and randomly fired revolvers and automatic weapons to discourage any effort to stop them. On Saturday morning, a French colonel commanding two dozen troops sent in from nearby Goma to evacuate 168 Hutu orphans told his men, "Watch out, because the Rwandan soldiers are hashed to the eyeballs."