WESTERN aid workers on Rwanda's border with Zaire hurriedly dug latrines and stocked up on food yesterday as UN officials warned of a large refugee influx from Zaire.
Officials of the UN refugee agency in Rwanda's border town of Gisenyi said Zairean soldiers were expected to close a crowded refugee camp in the Goma region to speed up a flagging UN campaign to send home one million Rwandans in eastern Zaire.
"We are ready. We are setting up way stations near the border, preparing latrines and food and water supplies," said Mr Alessandro Bolzoni, head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Gisenyi.
He said transit facilities near the border could only handle 30,000 refugees in total.
Zairean authorities said in December they would close the camp, home to 190,000 Rwandan Hutus, and another one in Bukavu, in talks with the UN refugee agency and have indicated the operation will go ahead in the coming days, the officials said.
The officials said refugees in Kibumba, a teeming tent city which blankets a mountain valley in the shadow of Rwanda's mountainous frontier would be made to walk across the border.
Zaire shut its Goma border crossing to foreign journalists on Tuesday and in Nairobi, the Zairean embassy stopped issuing visas to foreign reporters trying to go to Goma.
The refugees fled to Zaire with forces of the former Hutu government which led to the genocide of up to a million minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.
There are another 493,000 refugees in Tanzania and 110,000 in Burundi.
Many Western diplomats privately sectored repatriation as the only solution left to Africa's worst refugee problem. Many admit that such a quick fix solution could also be bloody.
In recent months Zaire has kept the world guessing on its plans. Last year, it threatened to forcefully deport all the refugees on its soil by December 31st but nothing happened.
Rwandan government officials have privately told the UN they would allow only 5,000 refugees to cross every day.
. The Rwandan Prime Minister, Mr Pierre Celestn Rwigema, yesterday toured refugee camps in north western Tanzania to encourage Hutu refugees to return home, officials said.