ZAIREAN troops mounting an unsuccessful operation to persuade Rwandan refugees to return home, arrested leaders of the Kibumba camp and handed them over to the secret police, relief workers revealed yesterday.
Troops were deployed on Tuesday around the sprawling camp, home to nearly 200,000 Hutus who fled Rwanda's 1994 civil war, as the first step toward closing it down.
Field staff working for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees turned out in force with trucks and provisions, but only 55 refugees from Kibumba and nearby camps returned home on Tuesday, and 73 on Wednesday. The refugees say they tear vengeance by the minority Tutsis who won the war, in which extremist Hutus slaughtered more than 500,000 men, women and children.
But the Zairean authorities believe that cam leaders are intimidating refugees who want to go back.
Intense efforts are under way to persuade as many as possible of the two million Rwandan Hutu refugees one million in Zaire and another million in Tanzania and Burundi to return to their tense homeland. Only some 90,000 have returned since the end of the war, and more than 60,000 Hutus are in overcrowded Rwandan jails awaiting trial on war crime charges.
The patience of the asylum countries has run out as a result of crime, despoliation, economic pressures and cross border guerrilla raids.
A summit to try to resolve the humanitarian crisis in Rwanda and Burundi will be held next month, possibly in Tunis, a spokeswoman for former US President Jimmy Carter said yesterday.
The meeting, the second of its kind organised by Mr Carter, will be attended by the heads of Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda - the countries hardest hit by the refugee crisis in the region.