700,000 FLEEING REFUGEES DISAPPEAR IN JUNGLE OF ZAIRE.Byline: Remer Tyson Detroit Free Press The Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, USA. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "Freep". Some still refer to it locally as "The Friendly" -- a slogan from an ad campaign in the '70s. Just north of the eastern Zaire town of Goma, a volcano occasionally belches Belches may refer to:
v. black·ened, black·en·ing, black·ens v.tr. 1. To make black. 2. To sully or defame: a scandal that blackened the mayor's name. 3. rock wasteland. Some interpret this sputtering A popular method for adhering thin films onto a substrate. Sputtering is done by bombarding a target material with a charged gas (typically argon) which releases atoms in the target that coats the nearby substrate. It all takes place inside a magnetron vacuum chamber under low pressure. of fire and brimstone fire and brimstone n. 1. The punishment of hell. 2. Homiletic rhetoric describing or warning of the punishment of hell. Noun 1. as a sign of divine intervention that has turned the border area between northeastern Zaire and Rwanda - once a peaceful place where tourists went to see gorillas in the mist - into hell on Earth for 700,000 wretched souls. They are part of 1.1 million refugees who fled into oblivion as a result of the latest round of ethnic fighting along the border. It's as if the entire population of Detroit suddenly disappeared without food, water, medicine and shelter into one of the most inaccessible regions of the world. U.N. officials in Nairobi say relief agencies have lost contact with the 700,000 Goma area refugees as they fled west through the volcanic region, deeper into Zaire and away from Rwanda. An additional 400,000 refugees fleeing the fighting have vanished elsewhere. ``It is a mystery as to exactly where they are,'' Peter Kessler Peter Kessler may refer to:
Relief personnel have been kept out of the area by Tutsi soldiers now commanding the border. The soldiers even turned away representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is a private humanitarian institution based in Geneva, Switzerland. . Most of the refugees are Hutus who left Rwanda in July 1994, when an invading Tutsi army took control of Rwanda. Among those who fled to Zaire were the leaders of the former Hutu regime, which engineered the genocidal slaughter of 500,000 or more Tutsi civilians beginning about 2-1/2 years ago. Tutsis living in Zaire, aided by the Rwandan army, gained control of eastern Zaire border areas during the past two weeks of fighting. As the horde of Goma area refugees moves westward, they encounter rugged, thick mountain jungle terrain. Almost no roads exist in the uncharted area. Kessler said Thursday that refugees arriving in the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi reported many refugees arriving there are dying of dehydration in the waterless, volcanic mountains north of Lake Kivu Noun 1. Lake Kivu - a lake in the mountains of central Africa between Congo and Rwanda Kivu Belgian Congo, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zaire - a republic in central Africa; achieved independence from Belgium in 1960 . ``They said they saw people dying all around them due to lack of water . . . One man was sucking water out of tree roots,'' Kessler said. Meanwhile, thousands more refugees have arrived wounded or exhausted in neighboring neigh·bor n. 1. One who lives near or next to another. 2. A person, place, or thing adjacent to or located near another. 3. A fellow human. 4. Used as a form of familiar address. v. countries, and they are showing severe signs of their ordeal, especially the children. Wendy Driscoll, a spokeswoman for CARE International in Nairobi, said the agency had reports of a 14 percent severe malnutrition rate among refugee children under the age of 5 arriving in Tanzania. ``That's very, very high for such a situation,'' she said Thursday. |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion