PERILOUS FLIGHT HOME : 13,000 FEARED DEAD SINCE ZAIRE FIGHTING ERUPTED.

Byline: Tony Smith Associated Press 

Fidele Baliguoma's first steps into Rwanda on Saturday were wobbly ones: His swollen feet were covered with dried blood after walking 10 days and nights through forests with his wife and 10 children.

Baliguoma and fellow Hutu refugees fleeing fighting in northeastern Zaire between the Zairian army and rebel Tutsis climbed trees to keep their bearings and survived on roots and water squeezed from the mud.

When the deadly sounds of war reached his refugee camp, there was no time to gather food and water. ``We ran, we hardly took anything with us. That's why many people died,'' he said.

Baliguoma said he counted at least 10 bodies lying on forest paths during his journey. Without immediate, large-scale foreign intervention, aid workers fear many of the 1.1 million refugees will begin dying of starvation.

The journey is perilous even beyond the lack of food and water. Another arrival, Didas Ntibankaundiye, said many refugees were injured in the panicked flight, falling or getting lost on the steep, winding paths.

About 400 Zairian refugees drowned when their boat capsized while fleeing across Lake Tanganyika into Tanzania, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The boat from Uvira, Zaire, 90 miles from the Tanzanian lake port town of Kigoma, was overloaded and capsized Friday in high winds, arriving refugees told the Kigoma newspaper, Kalulu.

The newspaper said another boat carrying an unknown number of Zairian refugees lost its way, and its fate was unknown.

The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders estimates that more than 13,000 people already have died since fighting began in eastern Zaire three weeks ago.

The fighting displaced Zairians as well as the Hutu refugees from Rwanda and Burundi living in camps in eastern Zaire, many since 1994. The Hutu refugees had feared reprisals from the Tutsi-led army that took control of Rwanda, ousting a Hutu government responsible for the summer 1994 massacre of a half-million Tutsis.

Both the Zairian rebels and the Rwandan military, which patrols on the Rwandan side of the border, want the refugees to go home. But Hutus who fled to Zaire came mainly from sites of the most brutal slaughter in 1994. That made it easier for Hutu militias - which fled to Zairian camps with the civilians - to terrorize refugees into not returning home.

Early Saturday, the U.N. Security Council urged U.N. members to prepare for a multinational force to secure corridors for delivering aid to refugees threatened by disease and famine. The Security Council, however, delayed deploying the force after the United States balked at immediate intervention.

The United States was urged by European nations, particularly France, to get on board soon. The European Union, through Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Emma Bonino, pointedly criticized the United Nations for the delay.

``U.N. Security Council representatives should keep in mind that the thousands of refugees dying every day in Mugunga (refugee camp) cannot spend the weekend in Long Island, as they do,'' Bonino said in a statement issued in Brussels, Belgium.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: A Rwandan boy stands in line with other refugees waiting to enter his homeland.

Associated Press