U.N. ACCUSES REBELS IN ZAIRE OF FORCING HUTUS TO SLOW DEATH.

Byline: James C. McKinley Jr. The New York Times

U.N. officials Friday accused Zairian rebels of trying to drive Hutu refugees to a slow death in the jungle. Aid workers who flew over refugee camps south of the Zairian city of Kisangani discovered that the number of people who had lived in the camps just days ago and had disappeared, presumably fleeing into the surrounding forest, had risen to more than 80,000.

The refugees, many of them thought to be too weak to walk, disappeared from two camps onto a narrow road through the forest after three days of fighting involving Tutsi-dominated rebels, local villagers and Hutu militants.

``We are missing thousands and thousands of people who one could not imagine walking very far,'' said Peter Kessler, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in Nairobi.

The plight of the missing refugees is fast becoming a diplomatic disaster for the rebel leader Laurent Kabila. There have been unconfirmed reports from local farmers that his rebels have killed refugees, and senior U.N. officials are stepping up pressure on Kabila, accusing his troops of purposely condemning the refugees to death by driving them into the jungle.

Speaking to reporters in Lubumbashi, Kabila denied that his soldiers had massacred refugees and even invited an international investigation to determine what had happened. He said the rebels responded with gunfire when they were attacked by armed Hutu guerrillas, and then intervened to stop skirmishes between the refugees and local villagers.

``I will accept independent findings, and if there is reason to take action against my troops, I will happily do so,'' Reuters quoted him as saying. ``But facts before me suggest my troops only intervened to stop fighting between armed refugees and local Zairians.''

But the U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, said through a spokesman that the rebels' actions amounted to ``slow extermination.'' The spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said that the refugees were not only ``being attacked in an organized way'' but that they were also being subjected to the rebels' policy of denying aid workers access to them, which was tantamount to killing them.

In Geneva, aid officials used even stronger words, suggesting that Kabila was seeking to exterminate the Hutu refugees, some of whom took part in the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. ``Eighty thousand people are condemned to a slow and cruel death,'' Christiane Berthaume, speaking for the World Food Program, told Reuters. ``The expression `final solution' is not exaggerated.''

On Thursday, U.N. officials who visited a camp at Kasese, 17 miles south of Kisangani, were shocked to discover not a single person was left of more than 55,000 people who had been camped there.

On Friday, officials flew over the area and found out that a second camp at Biaro, about eight miles farther south, was also abandoned, its 30,000 residents having apparently vanished into the forest.

U.N. officials say they fear the worst. A bulldozer hijacked by villagers Monday was seen at Kasese camp, as well as freshly dug trenches and a fresh mound of earth. Journalists and aid workers who tried to investigate the mound were scared away by automatic gunfire and grenade explosions nearby.

Even if there were no massacres, the flight of the refugees into the rain forest means that the sickest among them will probably die, aid workers said. U.N. officials estimate that at least 9,000 of the more than 80,000 people in the two camps were in perilous shape, suffering from malaria, cholera, and other tropical diseases.

``Those who can walk are somewhere else,'' said Filippo Grandi, the coordinator for the U.N. refugee agency in eastern Zaire. ``Those who can't walk - we don't know. Several thousand couldn't walk, including many unaccompanied minors. It's very frightening.''

From the beginning of the Zairian civil war six months ago, the rebels have had two agendas. They say they are fighting to oust Zaire's longtime dictator, President Mobutu Sese Seko. But they also want to destroy what is left of the Hutu guerrilla movement in Zaire, which had been based in U.N. refugee camps along the Zairian border.

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Photo

Photo: Rwandans gather on the bank of the Congo River in the village of Kikongo on Friday, after fleeing Kasese earlier in the week.

Associated Press