U.S. MAY INTERVENE IN ZAIRE : GOAL IS FOR REFUGEES TO RETURN TO RWANDA.

Byline: Steven Erlanger The New York Times

Prompted by France, U.S. officials are considering sending some U.S. troops to Central Africa for logistical support in an international force to protect and feed up to 1.4 million refugees caught in the fighting between Zaire and Rwanda, senior U.S. and European officials said Tuesday.

While U.S. officials see the use of troops as a last resort, the next few days will be crucial in deciding whether an international force will be needed, they said.

U.S. diplomats are working to establish a lasting cease-fire that would allow aid workers to return to the area and encourage Rwandan Hutu refugees to return home, closing the refugee camps in eastern Zaire that have fostered tribal and regional tensions. If that can happen, they hope there will be no need for foreign troops to create ``protected zones'' for the distribution of needed food and water.

But the Hutus have refused to return to Rwanda, now led by a Tutsi-dominated government, for the last two years and for now many are scattered in Eastern Zaire with few provisions.

While U.S. officials have not ruled out the use of troops for logistical purposes as part of an international protection force if it proves necessary, officials said the French proposal requires considerable refinement, with answers needed to questions of size, purpose, exit strategy and the like.

One main difference, U.S. officials said, is that the French would be willing to return the refugees to the existing camps they have just abandoned on the Zairian side of the border with Rwanda.

The Americans, along with many international relief officials, are more insistent on obtaining a more lasting solution in which the refugees return to their former homes inside Rwanda.

International officials hope to forestall another vast humanitarian disaster and blood bath in Central Africa, where Rwandan Hutus slaughtered Tutsis on a mass scale in 1994 and smaller-scale conflicts have continued. The 1994 massacres in Rwanda prompted the Tutsis to overthrow a Hutu-led government, and Rwandan Hutus to flee into Zaire.

Many United Nations and Western officials said the only real solution is for the Rwandan Hutus to return home, and they hope to use this crisis to shut the festering border camps and create safe corridors for aid and repatriation to Rwanda.

There is a sense of urgency, because some 1.2 million Rwandan refugees have left camps in the north to flee into inhospitable territory, while an additional 200,000 Burundian Hutus have disappeared from southern camps, U.S. officials said.