Using clubs and rifle butts, exhausted Zairian aid workers and rebels beat starving people back from boxes of high-protein crackers as Central Africa’s refugee crisis hit the boiling point.
The head of the UN World Food Program said more than 80,000 children in eastern Zaire could die by the end of the month unless they receive food and clean water soon. The food aid program in the refugee-packed region has collapsed.
“The small children are the most vulnerable and typically are the ones who are the first to go,” Catherine Bertini said Friday in Rome. “Without quick action, we will definitely start seeing people starving.”
She said children between 18 months and 3 years old were the most at risk.
Rebel soldiers fired rifles in the air to disperse mobs of Zairians clawing the ground and each other for boxes of crackers at a nearly empty warehouse in Goma. When that failed to keep the hungry away, they beat at them with clubs and the butts of their weapons.
Last week, the rebels routed the Zairian army and ethnic Hutu militias from this eastern Zairian city of 300,000 after Zaire tried to force local Tutsis out of the country.
The warfare shattered the food program and brought the danger of starvation to residents of Goma as well as the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled its United Nations camps. The refugees are thought to be in even worse shape.
The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders estimated Friday that more than 13,000 people have died and 1.2 million mostly Rwandan Hutu refugees have been left without access to food, water or medicine since fighting began in eastern Zaire three weeks ago.
The dead included three Spanish missionaries slain at their monastery in Bukavu. The men had been aiding the refugees.
“We must act and we must act immediately,” UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said Friday after meeting with the Security Council in New York.
Saying the refugees are facing a “genocide by starvation,” he told reporters he had urged the ambassadors to move quickly to support a French proposal to set up an international force to secure aid corridors and enable refugees to return home to Rwanda.
But Friday night, Security Council members worked on a resolution that only asked UN members to prepare a multinational force to help end the crisis. Authorization for its deployment would be postponed.
The council lowered its sights after members said the United States was not yet ready to support a resolution authorizing immediate creation of the international force.
Washington was said to be studying whether it would provide logistical and financial assistance.
![Volunteers who have been providing care packages and assisting migrants off of buses and onto trains at Wilmette’s Metra Station urged the Wilmette Village Board to not follow neighboring communities by adopting a busing ordinance during Wednesday night’s meeting. Despite concerns, trustees voted unanimously to limit unscheduled bus drop-offs to weekdays between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Village Manager Michael Braiman, who told Pioneer Press in early January the village had no plans to move forward with busing ordinances, said increased late-night drop-offs have begun to cause concern. According to the village, 68 buses with approximately 2,700 people have arrived […]](https://www.chicagotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PPN-L-WLM-busingordinance-050224-01.jpg?w=467 "Volunteers who have been providing care packages and assisting migrants off of buses and onto trains at Wilmette’s Metra Station urged the Wilmette Village Board to not follow neighboring communities by adopting a busing ordinance during Wednesday night’s meeting. Despite concerns, trustees voted unanimously to limit unscheduled bus drop-offs to weekdays between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Village Manager Michael Braiman, who told Pioneer Press in early January the village had no plans to move forward with busing ordinances, said increased late-night drop-offs have begun to cause concern. According to the village, 68 buses with approximately 2,700 people have arrived […]")
