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| Rwanda Refugees, 1994 – 1997 |
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By April 1997, around 100,000 refugees had walked 400 miles inland, ahead of Kabila’s advancing rebel army. The refugees made camp along an old railway line, in the dense forest to the south of Kisangani. Aid workers established themselves in the camps, but as tensions increased, the rebels forced them out. During a period of one week the rebels, including Rwandan forces seeking reprisals for the genocide, massacred thousands of the refugees. The remainder were forced to flee into the rainforest where many more died of their wounds and starvation.
Following international pressure, aid workers were finally permitted to return. They found scenes of appalling misery. An evacuation of the camps was organised, in which thousands of refugees were returned home upon massive airlifts, amongst them hundreds of unaccompanied children, many of whom had been orphaned by the massacres. Kabila’s forces advanced overthrowing Mobutu, and Zaire was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. The UN estimates that 40,000 refugees, many of the women and children who were camped in the rainforest, were unaccounted for. |
 The Biaro camp where tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees arrived, having fled their border camps five months before. Many of the refugees had been complicit in the genocide and feared retribution by the advancing rebel forces backed by the Rwanda. The camps was also home to hundreds of unaccompanied children. Biaro camp, Kisangani, Zaire. 1997 Amnesty International reports continuing human rights abuses under the government of Kabila, who resisted all investigations into the massacre of the refugees. In Rwanda, reprisal massacres continue on both sides, while in the new DRC Kabila now fights a civil war with the very Tutsi forces which brought him to power. |
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