Word: goma
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What they would do was vague: "facilitate" delivery of food and the voluntary repatriation of the refugees. How they would do that was equally unspecified. About 1,000 U.S. troops would take over the airport at Goma, the Zairean city nearest the fighting, held by Zairean Tutsi rebels. They would open a three-mile corridor between Goma and the Rwanda border to protect refugees walking home--though the border is in fact only a few hundred yards away. An additional 2,000 or 3,000 Americans would go to Rwanda and Uganda to airlift in supplies and the other...
...GOMA, Zaire: Rwandan refugees and displaced Zairians began flocking toward home today as if the doors to their cells suddenly had been flung open, and across the world, diplomats were crossing their fingers. A Tutsi offensive had driven Hutu forces westward into Zaire, potentially forcing the Hutu militias to relinquish control of the bursting Mugunga refugee camp that has served as a barren purgatory to more than 1 million people, and as cover for thousands of militiamen hiding from their enemies. A significant exodus would greatly ease the need for the U.N. humanitarian and military intervention that has been hurriedly...
...brink of a catastrophe," says Sadako Ogata, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Unless we can deliver food, water and other basic assistance to the people in the camps...they will end up dying. There is no time to waste." In 1994, when refugees converged on Goma and cholera broke out, Ogata issued a similar warning. By the time the world responded, some 50,000 of them, mostly women and children, were dead...
...Hutu threat intensifies, indigenous tribes have been fighting back. North of Goma a militia calling itself the Bangalima, after a famous tribe of warriors from the central Zairian rain forest, recently launched a series of attacks on Zairian army posts and local Hutu. Avid fetishists, often fighting naked and using charms that they believe turn enemy bullets into water, the Bangalima fighters have sworn to drive all Hutu from Zaire. A letter received last month by the local representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees threatened a "bloodbath" in the refugee camps if all 750,000 Hutu were...
...calling a rebel uprising by indigenous militia. Long feared for their corrupt and brutal ways, the unpaid combat troops have scored a few successes against the rebels but in the process have spread terror throughout North Kivu. At the Lake Edward fishing village of Vitshumbi, 62 miles north of Goma, paracommandos stormed in behind a barrage of mortar fire last month, killing 15 Bangalima combatants and, according to local human-rights workers, herding 34 suspected collaborators into local churches and gunning them down. A mother of five reported being raped by soldiers for 10 hours after she was accused...