Word: goma
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...Rwandan Patriotic Front (R.P.F.) left at least 500,000 dead. Most of the victims were Tutsi civilians slaughtered by Hutu militiamen. Of those who survived the genocide, at least 2.2 million have fled the country, including a million Hutu refugees who pushed northwest into the Zaire town of Goma in just five days last week. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of earlier refugees, Hutu and Tutsi alike, languish in camps across the eastern border in Tanzania and across the southern border in Burundi. If the exodus continues, half the country's population of 7.5 million will soon have died or dispersed...
Madness spreads like an eager germ through the camps that have doubled, then doubled again in size. Between the town of Goma and the airport, a woman dances naked down the highway, cursing at the listless crowds and at the corpses lying on mats by the roadside. A man at the edge of a mass grave laughs in delight when he manages to toss the lifeless body of a child squarely into the middle of the burial pit. A team of laborers is moving bodies from a field to the trucks nearby, when a young man lying among the corpses...
...This is the beginning of the final days," declares Deogracias Bivunde, who watched at least 40 refugees be trampled in a stampede by his home outside Goma. "This is the apocalypse." Two weeks ago Goma was a quiet place on the shores of a lovely lake, tucked amid banana groves and thick woodlands in the shadow of a spectacular volcano that lit the northern sky at night. The town was home to 80,000 residents; now it has more than a million sick and starving newcomers. Outside the airport, a sign extols The Pleasure of Traveling...
...food and medical supplies already being delivered, according to the Rwandan Prime Minister. Faustin Twagiramungu said he'll respond tomorrow. The U.S. forces reportedly would use the Rwandan capital, Kigali, as a transit point instead of the jammed airport near refugee camps in the Zairian border town of Goma. The bottlenecked Goma has proved a frustrating place from which to launch a rescue effort, even though the largest contingent of refugees has gathered in and around the city. U.S. aircraft landed there today with vital equipment to purify contaminated water that has spread cholera among tens of thousands...
International relief efforts have snarled while thousands of Rwandan refugees continue to die. Since the weekend, U.S. planes carrying relief supplies have circled for hours over the tiny, clogged airport at Goma, Zaire, then landed in Kenya or Uganda because they were running low on fuel. (Zairian authorities charged a fee of $2,000 from each U.S. aircraft that did land.) Many aid workers are blaming the foul-ups on French forces who have run the airport since mid-June. U.N. officials, meanwhile, suspended other American flights because they had received more aid than they could distribute amid a shortage...