Word: goma
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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...
...this was the plan, it had some sizable holes in it. Mugunga was nine miles farther into Zaire than the airport at Goma. Those inside Mugunga could not leave because they were being held in place by militant Hutu militias. And the camp was under siege by ethnic Tutsi rebels from Zaire, probably assisted by the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda. Another huge portion of refugees was presumed to be scattered in Zaire's forests. If Canadian, American, French, British and other soldiers simply sat on the tarmac in Goma, how would food ever reach the people who needed...
While clinging tenaciously to power, Zaire's tyrant has stockpiled much of the country's wealth for himself: his fortune is estimated at several hundred million dollars. "The Guide," as he has dubbed himself, lavished much of that money on empty show. When rebel looters in Goma recently entered the President's local villa--a mansion Mobutu visited just once, but kept ready for his imminent return--they found a house full of plastic "marble" and fake antiques. Other expressions of his grandeur are not so hollow: he owns chateaus in Spain and Belgium, a town house in Paris...
...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...