Debate rises, over whether aid he ed Rwanda NATION/WORLD The Michigan Daily - Monday, November 11, 1993 - 7A Bomb kills 13 in Moscow cemetery. U.N. agencies, relief groups debate if aid added to refugee crisis The Washington Post KIGALI, Rwanda - From the start, aid agencies knew the Rwandan refugee crisis of 1994 was an.extraordi- one. There were the numbers: 1.1 million Hutus, Rwanda's ethnic majority, streamed into eastern Zaire in just a few days, seeking to escape reprisals after carrying out a campaign to wipe out the minority Tutsi tribe. There was the chaos: 40,000 people died, primarily of cholera, after exhausted refugees set up camps of 4 ,000 to 200,000 people atop vol- ic rock around the border town of Goma. About 700,000 Hutu refugees would settle there. And there was the makeup of the refugees: Many of those in the camps had participated in the genocide. They had been leaders and members of the Hutu army and militias that scuttled into Zaire after a Tutsi-led rebel force stopped the slaughter in Rwanda. Many relief agencies publicly voiced cern over the appropriateness of 'ping refugees associated with geno- cide against Tutsis, but few organiza- tions acted on those concerns. Today the crisis in eastern Zaire has again exploded, with hundreds of thousands of refugees cut off from aid because of fighting that pits the Zairian military and Hutu militants against the Rwandan army and Ztirian Tutsi rebels. *The tragedy has launched an anguished debate among U.N. agencies and relief workers over whether aid groups exacerbated the refugee crisis by serving in the eastern Zaire camps, which became bases for the Hutu mili- tants. "Should we have stopped feeding the refugees?" said Brenda Barton, spokesperson for the World Food Program. "No. We were here to provide * d to hungry people.... We have a clear mandate." Doctors Without Borders, however, stopped most of its work in the camps in December 1994. "We pulled out because we thought we were being used to fuel another war," said spokesperson Samantha Bolton. "We were getting death threats. ... The militias were intimidating the refugees. They were killing people right in front of us. We had to protest." For the first few weeks of the 1994 refugee crisis, aid agencies did what they are paid to do. They fed people. They clothed them. They provided water and medicine and shelter. But prickly issues soon emerged. Should they supply camps peopled with refugees whose food was being taken by Hutu militants and redistrib- uted? Should they work in sites where the exiled army had begun rearming itself and using the camps as military training grounds? Should they provide medicine to militia members who set up kangaroo courts within the camps and killed fel- low refugees in front of aid workers? Those issues proved especially diffi- cult for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, charged with overall coordination of relief efforts during such crises. Critics have said the agency did not press hard enough to bring the refugees home, should have moved camps away from Rwanda's borders and should have found ways to separate Hutu militants from other refugees. In turn, representatives of the agency have charged that U.N. mem- bers knew of the crisis within the camps and did nothing. They point out that shortly after the crisis began, the High Commissioner for Refugees called for an international police force to separate the refugees. The United Nations said no. "We've tried to say from the begin- ning that some of these people are not really refugees," said refugee agency spokesperson Paul Stromberg. "People knew that was going to be a problem." But Stromberg admits that his agency- and the aid community generally-made mistakes. "There was an unwillingness to move away from seeing this as a human catastrophe to this issue" of mili- tants in the camps, he said. "We should have yelled and screamed and made it The Washington Post MOSCOW -A remote-controlled bomb set off at a crowded memorial service in a Moscow cemetery killed 13 people and wounded two dozen others yesterday in what police and news reports described as a war among criminal gangs over rich, tax- exempt social funds. Although contract killings and Mafia feuds have become common- place here in recent years, the attack was the single most deadly act of vio- lence in the city in recent memory. The bomb exploded at 11:35 a.m. at the Kotlaykovskoe Cemetery in southern Moscow as more than 100 fund who was assassinated by .a bomb outside his apartment two years ago. Yesterday's remote-control bomb killed his widow, Yelena Krasnolutskaya, and the current head of the fund, Sergei Trakhirov. The fund is one of several ostensi- bly social and, charitable organiza- tions that have received the right to import goods such as cigarettes and liquor tax-free in recent years. The funds have made enormous profits from selling the goods in Russia, and the proceeds have sparked feuds among rival criminal groups and clans. Police said the bomb was the equiv- alent of 4 to 6 pounds of TNT people gathered vodka toasts in memory of the head of an A fg h a n - w a r veterans' group who was killed in another bomb blast two years ago. As in earlier attacks, the country's politi- cal leaders wasted no time in declaring their shock and anger. Prime Minister Viktor around a table for Ithink an old sei scores ani continuat that sett) scores.. -Col. S Russian FE AP PHOTO A Rwandan woman sits next to her belongings as she waits with other refugees for permission to enter Rwanda at the Rwanda-Zaire border on Saturday. clear that the solution to this crisis was not going to be strictly humanitarian.... It had to be political." Barton, of the World Food Program, said her organization, knowing of the problems of food dis- tribution, tried to give food directly to families, bypassing militant camp leaders. The agency also tried to offer food from within Rwanda to lure refugees home. Since the summer of 1994, the World Food Program generally has provided between 8,000 and 9,000 tons of food per month to the camps. Barton said separating the refugees was impossible because "if the (Hutu militiamen) aren't wearing uniforms, how can you even know who they are? And you have to remember that a lot of people in these camps were women and children." Bolton, of Doctors Without Borders, said the brazenness of the Hutu extrem- ists compelled her organization to act. The Hutus did training exercises in the open. They set up a prison in one camp, where they held dissident refugees and others who opposed them. They killed patients in camp hospitals. "Refugees would come to us on the quiet and ask, 'What's really happening in Rwanda?' " Bolton said. "After we told them, these young guys would sur- round our people and yell, 'You're lying! You're lying!'" The spokesperson said that in the end, many of the 100-plus organizations stayed in the camps because the Rwandan crisis filled their coffers. "Everybody made a lot of money out. of Goma," she said. "We were on TV all the time. People were giving us a lot of money. It was a good fund-raiser to say you were working in Goma." International aid workers left the camps Nov. 1, after three days of fighting in Goma trapped them in their offices and in the U.N. com- pound in town. Today they face fresh questions, as the United Nations and governments grapple with how best to aid an unreachable refugee popula- tion. Many organizations are not sure what to do. They say they simply know that much of what they have done for the past two years has failed. Chernomyrdin described the attack as a "terrorist act." It came on Police Day, and Chernomyrdin announced he had canceled a concert to celebrate the holiday. Internal Affairs Minister Anatoly Kulikov said, "I already ordered all our operative services in the ministry to get to their. feet in order to solve this case, audacious in its scale and by the choice of the moment of the crime." Such crimes are rarely solved, how- ever. There have been no arrests in the assassination of an American busi- ness executive in a Moscow subway entrance last week, nor have the Russian police apprehended those who carried out a host of other mur- ders of prominent individuals in recent years, including an investiga- tive reporter, a television personality, a priest and several bankers. The blast, which left a crater near- ly 5 feet deep and threw some victims 70 yards away, came at a memorial service for Mikhail Likhodei, the chair of an Afghan-war veterans-aid Sthis is and may have been a land. mine. It had been placed id a under a table and was deto- ion of nated as those gathered next ingr o f to it were coin- memorating Likhodei with traditional tanislav Zhorin toasts of vodka. ederal Security Many of the Service victims' bodies were too badly mangled for immediate identifica- tion, police said. According to Russian television reports, two factions had been fight- ing for control of the Afghan War Invalids' Foundation. The group was running social pro- grams to aid 14,000 wounded soldiers from the Soviet Union's decade-long war in Afghanistan, but the killings appear to have been a duel over money, not social welfare. "I think this is an old settling of scores and a continuation of that set- tling of scores connected with Likhodei," Col. Stanislav Zhorin of the Russian Federal Security Service told reporters. A year after Likhodei was killed, another official of the fund, Valery Radchikov, was the target of an attempted assassination. Senior Sgt. Nikolai Lenika of the Moscow Southern District police headquarters said, "It is fairly clear that money played a deciding"role. And all those in society, from top to bottom, who have money attract orga- nized crime:' I You've got a lot to grin about when you use AT&T or an AT&T Universal MasterCarde. Like an AT&T True Rewards* Member Benefit Card. Just flash it and: " Sam Goody/Musicland gives you a 15% discount on CDs and cassettes. 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