Few in Kibumba pay much attention to death anymore. Two weeks after a hellish exodus from Rwanda’s civil war, and one week after a cholera epidemic began to decimate the 1 million refugees around Goma, the misery progresses inexorably. International aid is pouring in and the first 200 U.S. troops were deployed at the weekend to build a supply hub in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. But the effort hasn’t taken hold yet here at Kibumba, one of the worst camps. About 250,000 refugees fight for life in branch-and-grass shanties and on rattan mats scattered across a barren lava plain. The camp is 15 miles from the nearest water source. Perhaps 10,000 people have already died. “It’s a complete and utter disaster,” says John O’Shea, founder of Goal, an Irish relief agency. “Getting this under control requires a full-scale military effort. Without it, everyone here is going to die.”
As a wintry morning wind whips through the camp, a dozen dying people huddle outside a white medical tent, waiting for the French doctors to arrive from the town of Goma. A father pushes his prostrate son in a wheelbarrow; a woman props up her husband as his head lolls. “I am so cold, Mother,” mutters Jean-de-Dieu Mukagasasira, 22. His mother covers his skeletal, shivering frame with a gray blanket. He fell sick with severe diarrhea yesterday evening, she says. It might be dysentery, it might be cholera; he will probably be dead before he can be diagnosed. Three of the woman’s five other children are sick, and her husband died on the trek. “We want to go home,” she says, wiping her son’s brow as his pupils roll back. “But the inkotani (Rwandan Patriotic Front) will kill us.” Moments later, Jean-de-Dieu shudders violently and takes his final breath.
A crowd of thirsty refugees shouts at Rwandan workers for Doctors Without Borders: “We want water! Give us water!” Clutching yellow plastic cans, they surge around a spigot connected to a 15,000-liter tank. Five employees chase them back. The water is reserved for cholera and dysentery victims at the hospital, a young man named Charles Nearamba explains. An old man in rags shakes his fist. “Where can we go? We are dying!” Nearamba walks away.
The water supply remains hopelessly inadequate. The hardiest refugees trek 30 miles to and from a brackish stream. Those too weak to make the journey depend on water drawn from three tanks set up by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The tanks provide a minimal daily supply to only 50,000 people, or 20 percent of Kibumba’s population. The shortage creates daily scenes of desperation. In the chilly air, four quarter-mile-long lines of refugees inch toward one water station. Each person is allotted 20 liters for his family. “I have been waiting since 2 o’clock this morning,” says one man, standing beside a pump that provides a trickle of precious liquid. He has made the all-night wait four times in eight days.
Aid workers at Kibumba camp blame the water crisis on the U.N. failure to anticipate the exodus, the inadequacy of Goma’s airport and the snarled traffic that makes effective transport impossible. The United Nations blames the slow response of Western governments. The United States soon will have 5,000 troops on the ground in the region. But two weeks ago, U.N. officials say, they requested 80 water tankers from foreign donors; only 12 arrived. Mercedes Sayagues, a spokesperson for the World Food Program, says donors are quick to offer food but slow to provide water purification, tankers or latrines. Says Sayagues: “It’s sexier to feed people than help them s— in a safe place.”
It is cleaning time at the Doctors Without Borders cholera station. Rwandan nurses carry patients from four tents to the dirt courtyard so the makeshift clinics can be mopped clean of feces and vomit and sprayed with disinfectant. “Madame, get up. You have to go,” one nurse tells a moaning woman. Together, we carry her and deposit her outside in the sun. In the next tent, four young men have died during the night. One lies on his back staring at the ceiling; another is frozen in the fetal position; two more have already been wrapped in straw mats. Lying beside them, a naked boy of about 12 is barely alive. He groans and twitches, unattended. Four masked workers zip the corpses into white body bags. “Only eight dead this morning,” says hygienist Emmanuel Kabera, 21. “Two days ago we had 40. Things may be starting to improve.”
In Doctors Without Borders’ rehydration tent, Jean-Pierre Habimana, 30, is watching his wife die. A Hutu government functionary from the northwestern town of Ruhengeri, he holds the clammy hand of Epiphanie, 25, who hasn’t improved despite two days on an intravenous saline drip. Frustrated, he pulls out the needle and carries her outside in search of a doctor. Habimana fled with his family on July 17. At the chaotic border, he was separated from his 1-year-old son. He found him a week later, but the boy died of dysentery yesterday. “He had no milk from his mother for a week,” says Habimana, stroking his wife’s feverish cheek. Habimana is struggling to keep his family – wife, parents, sister and 5-year-old daughter – alive, walking 30 miles every second day for water. He is considering returning to Rwanda, joining 50,000 Hutu refugees who have already decided to risk possible retribution at the hands of the RPF rather than death in the camps. “If we stay here, we will all die,” he tells me. “I would rather be killed by a bullet in my own village. Even that is better than this.”
The UNHCR has a new priority: gathering the thousands of corpses piled up around Kibumba and digging a mass grave for them at the camp. (Until now, corpses were collected by the agency Goal and transported 20 miles to a burial pit in Goma.) The United Nations’ newly hired burial squad: 24 refugees, each paid $2 a day. Masked and wearing yellow rubber gloves, they load the bodies gingerly onto black stretchers and carry them to a grassy field. Supervisor Louis Biritsen, 37, directs the team’s movements. “Softly, softly,” he orders, as the workers toss a dead pregnant woman onto the heap of corpses. “You must be compassionate.” Hours later, a French bulldozer fails to penetrate the rocky volcanic soil, and the gravedigging plan is aborted; 1,000 bodies are left to rot while the aid agencies debate how best to dispose of them.
A cheer goes up on the road on the southern edge of Kibumba. “We are joyous this afternoon,” says Jean-Baptiste Madiraguha, a well-dressed man of 28, standing amid grinning Rwandan government soldiers and a few knife-wielding young men. They look like interahamwe, the Hutu militia responsible for murdering as many as 1 million Tutsis and reigniting Rwanda’s civil war. Several officials from the defeated Hutu government, now holed up in a shabby hotel in Goma, visited the camp this afternoon, he explains. “They told us that someday soon we will return to Rwanda.” How? Madiraguha says that unless the RPF will share power with the government-in-exile (a demand that Rwanda’s new rulers say they will never accept), he and others will resort to force. “The young people, the soldiers want to go back to war,” he says. “We were defeated because of the arms embargo. But if we can get our hands on weapons and ammunition, we will definitely attack.” The RPF, he says, is “capturing Hutus and carving their eyes out.” The United Nations insists that it is safe for the refugees to return.
Back at the cholera tent run by Doctors Without Borders, a young French doctor named Jean-Charles Pasquier is struggling against despair. The fact that only eight patients died this morning doesn’t comfort him; he guesses 300 more succumbed during the night elsewhere in the camp. “We only see the ones who have strength left,” says Pasquier. “The weakest can’t walk this far.” Pasquier walks behind the tent, where a dozen people wait for help. He bends and touches a toothless old woman wrapped in a blanket. She moans. “She hasn’t moved for three days,” he says. “She has no family, no friends. She is waiting to die.” He has seen countless others like her: men, women and children who suffer from no medical condition other than exhaustion and a lost will to live. “You have a burst appendix, you have cholera, I can help,” says Pasquier. “But this – this is not a job for a surgeon.”
As dusk begins to settle on Kibumba camp, we set out for Goma. At a bend a few miles down the highway, we come on an accident: a truck stacked high with corpses has plunged off the road and into a grassy field, flinging a half-dozen Zairean body collectors riding on the roof in all directions. The men lie stunned and gravely injured. Beyond them sits the truck, its grisly cargo spilling out the back. A young relief worker surveys the bizarre scene: the dying workers, the day-old corpses. “I thought things couldn’t get any worse in this place,” says a young relief worker. But in the camps of northeast Zaire, the horror confounds all expectations.
