The Mail & Guardian’s Stefaans Brummer visits the refugee camps along with the South African mercy mission A human tide, all carrying a load of precious firewood
BENACO and its satellite refugee camps cover the fertile hills of Ngara in western Tanzania, a few hours’ walk from the Rwandan border.
About 250 000 Rwandans, many wounded and maimed, have over the past three months fled across the border to the safety of these camps.
What they have in common is destitution and a nation rent apart; what divides them is an age-old ethnic hatred that exploded into the genocide that has wiped out an estimated 500 000 Rwandans.
The neat rows of thousands upon thousands of stick and grass huts, covered with plastic sheeting which reflects an unreal glint in the tropical haze, constitutes what is now probably Tanzania’s second most populous city.
Until last week it was also the world’s second largest refugee centre — a distinction now assumed by the Zairean border town of Goma, into which a further 500 000 Rwandans have streamed.
Both refugee areas contain, perhaps surprisingly, a majority of Hutus, the ethnic group associated with death squads responsible for the massacre of minority Tutsis and their sympathisers.
Such is the fear — and reality — of revenge in Rwanda that victim and victimiser alike gather what meagre possessions they can carry and head for the nearest safe border.
What resulted at Ngara — the destination of most of the airlifted South African food and medicine — was a logistical nightmare.
Roughly 200 tons of food a day is consumed by the Ngara refugees, says Philippe Lamair, liaison officer of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which is co-ordinating the relief.
Most of it is trucked over hundreds of kilometres of bad road from the Tanzanian capital Dar-es-Salaam and the city of Mwanza. At the moment, UNHCR can deliver; but as Goma has shown, the situation is unpredictable. “We must be careful, because things can change really quickly,” says Lamair.
Not that food alone makes a city of refugees happy.
“At Benaco we have sanitation, health and security problems,” he says. UNHCR and relief agencies are trying to move more refugees to satellite camps to relieve overcrowding and keep apart communities with political differences.
At Benaco, the roads are awash with a human tidal wave of misery; hundreds of new arrivals from Rwanda each day; refugees relocating to new camps; refugees bowed under loads of firewood, leaving behind them an ever-spreading swathe of deforestation.
At a feeding station a few thousand people clog the bush, waiting for their meagre daily ration of 420 grams of maize, 120 grams of beans, 50 grams of corn soya blend, a pinch of salt and a measure of oil. When the shoving becomes too much, marshalls lay in with sticks. Everyone laughs and calm returns.
German Red Cross staff at the main refugee hospital — a collection of tents, each serving as a ward — wrap a toddler’s arm in bandages as he winces with pain; they watch over a young woman sweating with cerebral malaria and a girl with an amputated arm and machete wounds on her throat; operate on a man with a fist-sized hole in the skull where his camp neighbours bashed him because they suspected him of sympathising with the Rwanda Patriotic Front. “This is not going to work,” says a member of the operating team.
A few kilometres towards the border a sombre and ragged bunch of grave diggers lean on their spades, waiting for their next consignment of corpses from the Kagera river, which crosses into Tanzania near Ngara.