Plight of lm eastern Zaire refugees deepens

By Emma Tuchor in Brussels and Michela Wrong in Gisenye

The plight of up to lm refugees in east Zaire despenad last night as efforts to co-ordinate an international response to the crisis appeared near collapse.

European Union development ministers yesterday backed the need to create humanitarian corridors to ensure the transfer of aid to the refugees but the emergency meeting broke up without agreement on the central question of whether to send troops to patrol the corridors to protect aid workers and relief convoys.

While both France and Spain said they were prepared to send 1,000 troops each to the region to ensure aid got through, strong resistance came from Britain Germany, and Belgium Zaire's former colonial power.

Baroness Chalker, UK aid minister, described as "daft" a call by Mr Hervé de Charette, French foreign minister, to back a multinational intervention force in Zaire.

Mr de Charette had described as "spineless" the failure of the international community to agree on the need for a big troop deployment to the area. France has called for a 5,000-strong intervention force and pledged to provide 1,000 French troops. The US is only prepared to provide logistical support.

The call led to divisions in the ranks of aid agencies, with Britain's Save the Children Fund warning that military intervention "may well compound the problem . Another leading British charity, Oxfam, argued it was "the least worst option".

Last night, Spanish diplomats said that almost nothing had been achieved at the meeting on the question of troop deployment.

One of the few concrete decisions to emerge was to send a troika of aid ministers from Italy, the Netherlands and Ireland, along with Mrs Emma Bonino, European aider to assess the humanitarian situation and identify ways to speed humanitarian aid.

Mrs Bonino said she hoped the meeker had sent a powerful message to the UN Security Council to speed decisions on how to reset to the Zaire crisis.

In east Zaire, aid organisations have pre-postioned aid on the Burundian and Rwandan sides of the border, ordered hundreds of trucks` and set up transit centres at the end of what are expected to be three humanitarian corridors running from the Zairean towns of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira into Rwanda and Burundi.

Fearing repetition of the hysterical exodus of 1994 and subsequent cholera out. break the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says it hopes to keep numbers to a manageable 10,000-12,000 refugees a day, spinning the operation out for three months.

While refugee relief agencies plan logistics, exactly how amass return is to be triggered among a population heading ever deeper into Zaire remains unclear.

While stopping short of advocating refugees be starved into submission, aid experts say it is crucial food is not distributed in quantities allowing the permanent camps of the past to re-establish themselves.

In the Zairean capital Kinshasa, thousands of students calling for the resigns lion of the part-Tutsi prime minister, Mr Kengo wa Dondo, took over parliament. Witnesses said unarmed gendarmes and troops were also in the building.