EU chief wants UN to use force in Zaire.

The EU aid chief Emma Bonino last night demanded that any international troops sent into Zaire be allowed use force if necessary to get to stranded refugees.

"Acces to the area must be gained now, either by peaceful means or manu militari", she insisted.

She said she had been forced to speak out because governements and the UN, and military chiefs of the world's most powerful countries scemed to be "at a loss" to work out how many refugies there were, where they were and in what conditions they were living.

"This is amazing", Ms Bonino said, "There is one straightforward answer to this problem: to organise promptly a military assesment mission to the area in order to check once and for allhow many people there are, where they are and what is happening to them".

Yesterday in Canada also continued to press for a military intervention in eastern Zaire.

But even as Ms Bonino spoke, tens of thousands of hutu refugees who had been missing for weeks in the jungles of Zaire poured into camps yesterday in Minova, a small lakeside town on the west of Lake Kivu under the control of the Mai Mai, Zairean rebbels.

The refugees, already numbering...well.over 50.000, said that most of the others who fled the fighting for Zaire's interior last month were heading for Minova while Hutu extremists and their famlies were marching to Kisangani and Walekale, desper in the country.

Exhausted after trekking from Bukavu, 100 miles to the south, into the forests and back to the lake, the refugees said many had died on the way.

Rebels.

The Mai Mai, who are in alliance with east Zaire's Rwanda-backed rebels, were trying yesterday to arrange to move the refugees back to Rwanda, either by road or across the lake. In the meantime, the hutu civilians who fled retribution for the genocide of a milion Tutsis and Hutu moderates in Rwanda in 1994 have nothing to eat.

"Who have used the last of our supplies and have nothing to eat. The water here is also dangerous to drink because it has not been treated. We desperately need the help of the UNHCR (United Nations Hight Commissioner for Refugees)", said Innocent Habiambere, 40, who fled Bokava.

The UNHCR has been desperate to find the refugees since they fled the campa in the south and has used satellite images of east Zaire and British aerial surveillance aircraft in its research.

Now that the mystey of the missing refugees, estimated to be anywhere from 300.000 to 600.000 is solving itself, however, a foreign military mission to the region looks increasingly unlikely.