PARIS, Jan 14 (Reuter) - Two relief groups said on Tuesday that lack of food and water was pushing up the death tollamong Rwandan refugees stranded in eastern Zaire and urged the world to do more to help. "The situation is getting worse and worse by the day," Brigitte Vasset of Paris-based Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) said after visiting the Tingi Tingi camp where some 120,000 people are living in what she called "catastrophic" conditions. MSF (Doctors without Borders) and the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said that more than 20 people a day were dying in the Tingi Tingi camp, up from 10 in late December, and appealed for more international help. UNICEF's Philippe Duamelle told a news conference with Vasset that half of those dying, mostly from lack of food and clean drinking water, were children under five years old. "The situation for young Rwandan refugee children in the north and east of Zaire is still worsening," he said after several weeks in the region. "There is very little food, the roads are very

bad." They said some people in the camps said privately they wanted to go home but seemed intimidated against leaving by suspected members of Hutu militias in the camp blamed for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda against Tutsis and moderate Hutus. MSF and UNICEF said the return of some 600,000 refugees to Rwanda and Burundi last year masked the fact that hundreds of thousands of others were still trapped between the lines of the Zairean army and Rwandan-backed rebels. "People got the impression at the start of December that the problem was solved. It isn't," said Philippe Biberson, president of MSF. "There is a very great need for food and other supplies." European Commissioner Emma Bonino met French President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday and said she wanted to continue humanitarian efforts for the refugees in eastern Zaire. "I want to continue. We are facing the same situation as before," she told reporters. Bonino handles the European Union's humanitarian aid. Asked if she favoured reviving the idea of sending a U

.N.-force -- championed by France before the sudden partial exodus home -- Bonino replied "You mean the multinational `farce'. "I hope that we'll find some other ideas because we've already run through that one without much success."