TINGI TINGI, Zaire, Feb 2 (Reuter) - The EU commissioner for humanitarian affairs on Sunday described conditions at Zaire's largest remaining refugee camp for Hutus as beneath human dignity and said the international community should be ashamed. "We are seeing here 200,000 people who were declared nonexistent by the international community," said commissioner Emma Bonino at the Tingi Tingi camp where refugees are trapped by war deep in the equatorial jungle in eastern Zaire. "It is frankly unacceptable that the best professionals in the military from the most important countries could not detect these people's existence," she told Reuters in an interview. Bonino was among world politicians who campaigned for an international force to come to the rescue of refugees caught by fighting between rebels and the Zaire army since last October. The United Nations abandoned the idea of the force after more than half of some 1.1 million Rwandan Hutu refugees in Zaire camps returned to their homeland following rebel vic

tories last year. Renewed warfare between the rebels and a Zaire army now backed by hundreds of European mercenaries has again turned the focus on the plight of refugees in eastern Zaire. "What I have seen here is really shame for the international community. The conditions here are beneath the limits of human dignity," Bonino said. The between 120,000 and 200,000 ethnic Hutus at Tingi Tingi are part of an estimated 400,000 Rwandan and Burundian refugees who were lost for over a month in the Zairean rainforest after fleeing fighting around their camps further east last year. A further 60,000 are now situated in two other camps, at Amisi and Shabunda close to current fighting between the Zairean army and mainly Tutsi rebels who are backed, according to Zaire, by neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda. Aid workers say that thousands more refugees are emerging now at isolated points in the east after walking for up to three months through vast tracts of rainforest. At Tingi Tingi conditions have visibly deteriorated ov

er the past days. Hundreds of children with shrunken faces and tiny skeletal bodies covered in sores are being given emergency treatment at medical centres run by the U.N. children's agency UNICEF and the French medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Bonino told the starving refugees the European Union would ensure food assistance reached them and that the road to the isolated camps would be repaired to facilitate its arrival. She added that she would continue to call on those responsible to look for a long-term political solution to the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire. "I will be appealing to the U.N. secretary general, because at the moment I see no forum, no negotiations going on to help find a solution for these 500,000 people who have been completely forgotten," she said.