GENEVA, March 10 (Reuter) - European Union humanitarian affairs commissioner Emma Bonino said on Monday that rebels in eastern Zaire were "hunting down refugees like wild game." She also accused the international community of resorting to "cowardice, a lot of lies and an enormous dose of cynicism" in its attitude to the crisis. Bonino said In a speech at Geneva's Red Cross Museum it was a scandal that some 160,000 mainly Rwandan Hutu refugees had to flee the Tingi Tingi camp in eastern Zaire last week as the forces of rebel leader Laurent Kabila moved in. "Yet again, hundreds of thousands of human beings, who have already paid a heavy price because of their wandering in the forest, hunger, illness and massacres without witness, are abandoned to the mercy of a uniformless, flagless and lawless army which hunts them like wild game," she declared. Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire is now advancing on the city of Kisangani, five months after launching an uprising led by Zai

rean Tutsis when the Zaire government threatened to expel them. His forces initially seized areas on the border with Rwanda where over a million Rwandan Hutus had taken refuge in camps after fleeing fearing retribution for massacres of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in their own country in 1994. Many Hutus then returned home, but others, apparently led by former leaders of the Hutu army and militias who spearheaded the massacres, fled westward, many of them coming together again at Tingi Tingi. Bonino, who visited the camp before the rebels advanced on it, said what she described as a "gigantic manhunt which is also directed against children, women and old people" had been justified on the grounds that people reponsible for the 1994 genocide were among the refugees. "Let me say once and for all that I claim the right to nourish and care even for those who have committed genocide if they are in danger," she said. "I refuse to endorse a mass condemnation to death, handed down by no one knows who and which doe

s not correspond to any acceptable criterion of justice in any state of law." Bonino, an Italian who is also EU fisheries and consumer affairs commissioner, said that in the manner in which the international community had handled the crisis "I do not see much courage, transparency or emotion. Rather, I find cowardice, a lot of lies, and an enormous dose of cynicism."