Zaire multinational force still awaits green light

[Reuter / Manoah Esipisu]

KAMPALA, Dec 5 (Reuter) - Politicians will meet at the
weekend, probably in Ottawa, to set a date for a multinational
force gathering in Uganda to move aid to refugees in eastern
Zaire, a Canadian spokesman said on Thursday.
``Then we shall know when we move. We can go in there at
fairly short notice. But when we do depends on the politicians,
who have not made a decision yet,'' Navy Lieutenant Charles
Brown said in the Ugandan capital Kampala.
Brown said the force so far had 340 soldiers in the region
and 190 of these were helping set up a new headquarters at the
Lugogo Centre, a trade and agricultural fair centre in Kampala.
Both the Zairean government in Kinshasa and the rebels who
control most of eastern Zaire have raised objections to aspects
of the multinational force led by Canadian Lieutenant-General
Maurice Baril.
Kinshasa does not want airdrops of food for the refugees and
it objects to the force using Uganda as its base. The rebels say
that they will let in only a handful of ground troops and that
the force is redundant because most refugees have gone home.
The United States estimates that about 170,000 refugees are
scattered in eastern Zaire, as well as 100,000 Rwandan Hutus
trekking westwards and out of reach of aid. The second group
includes some of the soldiers and militiamen responsible for
ethnic genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
Meanwhile the multinational force is flying aid to Rwanda
and Tanzania, tasks that Brown said were not its original aims.
American soldiers have maintained their camp at Kampala's
Entebbe airport, awaiting word on whether they have been signed
into the force and in what numbers.
Canadian Captain Kent Stewart of the Civil Military
Operations Centre said: ``The Americans have not yet been signed
on but we hope that can be done in a few days. We would like
them to sign on but we can't make them.''
There are around 300 American soldiers but these are
expected to be reduced significantly because the United States
believes the refugee crisis has reached manageable proportions,
U.S. soldiers said.
The British are making reconnaissance flights into eastern
Zaire, targeting the town of Numbi, which is reported to have a
mass of nearly 100,000 refugees.
About half a million Rwandan Hutu refugees flooded over the
border into Rwanda last month to escape fighting between Zairean
rebels and extremist Hutu militia allied with Zairean troops.
The United Nations has estimated that 700,000 refugees are
still in eastern Zaire but this figure is in dispute.