Canada says 700,000 refugees have now left Zaire

[Reuters]

OTTAWA (Reuter) - More than 700,000 refugees have now
returned to Rwanda from Zaire, Canadian Defense Minister Doug
Young said Friday.
``There has been a great deal of success because something
like 700,000 refugees have been repatriated from Zaire to
Rwanda, something never seen in history,'' he told Parliament.
Previous reports had spoken of 600,000 having gone back out
of the original figure of more than one million who aid agencies
said had fled to eastern Zaire in 1994 after a massacre of about
a million people in Rwanda.
Nonetheless both he and Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy
sought to give assurances that, though the need for airdrops and
major military intervention would probably not be needed in
eastern Zaire, the international mission still was on.
``Nobody indicated yesterday that we were ending our mission
in Zaire,'' Young said. ``Canada is not acting unilaterally. It
will not leave this area unilaterally.''
Canada is leading the multinational force designed to help
refugees return to Rwanda and to allow aid agencies help
refugees and displaced people in Zaire.
Axworthy said the coalition partners wanted to be able to
respond when needed. He said, for example, that UNICEF Executive
Director Carol Bellamy told him Friday there were lots of needy
children among the displaced Zairians.
He said she advocated that rather than focusing on the
numbers of refugees, ``we should be focusing on what's within
those numbers, and she said there's a lot of children that she
believes still are in need of assistance.''
Whether they need military help, he said, was being examined
by the force commander, Canadian Lt. Gen. Maurice Baril, and the
humanitarian agencies.
``They (the soldiers) will come home when the job is done.
You want to make sure that it is done well,'' Axworthy told
reporters.