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The MSF spokesman said ethnic clashes have been going on there for sometime, but added that he had not recently been in touch with its field staff there.
A representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Ugandan capital, Ahmed Farah, said that at least 50 Rwandan refugees fleeing ethnic clashes in Kivu province had trekked a long distance to reach Uganda's Kisoro district on the border with Zaire.
"They arrived over the weekend, but we have not yet interviewed them on the situation they left behind in Kivu", Farah said.
Another UNHCR official, who requested anonymity, said he had heard about the massacres in Zaire, but denied that up to 3,000 people had been killed".
"It is probable that hundreds were killed, but the figure of 3,000 is obviously a gross exaggeration", Farah said, asking: "Who was there to count all the bodies".
Last week's massacre is the second this year after one in April in which some 1,000 people, mostly of Rwandan origin, were reported massacred.
Ethnic tensions between Rwandan refugees, most of them Tutsis who fled to Zaire during the 1959 political uprising in Rwanda by the majority Hutus, has left thousands dead. Thousands more have fled fled back to Rwanda or Uganda.
Indigenous Zaireans accuse the Rwandan refugees of having taken over their land, but international aid organisations working in the region claim that the Zaireains were mostly envious of the economic progress of the Rwandan refugees.
eo/lto/fc AFP AFP SEQN-0303
