Citation
From Tom Walker in Ngara, Tanzania.
Red Cross food lorries were looted by refugees from Rwanda at
Tanzania's Benake camp, crowded with a quarter of a million Hutus,
after they grew tired of being told to wait in orderly lines for hours
while being photographed by the world's press.
Aid workers reacted angrily yesterday to the sight of camera teams
closing in on a semi-conscious woman who was slumped at the front of
one of the food queues, but with ten planes crowded with journalists
having arrived at the tiny nearby Ngara airstrip by midday, there was
little to stop the media intrusion.
To increase security at the camp, especially during food distribution,
the Tanzanian authorities began setting up tents for hundreds of
police. Meanwhile, aid agencies moved closer to establishing reliable
supply lines to Benake and the World Food Programme promised that
stocks of maize, beans and oil would get to Benake before it is too
late.
As a trickle of new arrivals filed in clutching all they had, the
tensions between aid workers and journalists grew with the rains
closing in from the east threatening to hamper work on life-saving
water systems and field hospitals.
Engineers from Medecins sans Frontieres were working around the clock
on a pipeline to the camp in an attempt to stop refugees tramping
through the quagmire to get at Benake's only source of water, a murky
lake beneath the sprawling camp. Yesterday women and children laden
with pots, buckets and jerrycans slipped and fell trying to climb the
mud slopes back to the camp. Medecins sans Frontieres estimates that
the refugees will need up to half a million gallons of water a day. Red
Cross workers set up an emergency orphanage for the scores of children
who have arrived with no families. At the airstrip, Mauro Romagnoli,
managing director of Cogefar, an Italian engineering company helping
the aid effort, watched in dismay as a huge CNN charter plane shuddered
across the mud and dust strip. This cannot go on,
he said. With the
termites, this airstrip will look like a gruyere cheese soon.
Tanzania's troubled relationship with Uganda, its neighbour, threatened
yesterday to sink hopes of an African-brokered settlement at a
high-level meeting in Arusha to try to end the Rwanda genocide.
President Museveni of Uganda openly supports the Rwanda Patriotic Front
because it helped to bring him to power in 1986. Tanzania, although
clearly tempted to support the American initiative for an intervention
force, is unwilling to step out of line with a resurgent Uganda.
