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Meanwhile, at the U.N., Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was revising his figures upward as he urged a massive relief effort. The early estimate was $274 million, but "at this very moment, as I am speaking," he said on Friday, "Rwanda's needs are constantly growing." He put the new figure at $434 million, but who could precisely calculate the cost of a catastrophe that $ kept growing? That same day, U.N. relief agencies were busy redrawing their maps after 200,000 more refugees crossed the northwest frontier into Zaire in just 24 hours.
They came like pallbearers, carrying everything from sweet potatoes to sofas in the naive hope that things of value would not be stolen by soldiers or bandits along the way. By last week, when the R.P.F. declared victory and installed a new multi-ethnic government, Rwanda had become "a nation without people," said Panos Moumtzis, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "The whole country is coming out of its borders." Unless the refugees can be persuaded to return, to harvest the crops now rotting in the fields and rebuild the schools and hospitals out of the rubble, disease and starvation will exact a toll that even the most savage soldiers could not.
Madness spreads like an eager germ through the camps that have doubled, then doubled again in size. Between the town of Goma and the airport, a woman dances naked down the highway, cursing at the listless crowds and at the corpses lying on mats by the roadside. A man at the edge of a mass grave laughs in delight when he manages to toss the lifeless body of a child squarely into the middle of the burial pit. A team of laborers is moving bodies from a field to the trucks nearby, when a young man lying among the corpses rolls over. "Get up! Get out of there!" yells the gravedigger. But the man wants to stay. He figures he will end up in the improvised graveyard one way or another.
"This is the beginning of the final days," declares Deogracias Bivunde, who watched at least 40 refugees be trampled in a stampede by his home outside Goma. "This is the apocalypse." Two weeks ago Goma was a quiet place on the shores of a lovely lake, tucked amid banana groves and thick woodlands in the shadow of a spectacular volcano that lit the northern sky at night. The town was home to 80,000 residents; now it has more than a million sick and starving newcomers. Outside the airport, a sign extols The Pleasure of Traveling.
They camp on doorsteps, in schoolyards, in cemeteries, in fields so crowded that people sleep standing up. Men and women search for fresh water only to find a thick, slimy brew so fouled by human waste that it does more to spread disease than quench thirst. For miles around, the trees have been disappearing, fed into pitiful cooking fires. If the refugees could burn corpses, there would be fuel enough for weeks.
Cholera is proving more efficient than carbines. It kills in hours, draining the body of fluid so fast that nurses without equipment for transfusions cannot rehydrate victims in time. Along the roadways and in the camps it has become hard to tell the sleeping from the dead until the bodies swell up in the tropical sun. Refugees wrap their faces in scarves and rags and surgical masks, hoping to filter the stench from the rotting bodies everywhere.