Grenade Attack Disrupts Refugee Resettlement

A grenade attack that wounded nine people in the back of a truck Saturday halted an operation to return tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees to the camp they fled two weeks ago.

Relief officials said they were considering whether to resume the shuttle between a temporary camp and the Magara refugee camp in northwestern Burundi with armed escorts.

“We immediately suspended things and are reevaluating,” said Paul Stromberg, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Saturday’s attack occurred three miles east of the temporary camp. The driver reported seeing three men throw one or two grenades, Stromberg said. One exploded.

Nine people were injured - five of them seriously, including a young girl. Stromberg declined to say who might have staged the attack.

Grenades are easily bought in Burundi - two for the price of a beer.

Before it was suspended, the operation had moved 4,600 refugees back to Magara, a 25-mile journey. Some 40,000 fled the camp for reasons that are still unclear.

Tensions have been high between the ethnic Hutu refugees who fled violence in Rwanda nearly a year ago and the many Burundian Tutsis who live near the camp. Many local residents assume the refugees fled because they killed Tutsis in Rwanda.

But aid workers say it is unlikely that many of the Rwandan Hutu militiamen who did most of the killing would flee to Burundi because its army is almost entirely made up of Tutsis.

Burundi is plagued by the same ethnic hatreds that brought last year’s slaughter of 500,000 people, mostly Tutsis, in Rwanda. Before the fighting began, both countries had populations roughly 85 percent Hutu and 14 percent Tutsi.

Two weeks ago some 40,000 Rwandan refugees had been living in Magara camp, when they calmly but suddenly set off for neighboring Tanzania. The refugees waited patiently for their regular distribution of two weeks’ worth of food and packed their few belongings before leaving.

They were joined by refugees from other camps.