TROOPS should go to eastern Zaire now and they should use force, if they have to, to get access to refugees and other people stranded there, the European Union Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid said yesterday.
"Access to the area must be gained now, either by peaceful means or manu militari"', Ms Emma Bonino said in a statement.
She said she was speaking out because governments and the military chiefs of the world's most powerful countries seemed to be at a loss to work out how many refugees there were, where they were and in what conditions they were living.
"This is amazing. There is one straightforward answer to this problem: to organise promptly a military assessment mission to the area, in order to check once and for all, how many people there are, where they are, and what is happening to them."
In Geneva, an official of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said its workers had located 40,000 missing Rwandan refugees in the Goma region of eastern Zaire.
There had been no news for weeks of this particular group of refugees, who have been fleeing fighting between Hutu rebels and government forces in the eastern part of the country. Irish aid workers will be going to help the newly-discovered group. Aid workers had to leave the area because of the lighting and have not allowed in since, but this week rebels agreed to allow assessment work to begin. UNHCR estimated there were 1.2 million Rwandan refugees in eastern Zaire until mid-November. But on November 15th, many decided to return home to escape intense fighting in the area between the Zairean army, Zairenn rebels and Hutu militiamen.
Canada hopes to reach international consensus soon on moving ahead with the long-awaited humanitarian mission for central Africa, the Canadian Foreign Minister, Mr Lloyd Axworthy, said in Ottawa.
"The hope is that we can arrive at an agreement amongst the various coalition partners within a matter of a day or so," Mr Axworthy told parliament on Monday, when asked how many more meetings would be needed before refugees would be helped.