GOMA, Zaire -- Even as disease raises the stakes for hundreds of thousands of people, even as crops are ripening and threatening to rot in the fields of Rwanda, the most important question for refugees cannot be answered.


Are they safe going home to Rwanda?


In the last three days, a swirl of fresh rumors has swept the refugee camps here: Ethnic Hutus are facing retaliatory attacks when they try to return home after their bitter civil war with the minority Tutsis.


In the past, such reports were largely dismissed as a cruel manipulation of politicians and militias from the defeated government who want to keep control over more than 2 million Rwandans who have fled their homes for refugee camps here and in the southwestern corner of Rwanda. There their security is temporarily guaranteed by French troops.


But in the last few days, Western journalists have come to believe that there is more to the reports.


Although their accounts are still second- and third-hand, refugees are increasingly being taken at their word when they say they know of a brother or an aunt who was attacked upon returning.


On Sunday, John Shattuck, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for human rights, offered this preliminary conclusion after a visit to Rwanda and Zaire: "There have been some isolated attacks, and we're very concerned about this."


Shattuck hastened to add that he has no solid evidence of renewed killing in Rwanda.


And he said he had received a fresh pledge from Rwanda's new government that it condemns any reprisals against returnees.


Such attacks would hardly be surprising. In the unimaginably morbid statistics of this war, the losing Hutu majority -- and specifically its Interhamwe militia -- is accused of butchering up to half a million Rwandans, mostly Tutsi, between April and last month, when their forces were routed from the country. And in a culture in which ethnic rivalries have existed for generations, vengeance is a deeply rooted tradition.


But repatriation is the only lasting hope that officials can offer to the 900,000 refugees encamped in squalor and disease here and the more than 1 million others who threaten to flee southwestern Rwanda if their shield of French troops leaves Aug. 22 as scheduled.


The victorious Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front has welcomed Hutu refugees home in hopes of bringing in the crops before the rainy season begins by early September.


But it also said the sick should not be rushed out of the camps to spread disease in Rwanda, and it demands punishment for those responsible for the slaughter of Tutsis.


At meetings in the Rwandan capital of Kigali over the weekend, U.S. officials said they had received assurances that a UN tribunal would be given jurisdiction over any genocide investigation rather than leaving justice to the new government, which, dominated by Tutsis, is headed by a Hutu president.