"According to our latest information, people are now crossing the border at a rate of 15,000 an hour," said an official with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or UNHCR, at its Ngara operations center.
Tanzania ordered all 540,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees out by the end of the month and troops intervened when many surged out of their camps last week and headed away from the Rwandan border.
The refugees left Rwanda in 1994 after Hutu mobs and militiamen killed about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. They say they fear reprisals from Tutsis if they return home.
It was unclear how many refugees had entered Rwanda since Saturday, but a column estimated by the UNHCR at 200,000 on Monday stretched for 90 kilometers inside Tanzania and aid workers expected the first in the line to cross later in the day.
UNHCR has been criticized by Amnesty International for its stance over the Rwandan refugees in Tanzania, which Amnesty says is at odds with the UN agency's commitment to protect refugees from forced expulsion. Rwandan and Tanzanian authorities barred journalists from the border area for much of the time but most refugees seemed resigned to returning under pressure from troops and police.
The long column on Monday included refugees from six camps who left Thursday in a failed attempt to avoid repatriation.
Another group who said they hoped to trek to Kenya was also ordered Sunday to turn onto a road leading back to Rwanda.
"We can't agree to go to Rwanda. The army of Tanzania will force us to go to Rwanda but we want to go to Kenya. We think it will take two weeks," said refugee Ernest Kimukama.
However Kimukama was unaware that the line of refugees he was in was being diverted towards Rwanda.
"We have much information that in the Kagera River, there are many, many bodies," said Batiste Kizimana, another refugee. The Kagera flows east from Rwanda through northern Tanzania.
"What the people want is to have a place, another place, not Rwanda, not the Tanzanian camps. You are forcing us to go home without security, without representation in the political system. We are not represented, we cannot go back," he added.
Human rights groups have reported no mass killings in Rwanda since an estimated 600,000 refugees flooded back from eastern Zaire last month after fighting forced them out of their camps. Foreign aid workers said Kizimana's refugee column included hundreds of Hutu hardliners, the camp intimidators.
"There's definitely 10,000 or so who can't go back and won't go back. I was at the head of the column on Saturday. For the first five kilometers, it was led by young men, young and healthy ... carrying very little," said a foreign aid official.
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