Upheaval In Romania : Capital Is Combat Zone as Loyalists Battle Rebel Forces : Romania: Tanks, helicopters and machine guns join the Budapest fighting. Deafening sounds of war rocked the city.

The pockmarked buildings of Bucharest are scrawled with slogans like “Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu” and “Down With Ceausescu and His Clan.”

Salvos of bullets ripped the sides of buildings Saturday as units of the secret police still loyal to deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu fought running battles through the streets and squared off with regular army soldiers who have gone over to the rebels.

“This is civil war,” said a man in the throng of thousands gathered in a central Bucharest square.

Brown-uniformed soldiers huddled in doorways, engaged in machine-gun duels with secret police snipers on rooftops as crowds ran amid the bullets or crouched behind cars.

In the morning, jets flew low over the city, adding to the deafening sounds of combat that have rocked the capital since Friday night.

A Reuters correspondent saw trucks roar past with a cargo of coffins--bound for hospitals to bear away the corpses. Hundreds have been killed in the capital. Doctors at one emergency clinic said they had at least 60 bodies.

The area around the central Inter-Continental Hotel was closed off by civilian volunteers as the security police, the Securitate, fought for their survival. They shot into the crowd from rooftops or from helicopters as rebel ranks moved into the square in front of the hotel.

Trucks and cars were being used as barricades and young civilians armed only with clubs checked cars to catch suspected Securitate members.

Despite the confusion and fear, unarmed civilians, many of them wearing red armbands, risked the gunfire to help the army overcome the pro-Ceausescu forces.

Some climbed on tanks to direct the soldiers against the security forces, or even followed them into combat.

Most of the soldiers looked very young--between 18 and 20. Their uniforms for the most part looked old and shabby.

Flames leaped from the presidential palace in Republic Square as tanks ringed the building and fired on Ceausescu’s forces inside.

“There they are, on the eighth floor, shoot!” one onlooker called to the soldiers. A group of more than 50 people stood behind the ring of tanks, watching in silence.

The heaviest fighting was around the strategic radio and television buildings in the city center, held by pro-democratic forces.

Hundreds watched as a Securitate deserter in a green windbreaker jacket crouched behind a tree with an automatic rifle, his former comrades as targets.

Announcers on Bucharest Radio alternated between calm assurance that the National Salvation Front was in control of the situation and urgent calls for the population to help defend the building.

Bucharest television, freed from the yoke of reporting Ceausescu’s personality cult, showed pictures from the heat of the onslaught around the hotel and nearby university.

As dusk fell, thousands sat with tired pro-democracy troops on the pavements or clambered over tanks to offer food and then retreat to a cautious distance.

“I used to despise my own nation,” said a Romanian, surveying the scene with tears in his eyes. “But now I am proud. . . . “

In the square between the Central Committee building and the smoking presidential palace, with forlorn gaping holes for windows, small groups still shouted “Ceausescu! Murderer!”

Civilians picked their way through piles of shattered glass and broken plaster, bearing the blue, red and yellow national flag with the Communist symbol cut from the center.

They had discovered a warren of tunnels linking the two centers under the square and aimed to flush the Securitate, bunkered down in them for the night, out of their refuge.

On the balcony of the Central Committee building, where Ceausescu made his most self-aggrandizing speeches during his 24-year reign, ordinary Romanians now have their say, telling of the appalling conditions they have endured.

“For years, somebody else spoke for us without consulting us,” one speaker shouted above the gunfire. “Now we want our own brains to do the work. We are now free, and we want to be just like people of the rest of Europe.”

THE ROMANIA STORY The Fighting

Fierce street battles raged in Bucharest as forces loyal to ousted President Nicolae Ceausescu continued to hold out. In Timisoara, where the uprising began Friday, 100 elite Securitate troops loyal to Ceausescu reportedly parachuted into the area to reinforce comrades still holding out.

Casualties

Estimates of total deaths during three days of fighting in Bucharest ranged to 1,000 or more. In Timisoara, the official body count had reached 4,082 and, with searchers still digging up mass graves, the count there is expected to top 12,000.

Ceausescu

The provisional government announced on television that Ceausescu, his wife, Elena, and brother, Ilie, had been captured. Ceausescu’s son, Nicu, was captured Friday. It gave no details of the Ceausescus’ capture but said they would be put on trial.

The Reaction

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev pledged to provide “immediate and effective humanitarian aid” to Romania. But the Kremlin turned down a request for military assistance.

The United States called on all Romanians to lay down their arms and back the new Romanian provisional government, saying it “has pledged a transition from dictatorship to democracy.”