France and Belgium Warn Their Citizens to Flee Zaire : Africa: Riots shake the capital and a key mining town. Longtime President Mobutu blamed for the crisis.

France and Belgium on Friday urged their citizens to flee Zaire as the political situation appeared to be disintegrating in Black Africa’s largest state.

European diplomats blamed President Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s ruler for the last 26 years, for the latest crisis, which spawned rioting in the capital, Kinshasa, and the mining city of Lubumbashi.

After promising to share power with opposition leaders in his Central African land, rich in minerals but crippled by graft and a broken economy, Mobutu this week dismissed a prime minister considered by Western envoys to be a reformer and replaced him with a man widely regarded as a figurehead.

The appointment of loyalist opposition leader Bernardin Mungul-Diaka to replace the more independent-minded Etienne Tshisekedi was followed by rioting in Kinshasa and, for the first time, in the important mining center of Lubumbashi, capital of Shaba province in the southeast.

The Agence France-Presse news agency reported 17 dead and more than 100 wounded in the Lubumbashi rioting.

At least 250 people have died in a month of violence that began with looting in Kinshasa by troops.

Reporting from Brazzaville, in the neighboring Congo, the Associated Press said witnesses fleeing Kinshasa on Friday reported that rioters burned one of several villas belonging to Mobutu and pillaged the new prime minister’s home.

Mobutu’s dismissal of Tshisekedi, who had the support of the Sacred Union political movement--made up of several opposition parties--was viewed as the last straw by France and other European governments. Their envoys had been meeting regularly with Mobutu on the ruler’s houseboat-palace, anchored safely in the center of the broad Zaire River 18 miles from Kinshasa.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman in Paris announced Friday that France, frustrated by the latest Mobutu political intrigues, is terminating its aid programs in Zaire and withdrawing its civilian and military advisers.

Prime Minister Wilfried Martens of Belgium, in a statement Friday, urged the 4,000 Belgian citizens in Zaire to leave “without delay,” saying their safety could no longer be guaranteed. France, Britain and the United States issued similar warnings to their citizens.

The French and Belgian governments said their remaining paratroop forces in Zaire would also be withdrawn. The presence of the foreign troops, brought in by the foreign governments to protect their citizens and aid in their evacuation, has been credited by diplomats with keeping a cap on the volatile situation.

Officials have warned that violence is likely to escalate once the foreign troops leave. “It could be very, very bad,” said a French official in Paris. “We fear the worst. The worst is that Zaire can break up and that its divisions spread to neighboring countries.”

Zaire was once considered a key African bulwark against communism by U.S. policy-makers, who helped put former journalist and military school dropout Mobutu in power through a CIA-backed coup. But its strategic importance to the West has declined dramatically in the post-Cold War era as the United States, the Soviet Union and China abandoned their competition for global allies.