Fighting Rocks Zaire City, Raises Genocide Fears

Shelling rocked a city in eastern Zaire on Friday as Tutsi rebels battled Zairian troops, and a European envoy warned that a new genocide in Central Africa could be near.

Western aid workers in Geneva said that Banyamulenge rebels--ethnic Tutsis who have lived in Zaire for generations--had seized the airport in Uvira and cut off all satellite and radio communications. Many people were fleeing the city on Lake Tanganyika, they said.

Residents of the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, 18 miles to the east, said they heard blasts from Uvira on Thursday night and Friday from fighting between Zairian troops and the Tutsi rebels.

A U.N. radio operator in Uvira was quoted as saying Thursday night that he had to stop transmitting because the Banyamulenge were about to take the area where he was. He has not been heard from since.

A rebel leader, speaking from Uvira by satellite telephone, told the BBC that the Banyamulenge had taken Uvira and were cleaning up pockets of resistance.

However, a Burundian army officer maintained that Uvira had not yet fallen, but he admitted that rebels had seized a frontier post at Vugizo and a sugar plantation near Uvira.

He said the rebels controlled most territory between Uvira and the capital of South Kivu province, Bukavu, 60 miles to the north.

Aid officials fear that the Tutsi rebellion in eastern Zaire, which burst into heavy fighting a week ago, could spread and that Tutsi-dominated armies in Burundi and Rwanda could join the conflict. Both countries deny they are involved.

At the United Nations in New York, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called for a conference of nations to resolve the crisis, which he warned could lead to the disintegration of Zaire.

In Brussels, European Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Emma Bonino appealed to the warring parties to stop fighting and avoid further genocide in Central Africa’s Great Lakes region.

“A new genocide is possibly in the offing,” Bonino said, adding that the fighting had blocked efforts to feed the 1.1 million refugees in eastern Zaire.

The U.N. food agency announced Friday that it will start a 20-day emergency food airlift to eastern Zaire this weekend.