Zaire Fighting Edges Region Toward Chaos

Advancing Tutsi rebel forces captured new territory Sunday in eastern Zaire as heavy fighting sent Zairian troops and panicked civilians in chaotic retreat and increased tensions in an area suffering the worst fighting in months in strife-torn Central Africa.

Mortars and gunfire roared on the outskirts of Bukavu, capital of South Kivu province, and witnesses said fleeing Zairian troops and civilian mobs hijacked scores of vehicles, broke into homes and looted abandoned offices and warehouses of international aid agencies.

Many of the ill-disciplined Zairian soldiers used the stolen vehicles to drive themselves, their families and their plunder away from the fighting.

Food, fuel, water and other basic goods were reported in short supply in Bukavu, located on the southern end of Lake Kivu.

The government radio station fed panic in the besieged city by repeatedly broadcasting warnings from the regional governor, who said the Tutsis were “murderers who want to kill us and exterminate the [Hutu] refugees.”

The rebels began battling Zairian troops after local Zairian officials earlier this month ordered the estimated 300,000 Banyamulenge Tutsis to leave the country.

The conflict has become an extension of the brutal ethnic warfare that has plagued the Great Lakes region of Central Africa in recent years.

United Nations officials said the Banyamulenge-led rebel forces now control a 50-mile stretch of rugged territory, from south of the Zairian city of Uvira north to Bukavu.

The territory, which follows Zaire’s border with Rwanda and Burundi, includes Uvira itself and the lakeside port of Kamanyola. The rebels also apparently control parts of the Haut Plateau further west.

The guerrillas’ surprising gains stem in part from the apparent collapse of Zairian army units. Relief workers said several refugee camps emptied in panic after residents heard shooting or saw Zairian soldiers run away.

The Tutsi insurgents’ ultimate objective is unclear. They initially organized to defend the Banyamulenge people, who have lived in Zaire for two centuries, from ethnic persecution by the local Zairian officials who had ordered the Tutsi group to leave the country or be “hunted” by the army.

The fighting has spread more than 100 miles to the north since it began.

Hutus, an ethnic group at odds with the Tutsis, claim that the Tutsi rebels are doing their own “ethnic cleansing” in an attempt to create a so-called “Tutsiland” along the borders of Rwanda and Burundi.

Both countries are led by Tutsi military regimes and maintain that Zaire openly harbors and supports armed Hutu militias that have killed hundreds of people in cross-border raids.

The broader question is whether the Zairian Tutsi guerrillas, who also claim support from ethnic-based secessionist groups in Shaba and Kasai provinces, are capable of toppling the 31-year dictatorial regime of Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko.

Mobutu has been under treatment for cancer in Switzerland since August, and his absence has contributed to a power vacuum. Despite, or because of, Mobutu’s brutal reign, Zaire has no real functioning government, infrastructure or foreign reserves, and the vast country increasingly appears in danger of disintegration.

But it was impossible to obtain reliable information about the scale or progress of the current fighting. No outsiders are known to have seen the rebels in action, and the size, composition and tactics of their forces have been difficult to discern.

Zaire has closed its land borders and barred most journalists from entering the affected area.

Several reporters and television crews who have managed to enter Bukavu and the city of Goma, about 60 miles north, have been detained, deported, assaulted or robbed at gunpoint. Three journalists standing beside the border in Cyangugu, Rwanda, were fired on Sunday by Zairian troops but escaped injury.

Kitale, the northernmost camp in Zaire holding refugees who originally fled a genocidal war in Rwanda in 1994, also came under fire early Sunday, but the attackers apparently were repulsed by camp guards.

Paul Stromberg, spokesman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, described the situation at the 150,000-person camp as “stable” after the shooting, which left one Zairian guard dead and three wounded.

About 3,000 displaced Zairians and 1,000 Rwandan Hutus from Kibumba, a huge camp near Goma that was abandoned early Saturday after it was repeatedly shelled by mortars, fled the growing turmoil Sunday by crossing the nearby border into Rwanda. The forlorn group and their ragged bundles were then ferried by 20 U.N. trucks to a transit center near Gisenyi, Rwanda.

The refugees’ arrival, and indications that thousands of others may be en route, raised hopes among international aid groups that the widening ethnic conflict may help finally persuade a significant number of the more than 1 million refugees in Zaire since the 1994 Rwandan conflict to return home.

“We’re preparing for a big influx,” said John Keys, director of the International Rescue Committee here.

The refugees are both a symptom and a cause of the instability in Africa’s Great Lakes region. In all, 1.6 million refugees from Rwanda’s genocide and Burundi’s ongoing civil war are scattered in internationally supported camps in eastern Zaire, northern Burundi, western Tanzania and southern Uganda.

To add to the regional conflict, and the threat, Zaire accuses Rwanda of supporting the Banyamulenge rebels. The two nations’ armies have exchanged artillery fire over the border near Bukavu twice in recent weeks after the insurgents apparently sought refuge in Rwanda.

Zaire has blamed Rwandan troops for the assault Saturday on Kibumba, which left six people dead.

U.N. officials said they could not confirm the claim, but they added that the shelling appeared to come from the direction of Rwanda.

Rwanda’s government vehemently denied any involvement in the attacks on the refugee camps, and Western diplomats here said they had no evidence that an invasion had occurred.

Most of the estimated 190,000 other refugees from Kibumba were headed in a 15-mile-long stream deeper into Zaire. Military roadblocks and aid workers with bullhorns diverted the flow away from the city of Goma and west toward the nearby refugee camps of Mugunga and Lac Vert.

“The refugees on the road seem quite calm,” said Stromberg, the U.N. spokesman. “Most appear in good shape. They’re carrying five to seven days of food. And we got a mobile clinic and water trucks on the road.”

The U.N. evacuated 18 aid workers Sunday from Goma, the chief logistics and supply center for the refugee camps, but more than 200 others remained behind.

The United Nations has said that as many as half a million refugees may now be on the move as the fighting has spread.