Aid Workers Flee After Rebels Take Zairian City

Fearful of growing chaos and a widening war, the United Nations safely evacuated the last international aid workers from this embattled city Saturday after bands of rebel fighters backed by Rwandan government soldiers routed the Zairian army and captured the key border enclave.

The fall of Goma, and the emergency withdrawal of about 130 terrified expatriates by road to nearby Rwanda, mean that no U.N. or other foreign aid groups are able to assist more than 1 million ethnic Hutu refugees and displaced Zairians scattered along a broad swath of eastern Zaire.

Their fate is now in the hands of the defeated Zairian army, the largely powerless Zairian government, and ethnic Hutu refugee leaders and extremist militias, many of whom have been accused of masterminding the genocide of minority Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.

Aid workers warned that many disabled and elderly people, children and others in vulnerable groups are at risk of perishing due to exposure or disease in the rugged mountains and volcanic fields, now drenched each afternoon with seasonal rains.

“There will be no assistance for the foreseeable future,” Guy Avognon, the area coordinator for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, warned after the evacuation convoy of about 40 vehicles crossed the Rwandan border to Gisenyi. “It is a catastrophe.”

Even if security returns to the region--a doubtful prospect, as Tutsi-led rebel forces now control every major town and airstrip along eastern Zaire’s border with Rwanda and Burundi--humanitarian agencies and donor nations are reluctant to restart the highly controversial $1-million-a-day refugee camps.

About 200,000 refugees were reported to be moving on forest tracks northwest of Goma on Saturday toward Mugunga camp, already the world’s largest refugee center. Zairian aid workers opened Mugunga’s vast warehouses to hand out the last 900 tons of beans, cooking oil and other food, enough for about a week.

“Everything we have there is being distributed,” said Frank Cawkwell, a CARE Australia aid worker who spoke to the camp by radio from Gisenyi. “The goal is to give the food out to the people who need it before the rich and the strong take it.”

Rampaging mobs looted scores of shops in downtown Goma after the ragtag Zairian troops fled in disarray about 7 a.m., following a final, fierce battle that erupted at dawn. Witnesses said hundreds of men, boys and women--some pregnant or carrying infants--smashed windows and carted off televisions, beer, shoes, tires and other goods. What they didn’t take, they destroyed.

Looters also pillaged aid agency compounds as law and order collapsed in the once-elegant Lake Kivu resort. Relief workers abandoned tens of millions of dollars’ worth of vehicles, equipment and supplies when they fled. They left behind hundreds of Zairian employees.

“People feel very bad leaving their national staff,” said Chris Hennemeyer, an evacuated Catholic Relief Services official. “They were radioing us saying: ‘We’re running out of food. We’re running out of water. Our radio batteries are dying. What do we do?’ It’s kind of pathetic.”

Goma appeared a ghost town early Saturday, its broad, tree-lined streets deserted and eerily silent except for cawing crows.

“I don’t know who is in control,” Leonard Kiza, a 41-year-old gardener, said nervously. “It might be the rebels.”

The answer came shortly afterward from five rebel fighters who wore high-top sneakers and tattered street clothes and carried AK-47 assault rifles and grenades.

“We’ve just taken Goma,” said their leader, a lanky 21-year-old guerrilla in a porkpie hat. “The Zairian soldiers have gone.”

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Not all of them, apparently. Occasional gunfire, rattling machine guns and exploding grenades suggested the Rwandan-backed insurgents were mopping up pockets of resistance.

In addition, five foreign journalists, including a Times correspondent, came under fire when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded about 30 yards away in front of a small hotel. A man dressed in blue Zairian police fatigues fired an assault rifle at them, wounding Zengt Stenvall, a cameraman for Sweden’s TV4, in the left leg.

The group was pinned down in a cross-fire for about 20 minutes before carrying the wounded cameraman about a mile to the Rwandan border, where an ambulance rushed him to a hospital. He was in stable condition.

Aid workers confirmed that 25 to 100 Rwandan troops, wearing the army’s distinctive black-marked olive drab fatigues and black berets, had patrolled in Goma on foot Friday afternoon. Another dozen Rwandan soldiers crossed the border and drove into the silent city early Saturday in a pickup truck.

“They were very polite,” a relief official said. “They came in, looked at the situation and moved on.”

Rwanda’s involvement in the Zairian rebellion has raised the stakes in what has become a regional conflict. But some Western diplomats privately applauded the move, saying a military solution had become the only way to push marauding Hutu extremists, long based in the refugee camps, away from the border.

“The Zairian army stood zero chance,” said another aid official, who asked not to be named. “Take the worst army in Africa and put it against the best army in Africa.”

Rwanda’s government has repeatedly denied that its well-trained army crossed the border Friday during a thundering cross-border artillery duel with Zairian troops, or that its soldiers had joined the fighting that turned this once-prosperous capital of North Kivu province into an urban battleground.

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In accordance with emergency evacuation plans, the aid workers and other resident foreigners--including a Belgian nun who carried an infant orphan with her--gathered Thursday at five locations in downtown Goma, including adjoining compounds used by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

When the battle for Goma began Friday, the 78 people in the refugee agency house locked the front door and ran upstairs. They lay face down in the concrete-lined hallway as the compound itself soon came under attack.

“We could hear the bullets hitting the house,” said Michele Quintaglie, spokeswoman for the World Food Program. “We could hear rockets going out. Mortars were exploding. And we could hear our radios crackling, ‘They’re coming over the gate, they’re at the wall, they’re on the lawn.’ We were told not to talk. That’s how dramatic it was.”

Panos Moumtzis, a refugee agency spokesman, defended the aid workers’ flight and the abandonment of the refugees.

“We are relief workers,” he said in Gisenyi. “We are not a police force. We are not an army.”

The rebels in Goma said they were the Banyaingilima, who are ethnic Nandi people, and who clearly have joined forces with the ethnic Tutsi Banyamulenge rebels who have smashed through Zairian defenses farther south since the war erupted nearly three weeks ago.

The Banyaingilima, known and feared here for their fighting spirit, naked warriors and fetish cult, have battled Zairian troops for the past several months from their stronghold in Masisi, about 30 miles northwest of Goma.

The guerrillas said they had taken the Zairian army artillery base on nearby Mt. Goma late Friday and seized a rocket launcher on the lawn of the lakeside mansion owned by Zaire’s dictator, President Mobutu Sese Seko.

The rebel victories pose an obvious challenge for Mobutu, who has ruled the vast mineral-rich country for 31 years, and they may lead to the disintegration of Africa’s second-largest nation.

Mobutu has been in Switzerland since August under treatment for prostate cancer. The French newspaper Le Monde quoted Mobutu’s “immediate medical entourage” Saturday as reporting that the cancer has spread to Mobutu’s bones.

Mobutu’s absence from Zaire has fueled the crisis.

Indeed, Laurent Kabila, self-described spokesman for the rebel alliance, told reporters Friday in the insurgent-held city of Uvira that the campaign was aimed at toppling the Mobutu regime.

“Our objectives are clear,” he said. “We are fighting for a vast movement to put an end to this useless state.”

He insisted that the rebels will fight their way to Kinshasa, although no roads exist from this remote region to the capital, which lies about 1,200 miles west. Mobutu has said that he never allowed roads to be built precisely to prevent rebels from marching to Kinshasa.

“We have contacts in many regions,” Kabila insisted. “And if we have to, we will walk.”