Congo Rebels Take War to Capital as Fighting Intensifies

Rebels fighting to topple President Laurent Kabila slipped into the outskirts of this capital before dawn Wednesday and triggered an intense battle that paralyzed much of the city, but the insurgents fell short of their apparent target: Congo’s main airport.

Sharp blasts and long, thundering explosions rocked the city all morning as government helicopters shuttled between the city center and the embattled northeastern suburbs. The fighting died down after noon, but authorities imposed a 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew on the nearly 6 million inhabitants here.

The scale of the fighting appeared to be large, with doctors at General Hospital reporting hundreds of combatants killed or wounded.

The attack marked another surprising turn in the 3-week-old uprising that has drawn in five foreign armies and unsettled Central Africa. It came a day after Kabila returned to Kinshasa following a nine-day absence and declared that the rebel drive, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, was being crushed.

The rebels’ frontal advance on Kinshasa from a captured airfield at the mouth of the Congo River faltered over the weekend in the face of a withering counterattack by troops, tanks and fighter jets from Angola and Zimbabwe, which came to the aid of Kabila’s poorly equipped army.

Western diplomats said Wednesday’s attack appeared to have been a well-planned gamble by an outmatched rebel force, perhaps signaling a switch to guerrilla tactics that could bedevil Kinshasa for weeks to come. They said the government’s ability to restore order in the capital was uncertain.

Kinshasa’s Ndjili airport, center of air operations against the rebels, is defended by troops from Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, according to diplomats, who say Namibia’s small contingent arrived this week. There was no fighting reported at the airport.

The appearance of several hundred rebels in suburbs near the airport--on the opposite side of the city from the bulk of their forces--caused some confusion. Residents in one neighborhood, thinking that the rebels were government troops, applauded as a column marched by.

Congo’s state radio said the fighting started shortly after dawn after the arrest of three infiltrators who told of the presence of fellow rebels in Mikondo, a eucalyptus forest that is also near the airport and about 12 miles from the city center. The forest came under a government artillery barrage.

As Kinshasans awoke to the sound of fighting, Information Minister Didier Mumengi appealed for calm in an unusual live radio broadcast and insisted that the situation was under control. He described the fighting as a mopping-up operation to “end the final convulsions of the invaders.”

But he also urged people to “denounce anyone suspected of working with the aggressors” and warned: “This will be a long and popular war.”

Both sides urged Kinshasans to stay inside. Stores were closed and streets nearly deserted, except for truckloads of government troops.

The government erected barricades throughout the capital and deployed troops near Kabila’s residence, the Marble Palace, in southwestern Kinshasa. The president’s whereabouts were not reported.

Kabila is battling a mutiny led by ethnic Tutsis in the armed forces, who are joined by holdovers from the defeated army of the late Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator he ousted in May 1997.

On Congo’s eastern frontier, where the anti-Kabila revolt began Aug. 2, the rebels claimed Wednesday to have captured Kalemie, making it the fifth major border city under their control.