Residents of Capital Help Congo Troops Repel Rebels

President Laurent Kabila’s forces appeared to be turning back a heavily armed rebel assault on this capital Friday after civilians in its rough eastern neighborhoods joined in rooting out and killing the intruders.

In a chilling turn for Congo’s conflict, local journalists and residents reported seeing the bodies of several dozen suspected rebels who were lynched, burned or beaten to death by jeering and spitting crowds mobilized by the government.

Authorities said at least 1,000 rebels had been arrested in three days of fighting that left hundreds dead or wounded in the capital. Other rebels tried to slip away after dropping their weapons and shedding their uniforms, residents said.

Crowds gathered Friday afternoon along central Kinshasa’s 30th of June Boulevard to applaud government tanks and troops. The soldiers waved automatic rifles in the air, firing in celebration.

Justice Minister Mwenze Kongolo said the victory party was premature. “Vigilance against the enemy continues,” he said. “This war is not over.”

As the army locked the city’s 6 million people under another overnight curfew, small-arms fire echoed in scattered neighborhoods, signaling pockets of resistance.

And with the insurgents holding every major city on Congo’s eastern border and being supported by troops from neighboring Uganda and Rwanda, Africa’s third-largest country remained dangerously partitioned by a multinational armed conflict with no peaceful solution in sight.

*

Kabila is fighting a mutiny by many of the same forces who helped him depose dictator Mobutu Sese Seko 15 months ago. The latest fighting began Aug. 2 after Kabila purged his army of ethnic Tutsi officers and advisors from Rwanda. Congolese Tutsi troops seized eastern cities in the Great Lakes region with backing from the armies of Uganda and Tutsi-led Rwanda, both eager to halt attacks against them by other rebels from Congo’s eastern mountains.

Moving west to the Atlantic aboard hijacked airliners, the rebels picked up support from other disaffected Congolese army units, including holdovers from Mobutu’s army, and began marching from the mouth of the Congo River toward Kinshasa. Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent allied troops and fighter jets to help Kabila save his capital.

But it was Kinshasa’s angry residents who seemed to turn the tide in the city after hundreds of rebels slipped through its defenses and provoked an intense battle early Wednesday near Ndjili airport, their apparent target.

Tens of thousands of residents fled their homes with bundles of belongings on their heads as the army attacked neighborhoods near the airport that had been infiltrated by the rebels. But many other residents, some of them without firearms, stayed to help the army identify and round up the scattering rebels.

*

“People approached the rebels with smiles on their faces, pretending to be siding with them,” said a resident of the Kingawa neighborhood. “Then they grabbed them and started beating them.”

Emboldened by such assistance, the army also worked brutally. People said they saw soldiers hurl one captive off a bridge into shallow water and then shoot him to death. Troops moving between crowded stalls at the city’s central market arrested three men, slapped them to the ground and gunned them down execution-style, according to other witnesses.

The crowds were enraged by the tactics used by the rebels, whose march toward the capital choked off much of its supplies of food, fuel, electric power and running water--creating hardships that overshadowed any discontent with Kabila’s rule.

In interviews early this week, many Kinshasans said they were indeed disappointed with Kabila. Hailed as a liberator after 32 years of Mobutu’s one-party rule, he has jailed opposition leaders, appointed cousins and nephews as ministers, snubbed Western dignitaries and cozied up to China, Cuba and Libya.

But an equal number of residents said they were tired of revolts, appalled by the rebels’ open backing by foreigners and distrustful of their claims to be democrats.

“Kabila is ruling the country in the same style Mobutu did,” said Lilly Bibombe, 29, a recent law school graduate. “But we cannot accept colonization by Rwanda. “