Hundreds Flee Fighting in Lesotho

Hundreds of terrified residents of this mountain kingdom fled across the border to South Africa on Wednesday as fighting continued for a second day between South African troops and mutinous Lesotho soldiers.

“Our parents would be coming too if they had passports,” said Silvia, an 18-year-old student who crossed the border on foot with several friends. “We don’t know where we are going, but we are afraid to stay another night.”

The scene at the border crossing here on the outskirts of Maseru, the capital, was a mix of outrage, resignation and desperation as the South African-led military operation whose stated goal was to soothe this country’s seething problems instead pushed it further toward chaos and collapse.

Late in the day, immigration and customs offices were empty, the bureaucratic tasks taken over by South African and Botswanan soldiers with rifles and armored vehicles.

On the South African side, Lesothans without visas were carted off to a refugee camp in nearby Ladybrand, where they waited as the plumes of dark smoke from burning homes and businesses in Maseru colored the horizon.

Those with proper credentials scurried to make plans to go somewhere--anywhere--as they recounted tales of armed thugs in the streets and general panic as hundreds of looters emptied the shelves of downtown stores and businesses in a country where large numbers of the population are armed even during peaceful times.

“Don’t go up that road--the criminals are taking advantage of the situation,” said Adu Boansi, a rental car company employee who was waiting with his wife and three children for a ride to South Africa. “This place has become a dangerous place to live.”

South African officials, while confirming nearly 50 dead from both sides and continued resistance by soldiers not loyal to the government of Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili, said the situation had improved by late Wednesday and promised to step back once the fighting stopped.

“When law and order have been restored, the [Lesotho] government will take over,” South African Defense Minister Joe Modise said.

In Washington, a visiting South African President Nelson Mandela defended the intervention.

Mandela praised longtime rival Mangosuthu Buthelezi for ordering the military action in his capacity of acting president while Mandela and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki were both out of the country.

“Our belief is in peaceful solutions,” Mandela said. “Whether we are going to continue with that policy indefinitely must depend on the reality on the ground.”

Mandela commented on the intervention following a formal ceremony in which President Clinton presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal in a celebration of the victory over apartheid.

“Americans as one today, across all the lines that divide us, pay tribute to your struggle, to your achievement and to the inspiration you have given us to do better,” Clinton told Mandela as the leaders of the House and Senate looked on.

“If today the people of South Africa are free at last,” Mandela replied, “ . . . then it is not least because the American people identified with and lent their support to the struggle to end apartheid, including critical action by this Congress.”

Mandela clearly was more comfortable talking about South Africa’s struggle for freedom than about the Lesotho incursion, which met unexpectedly determined opposition and appeared at odds with Mandela’s well-known talk-not-fight approach to political conflict.

Embittered Lesotho opposition leaders blasted the deployment as an act of betrayal. The opposition here has claimed for months that elections in May were rigged by the government, and opposition leaders have looked to Pretoria for moral and political backup.

“The South African government has acted dishonorably,” Mamelo Morrison, spokesman for the opposition, told a news conference. “South Africa has lost the moral authority to broker peace because it is part of the problem.”

Mandela came under particular attack for applying a new standard to South Africa’s tiny, encircled neighbor. Just weeks ago, his critics charged, Mandela was condemning his neighbors in Zimbabwe and Namibia for sending troops into Congo to defend the government of Laurent Kabila.

Malapo Qhobela, leader of the opposition Basotho Congress Party, told reporters here that Mandela should have visited Lesotho before giving up on a negotiated solution to the country’s deepening troubles.

“Instead, he chose to go to the U.S. to help someone who is beleaguered by sex scandals, clearly abdicating his international responsibilities,” Qhubela said. “This is just big power chauvinism.”

The theme of South Africa-the-bully was popular Wednesday among ordinary residents of Lesotho as well. Much as Canadians or Mexicans often resent the dominance of the U.S., the ethnic Basotho people of Lesotho have a love-hate relationship with South Africa.

More than half the impoverished country’s economic activity is generated by workers in South African mines sending their earnings back home. In good times, such dependency is tolerated; but in bad times--as is now the case--South Africa is blamed for unemployment and poverty.

Early this year, the two countries’ economic ties became even tighter with the opening of the first phase of a multibillion-dollar water project in the Lesotho highlands. The project will become a key source of water for the Johannesburg region, South Africa’s most populous metropolitan area, and new source of electricity and revenue for Lesotho.

“It is of huge strategic importance to South Africa, with the channeling of water to areas often exposed to drought,” said Adri Cronje, a spokeswoman for South Africa’s Foreign Affairs Department, who declined to say whether such considerations influenced the decision to deploy troops. Fighting has taken place at the dam, but South African officials said the project has not been jeopardized.

By nightfall, the sound of gunfire and mortars had subsided, and on a starlit knoll overlooking Maseru from the South African side of the border, a group of Taiwanese businessmen gathered to take stock of its losses. Many of Lesotho’s industries are owned by Asians, who have become a favorite target of the vandals and looters.

“They are mostly angry at the South Africans, but they are also jealous of our success,” said John Leu, who runs a textile factory in Maseru that produces T-shirts for export to the United States. “I have been here for eight years, and this is the worst I have ever seen it. I don’t know if it will ever be the same.”

Times staff writers Norman Kempster and Edwin Chen in Washington contributed to this report.