KIGALI, Rwanda - Advancing Tutsi rebel forces captured new territory yesterday 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 fierce 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 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 battled 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.
U.N. officials said the Banyamulenge-dominated rebel forces now control a 50-mile stretch of rugged territory from south of the Zairian city of Uvira 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 added to the 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 yesterday 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 yesterday, but the attackers apparently were repulsed by camp guards. Paul Stromberg, spokesperson for the U.N. Office of the 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 yesterday 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 convince a significant number of the 1.1 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 communication and conflicting reports from the area. "We really don't know how many camps were emptied," he said.
AP PHOTO
A column of Rwandan Hutu refugees arrive at the Mugunga refugee camp.