Zaire Rebel Assault Meets Resistance

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Although rebel forces have pushed deep into the vast jungles of eastern Zaire, seizing town after town, victory in their five-month war to topple Africa’s longest-serving autocrat could be months away and is far from assured, diplomats and analysts said Friday.

A long-anticipated rebel assault on Kisangani, the country’s third-largest city and the last government stronghold in eastern Zaire, appears to have stalled after meeting unexpectedly stiff resistance from reinforced Zairian army troops, reportedly backed by Serbian mercenaries and exiled Rwandan Hutu hard-liners, about 50 miles east of the city.

The guerrillas claim to control access to three sides of the dilapidated Zaire River trading port and have repeatedly predicted its imminent fall. But government officials in Kinshasa, the capital, insist that the rebels are using propaganda to try to frighten soldiers into abandoning the strategic city.

A Kinshasa businessman who is in regular contact with officials in Kisangani said Friday that Zairian forces appeared to be holding their own.

“The army has consolidated and is doing better on the ground,” he said. “It was feared they would just lay down their arms and run. Apparently, the rebels thought they could just walk in. That’s not the case.”

The businessman, who asked not to be identified, added: “I spoke to the governor of Kisangani yesterday, and he was quite positive. He said he’s asked his wife to come out there for a few days. That tells me it’s much more secure than we had thought.”

It is impossible to confirm such accounts, because neither the Zairian government nor insurgents in Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire have allowed journalists or other outsiders to visit the front lines.

But a U.N. World Food Program plane carrying 30 tons of emergency food landed at Kisangani’s municipal airport Thursday for the first time since all aid workers were evacuated two weeks ago.

The city’s international airport has been taken over by the military, which reportedly has planted land mines on approaching roads and fields.

A World Food Program spokeswoman in Nairobi, Kenya, said the relief supplies were intended to help an estimated 75,000 refugees who have gathered 60 miles south of Kisangani at a makeshift camp in Ubundu. A second relief flight Friday was canceled after heavy rains made landing impossible.

U.N. officials fear that the oncoming rainy season will further hamper efforts to assist tens of thousands of Rwandan refugees and uprooted Zairians who are scattered in dense forests in eastern Zaire. Most fled refugee camps along Zaire’s eastern border at the start of the uprising--with hundreds of thousands of Rwandans returning to their homeland--and an unknown number have died in the arduous trek through the jungle.

A full-scale battle at Kisangani would apparently be the first in a war that has seen demoralized soldiers repeatedly desert or retreat in disarray as the rebels approached. Most towns reportedly have fallen without a shot fired, and the insurgents now control about one-fifth of the Central African nation.

Many have predicted that Kisangani will fall as soon as rebel units consolidate positions and move sufficient reserves and ammunition up overstretched supply lines. After years of brutal depredations by President Mobutu Sese Seko’s corrupt army and officials, many residents are expected to welcome the rebels.

Diplomats said the city’s capture would be a major blow to the 32-year reign of Mobutu, the country’s ailing leader who is in France after surgery for prostate cancer in Switzerland last year.

Western intelligence agencies have warned embassies that Kisangani’s fall could trigger widespread rioting or a coup in the capital.

“We still don’t know what a coup would mean,” said a Western diplomat in neighboring Rwanda. “The only interesting thing would be a coup in which they want to negotiate with the rebels. Anything else would be a joke.”

But other analysts said that Mobutu’s embattled regime could survive the current crisis and that the war could drag on for months.

“Kisangani is a very important psychological target,” an African ambassador in Kinshasa said. “But it’s basically a shell. There’s nothing there but refugees and dissatisfied military. . . . I can’t see that it would be the end. I don’t think the government will immediately fall.”

A rebel spokesman also appeared to downplay the battle for Kisangani.

“Kisangani is very important, but it is only one step toward liberating the whole country,” Raphael Ngenda, the insurgents’ spokesman told reporters in the rebel stronghold at Goma, on the border with Rwanda.

Indeed, there are growing indications that the rebels may be using Kisangani as a diversion while they shift their attention to mineral-rich Shaba province in the southeast. Deposits of diamonds, gold, copper and cobalt in Shaba are vital to Zaire’s economy and state revenue.

The insurgents claim to have captured several towns in the province this week. The Defense Ministry also reported clashes with rebels in dugout canoes on Lake Tanganyika in the province.

Shaba has a long tradition of anti-Mobutu sentiment, but the rebels remain hundreds of miles from Shaba’s provincial capital, Lubumbashi, and the major operating diamond mines.

The rebellion began as an outgrowth of ethnic conflicts between rival Hutus and Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda.

Mobutu threw his support behind the Hutus, who fled to Zaire after orchestrating the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994.

Regional and international diplomatic efforts to engineer a cease-fire and forge a political settlement have yet to succeed.

Kabila, the rebel leader, met Thursday with U.N. special envoy Mohammed Sahnoun in the Ugandan city of Gulu but reportedly won’t consider a truce until Mobutu agrees to negotiate a transfer of power.

France, a traditional supporter of Mobutu, has repeatedly called for multinational military intervention to assist the refugees and stop what it claims are widespread atrocities by rebel forces.

The Clinton administration and other Western governments are reluctant to commit troops to a bitter and far-off civil war in which refugees are scattered across hundreds of miles of impenetrable jungles.