Mobutu Leaves Zaire, Perhaps for Good

KINSHASA, Zaire — Riding in a bulletproof Cadillac flanked by army trucks bristling with machine guns, President Mobutu Sese Seko made his way to the airport and out of Zaire on Wednesday. As he flew away, perhaps for the last time, church sources alleged a massacre of civilians by Mobutu’s troops.

Reports reaching Kinshasa by radio said as many as 200 civilians have been killed, among them 10 Red Cross workers.

The news added to fears of violence in the capital, whose 5 million inhabitants are uncertain whether they have seen the last of the dictator who has ruled their country for 32 years.

Amid ongoing diplomatic efforts to persuade him to resign and turn over power to a transitional government, Mobutu flew off to a regional summit in Gabon, with the stated purpose of getting advice from leaders of other French-speaking African countries.

“We don’t want him to come back. We want him to stay away forever,” Longange Mabuliki, an impoverished student, said shortly after Mobutu’s departure.

Many in the capital saw the trip as Mobutu’s excuse to get away before the rebels under Laurent Kabila mount their long-threatened attack on Kinshasa that would culminate their conquest of this vast Central African country.

Mobutu’s aides, however, insisted that he will be back after the summit Friday, so few on the streets of this edgy city dared to celebrate. “If they celebrate now, they will be killed by the soldiers,” said Didier Bolondo, a 30-year-old street hawker.

But he said residents are dreaming of the day when Kabila comes with his troops to drive Mobutu out. “Then we will clap for Kabila. Then there will be a party,” he said.

Meanwhile, portents of war drew closer. In some of the heaviest fighting reported since the beginning of the conflict last October, church sources and humanitarian groups said more than 300 people had died in a single day around Kenge, a town 120 miles southeast of Kinshasa.

“The FAZ [Zairian army] has organized some sort of counterattack, some kind of operation,” said a Western military analyst in Kinshasa. But he added: “I don’t think this represents a major turnaround” in the civil war.

A cleric in radio contact with priests in Kenge said fighting began Tuesday morning and continued until about midnight, ending when government troops fled to the surrounding countryside.

The cleric, who asked not to be identified, said that when rebels later entered two villages near Kenge on Wednesday they found “many people killed.” In all, about 200 civilians died in houses or on the road, plus 15 rebel troops and about 100 government soldiers, church sources estimated. In Kinshasa, the Zairian Red Cross said 10 of its workers were killed in the fighting. The reports, however, could not be independently confirmed.

“This was not pillaging--this was a massacre,” said the cleric. He said it appeared that civilians were killed by soldiers who were “very angry to see the people have accepted the rebels, and so they wanted to take revenge.”

The Western analyst said it was “a mystery” how government troops had turned up behind the rebel lines, apparently taking their foes by surprise. One possibility, he said, was that a government plane had landed behind those lines.

Rebel spokesmen in the southeastern city of Lubumbashi charged that troops from the former Angolan rebel movement, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA, were involved in the fighting on the side of the government.

There have long been reports of Angolan government troops helping Kabila’s rebels. If UNITA is now helping Mobutu, who was a longtime ally of its rebels, it would mean that the two sides in Angola’s long-running civil war are facing off in Zaire while maintaining an uneasy peace in Angola.