Curfew Shuts Down Zaire’s Capital on Eve of Make-or-Break Peace Talks

KINSHASA, Zaire — This capital has perhaps been Africa’s most festive city even in the worst of times, but on Tuesday evening the music stopped. People without much food in their bellies and not in the habit of taking their government too seriously were making unusual haste to obey a new order: Go home, lock up and observe an all-night curfew, the first in Zaire’s seven-month civil war.

Zairian Information Minister Kin-Kiey Mulumba announced that armed patrols had been stepped up around the city and that troops had been given orders to shoot looters--a less than reassuring proposition in a country where the army itself is blamed for Kinshasa’s last major looting rampages, in 1991 and 1993.

Mulumba also said strategic installations were being put under tight surveillance, and he called on citizens to defend themselves, as rebels claimed to be encircling the city for an attack if peace talks scheduled for today should fail. “The population has the legitimate right to defend itself, with means proportional to those of the rebels,” Mulumba said.

Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko and his archrival, guerrilla leader Laurent Kabila, are scheduled today to hold a second and final round of shipboard talks off Pointe-Noire, Congo, aimed at finding a smooth and nonviolent way out of the political and military crisis.

The somber, battened-down mood in Kinshasa reflects the difficulty of the assignment: The ailing Mobutu wants a dignified exit, Kabila wants a total surrender. Kinshasa residents fear that if a compromise can’t be reached, Kabila will make good on repeated threats to take the city by force.

Kabila’s rebels have captured other Zairian cities and towns relatively bloodlessly. But here in the capital they could meet stiff, final resistance from Mobutu’s presidential guards, who are far better trained, paid and motivated than the regular Zairian army.

Also, Western diplomats say, Angolan insurgents have been covertly moving into Kinshasa as reinforcements for the government.

The South African officials who have been organizing today’s talks are billing them as the last chance. “If agreement is not reached, in reality it opens the way to a military solution being the only thing on the cards,” South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki told reporters Monday in Cape Town.

There have been indications that a deal was in the final stages of being worked out. The latest sign is a plan that would involve the installation of Laurent Monsengwo, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Kisangani, as Mobutu’s legal successor. That would allow Mobutu to step down without the humiliation of surrendering directly to Kabila.

Already, Monsengwo has returned from travels in Europe, and Mobutu supporters in the national Parliament have elected him as the parliamentary president, first in line in the presidential succession.

But there are also signs the plan is in trouble: Kabila has so far rejected any solution based on the existing Zairian constitutional order, and he has threatened not to come to today’s talks if Monsengwo takes his new parliamentary office. Monsengwo has not yet formally accepted the position.

On Tuesday, before rushing home for the curfew, Kinshasa residents were also venting their doubts about the compromise. In the afternoon, trucks with loudspeakers were circulating in the city, issuing calls for observance of a general strike today in protest against the archbishop as being too close to Mobutu.

Leaflets promoting the general strike were also being stuffed into parked cars and left on street corners.

With the likelihood of a smooth transition an open question, security has been stepped up for the few foreigners still living in Kinshasa. On Monday, the U.S. Embassy reduced its staff from 37 to 25, after a spokesman for Kabila’s rebels predicted that Mobutu forces might try to kill foreigners as a way of provoking a foreign military intervention.

Such an intervention, the argument ran, would save the Mobutu regime in the process of saving the foreigners.

Separately, from rebel-held eastern Zaire on Tuesday came troubling signs of what life might be like for the rebels’ perceived enemies in a post-Mobutu Zaire. A UNICEF spokeswoman in Geneva said that armed men wearing rebel uniforms had stormed an agency staff house in the eastern city of Goma, demanding weapons and attacking two staffers so badly that one had to be hospitalized.

UNICEF spokeswoman Marie Heuze said in Geneva that UNICEF is investigating. Heuze said rebel authorities in Goma blamed the attack on agents provocateurs trying to discredit their movement.

However, relations between the United Nations and the rebels have been poor in recent months, with the U.N. accusing the rebels of mistreating tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees who have been stranded in Zaire.

Last week, a U.N. human rights team trying to investigate reported massacres of the refugees left the region, saying Kabila’s rebels were making its work impossible.