Zairian Foes Agree To Talk U.S.-Brokered Accord Comes As Rebels Allow Refugees To Return To Rwanda

With rebel forces closing in fast on the capital, an eleventh-hour U.S. mediator announced that President Mobutu Sese Seko has agreed to his first face-to-face negotiations with insurgent leader Laurent Kabila.

The accord for peace talks came as Zairian rebel leaders stepped up efforts to evacuate thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees from a devastated jungle encampment Wednesday.

The insurgents and U.N. aid workers moved about 1,500 refugees from the jungle camps to rebel-held Kisangani, where the U.N. began airlifting refugees home to Rwanda.

An estimated 100,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees had occupied the Biaro camp before the attacks last week. They are part of more than 1 million ethnic Hutu refugees and Rwandan soldiers who fled to Zaire in 1994 - a year of epic bloodshed in Rwanda in which extremist Hutus massacred an estimated half-million ethnic Tutsis before a Tutsi-led rebel force seized power in a civil war. In recent months, the Hutu refugees have walked hundreds of miles through Zairian jungle to escape the steadily advancing Zairian rebels - a force composed largely of Zairian Tutsis and backed by Rwanda.

Both the U.N. airlift and the U.S.-brokered peace talks, endorsed separately by Kabila, were seen as victories for Bill Richardson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations dispatched to Zaire to seek a negotiated end to the six-month conflict. But Kabila made it clear he sees the encounter only as a way to work out Mobutu’s departure and transfer power to a rebel-based government - an idea that Mobutu so far has refused even to address in public.

New rebel advances on the ground suggested the talks could be out-stripped by the swiftly evolving military situation in any case. With the government army in disarray, insurgent forces poured unopposed Tuesday morning into Kikwit, a provincial center 240 miles east of Kinshasa that is linked to the capital by road and rail and boasts a large airport.

“We have advanced beyond Kikwit,” Kabila told the Reuter news agency later in rebel-held Lubumbashi. “Our destination is Kinshasa.”

Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire has taken a little more than six months to roll through this enormous, mineral-rich country, the third-largest in Africa. With Kikwit in the alliance’s hands, the rebel leader has now seized control of the main cities except Kinshasa and seems poised to push swiftly into the capital - either by force if Mobutu continues to resist or by prior arrangement if Richardson’s agreement for negotiations bears fruit.

Richardson expressed delight that Kabila and Mobutu have agreed to talk, and South Africa made available the 545-foot Outeniqua, a naval supply ship sailing off Zaire’s Atlantic coast, as a site for a meeting tentatively set for Friday. But Mobutu said nothing about being willing to negotiate an end to his 32-year rule, and Kabila, with Kinshasa in his gunsights, seemed in no mood to compromise.

“As far as I am concerned, this will be a short ceremony at which Mr. Mobutu is supposed to agree to leave,” he told Reuter shortly before Richardson flew to Lubumbashi for a meeting with the rebel leaders. “Otherwise our force now advancing on the route to Kinshasa will eject him.”

This was not the first time the two sides have said they plan to negotiate. In February, representatives of the rebels and the Zairian government met and agreed to negotiations. The warring sides were expected to begin talks earlier this month in South Africa, but Mobutu balked at traveling there, citing health reasons.

The 66-year-old autocrat has prostate cancer.

After meeting with Richardson Tuesday, Mobutu held hands with the U.S. envoy as they stood on the veranda of the president’s residence. Mobutu appeared weak, his complexion waxen. He said nothing.

Diplomatic sources in Washington said Monday that Richardson, carrying a personal message from President Clinton, planned to urge Mobutu to use his illness as a pretext to leave office. During a brief news conference Tuesday, Richardson said he and Mobutu “were both very frank. I carried a strong message.”

Asked whether Richardson had directly asked Mobutu to step down, one source familiar with the talks said, “Let’s say that it was a very, very honest talk. … At times it was sort of moving. You have to remember that there are 32 years of history between this man and the United States.”

Richardson, on arrival in Lubumbashi, said he will be working out further “details” with Kabila such as free and fair elections and “the rule of law” after Mobutu is gone.

But Kabila insisted that Mobutu’s departure is his first priority in the talks, and only after that is agreed can the discussions turn to such things as elections.

“There will be no compromise over the departure, through the battlefield or at talks, of Mobutu, his system and his henchmen,” Kabila said.