TUTSI rebels vowed yesterday to bring down Zaire's ailing President Sese Seko Mobutu as they battled his troops in the east of the country, provoking fears of a humanitarian disaster.
The UN Security Council was due to meet late yesterday, to hear briefings from the UN Secretary General, Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, amid mounting support for the idea of a regional conference focusing on the ethnic turmoil.
Dr Boutros Ghali was expected to tell the council that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan leader Mr Paul Kagame are no longer opposed to such a conference.
Concerned by the impact of the month old fighting on the more than one million refugees in the region, Ms Sadako Ogata of the UNHCR reiterated a longstanding plea for more than one million Rwandan refugees to return home.
With fighting intensifying, she said she feared "this terrible situation" may not stop immediately and urged the refugees to consider whether they would be safer in Zaire or Rwanda. "UNHCR will accompany you to yours home communes and you will receive an assistance package to help you rebuild your life," she said.
The Hutu refugees fled to Zaire and neighbouring Burundi fearing reprisals from Rwanda's Tutsi led government after Hutu extremists slaughtered half a million people in 1994.
In Brussels, the EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, Ms Emma Bonino, warned that a "new genocide could be in the making". She said humanitarian action was "currently almost impossible" because of roadblocks on all access roads to the affected eastern region, set up by both the rebels and the Zairean army.
. Ethnic Zarean Tutsis fighting Zaire's troops were reported to have seized the airport in the eastern Zairean town of Uvira and cut off satellite and radio communications, Western aid workers said yesterday.
But the aid workers in Geneva, citing field reports, said Tutsi Banyamulenge fighters, resisting Zairean attempts to force them back to Rwanda, took Kiliba airport in Uvira on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and many people were fleeing the town.
Zairean troops, many of them unpaid for months and more interested in looting than in fighting, had fled the town, aid workers said.