Zaire

FOREBODINGS of a wider war arise from the Zaire rebels' success in the south and from Zaire's response. Yet what distinguishes this episode from attempts to dismember Zaire in times of Cold War and high copper prices is the reluctance now of outside powers to intervene.The new alarm comes from the rebel advance into the town of Kalemie on the eastern edge of Zaire and the western shore of Lake Tanganyika. It is inside the border of Shaba province, which was the copper-rich secessionist province of Katanga in the 1960s.

THE HOMECOMING of President Mobutu Sese Seku after four months in Europe was the best thing that could happen to troubled Zaire in the short term. He was running his regime by phone, diplomats attest. Even his enemies give him some credit for holding the country together. The best use he could possibly make of this probably brief presence, however, would be to prepare an orderly departure.After international agencies and donor nations suspended Zaire's aid, the dictator who seized power with U.S. support in 1965 pledged to hold nationwide elections next June.

KINSHASA, Zaire -- His step was slow, his body appeared frail and his voice often faltered. But Mobutu Sese Seko, Africa's longest-serving ruler and, some say, one of its most venal tyrants, clearly basked in the glow of a triumphant return home yesterday after four months in Europe for cancer treatment.At the airport, he raised his silver-topped cane above his leopard-skin hat and slowly twirled in a circle atop a red-carpeted podium to acknowledge the blaring brass band, marching honor guards, grinning officials, thousands of supporters and scores of reporters who had flocked to see him.Huge crowds, including many people wearing shirts and dresses emblazoned with his portrait, cheered, waved flags and sang as his stretch Cadillac limousine, accompanied by trucks of heavily armed commandos and mounted anti-aircraft guns, bounced along potholed roads for 20 miles from the airport to his palace inside a military base overlooking a bend in the Congo River.

KINSHASA, Zaire -- From his plush 15th-floor hotel suite, far above the broad Congo River, Mukalay Msungu Banza juggled three cellular phones, taking calls from an ambassador, a government minister and party loyalists.All wanted the news. When will Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's dictator since 1965, come home from the French Riviera, where he has been recuperating after his treatment for prostate cancer August?This week. Definitely. Maybe."The population can feel the void, the absence of the president," said Banza, a top Mobutu aide.

A MIDST THE nearly silent mass of refugees, walking with their calm determination, it was the children you noticed first. Perhaps the majority of the returning Rwandans were youngsters as the growth rate in the refugee camps over the last two years has been around 3 percent, perhaps a little higher than it was before these people entered the camps. Families with six, seven children are common.Few of these children knew their lives were considered ones of deprivation, that their very existence as refugees had been part of a clarion call for international aid. These were the "innocent" children who were too young to have had anything to do with the genocide and rebellion that left Rwanda in tatters two years ago, the ones that the international aid community had come to rescue.

MUGUNGA CAMP, Zaire -- The tail end of the snake of refugees that is making its way into Rwanda from Zaire rests in this eerie ghost town, the world's largest refugee camp just four days ago and home to about half a million people.Refugees line both sides of the road that extends from the camp into the Zairian city of Goma, but their numbers are slowing, after a three-day parade of determination engulfed the two-lane byway.The 7-mile-wide camp is populated only by rats. They scurry amid the crevices in the waist-high walls the residents built out of lava rocks during their 2-year stay here.

CYIMBOGO, Rwanda -- Edward Ntagunjiri was one of the first to test the promise that he and his family would not be murdered if they came home to Rwanda.On Friday, thousands of other Rwandan Hutus came home from eastern Zaire.They had fled to Zaire two years ago, fearing the vengeance of Tutsis who had won control of their homeland. They had a reason to be afraid: Rwandan Hutus had massacred more than half a million Tutsis in Rwanda.Like 64-year-old Ntagunjiri, the exiles had little choice.

PRESIDENT CLINTON'S commitment of troops in Bosnia for another 18 months of peacekeeping and in Zaire for humanitarian relief is a telling reminder of how much U.S. military policy is changing after the end of the Cold War. Confrontation with the Soviet Union, with mighty armies squared away at the Iron Curtain, has given way to low-level brush fires. The trouble is Mr. Clinton has failed to explain these changes to the American people and, in fact, has resorted to obfuscation.Such a course is not dishonorable if he has definite goals that can be achieved only by gradually bringing public opinion around to his point of view.

GISENYI, Rwanda -- The Hutus began swarming home to Rwanda yesterday, taking an anxious world by surprise.By the tens of thousands they left war- and disease-ridden eastern Zaire in a mass migration rivaled only by their flight in the opposite direction two years ago.They came in numbers that were too high to count, perhaps reaching into the hundreds of thousands, walking through the streets of the Zaire town of Goma to a small border crossing where the...

ALL THE REASONS the U.S. has for not rushing headstrong into Zaire, Canada has as well. While 18 American troops died as a result of mission creep in Somalia in 1993, Canadian troops were accused of torture and murder, leading to scandal and the resignation of a chief of staff.In the latest African disaster -- Zaire -- the underlying political problems have not been faced. The one million Hutus fleeing their camps in eastern Zaire were held there by militia who had perpetrated the 1994 Rwanda genocide, who used the camps for raids on Rwanda and who provoked the attacks that dispersed the refugees.