Zairian

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.

LUANDA, Angola -- In an important spillover effect of the war in Zaire, government troops in neighboring Angola have attacked territory controlled by their longtime rebel enemies, who lost their most important backer when Mobutu Sese Seko, the Zairian dictator, was defeated.Military officials and diplomats say the Angolan government, which signed a peace treaty with the rebels in 1994, has launched offensives deep in the country's diamond territory.Government officials say they have simply been trying to patrol their border against armed militias and soldiers loyal to Mobutu who are trying to escape the former Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

KINSHASA, Zaire -- Kisangani, Zaire's third largest city and the last major government-held outpost in eastern Zaire, fell to rebel forces yesterday, posing the most serious threat yet to the 31-year-rule of President Mobutu Sese Seko.The capital, Kinshasa, was quiet as details of the battle spread slowly among the population, but for many the fall of Kisangani, the centerpiece of the government's fight against the 6-month-old rebellion, raised serious questions about the ability of Mobutu's government to survive.

PRETORIA, South Africa -- With a hesitant handshake and words of peace, negotiators from the two warring sides in Zaire opened their first face-to-face negotiations here yesterday.Mediators hope the two sides will agree to a cease-fire and set a formula for the future governance of the chaotic Central African republic, steps that could involve direct talks between Zaire's ailing President Mobutu Sese Seko and rebel leader Laurent-Desire Kabila.Kabila's rebel forces have seized control of a quarter of the country in six months and are now heading toward Lubumbashi, Zaire's second-largest city.

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.

As the Pentagon gears up warily to send U.S. troops into Rwanda on what is described as a strictly humanitarian mission, American diplomats at the United Nations are pushing for an end to the international community's ill-starred intervention in Somalia. These contradictory policies send a stark message about how this country is trying, not too coherently, to cope with the chaos sweeping so much of Africa.When President Bush sent U.S. troops to Somalia in late 1992, that was also supposed to be a strictly humanitarian operation.

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.

A new round of tragedy began in Africa as Zairian troops uprooted at least 85,000 refugees from camps near Goma in recent days and pushed them toward borders, most to Rwanda and some to Burundi. Thugs with guns rob, pillage and rape to prod the exodus and to profit from it.The refugees are mostly Hutu civilians who never harmed anyone. Some are families of soldiers. Whether from Rwanda or Burundi, they fled Tutsi armies fearing retaliation for atrocities or genocide perpetrated by other Hutu against other Tutsi, in both countries in the recent and distant past.

WITH SOME HALF million Hutu refugees streaming back into Rwanda from camps near Goma in Zaire, north of Lake Kivu, the greatest stream of uprooted humanity in one place in this tragic century is taking place. The International Committee of the Red Cross thinks hundreds of thousands of stragglers remain on the road or lost in the countryside.These people chose their homeland, governed by a hostile Tutsi-led army, over exile ruled by thuggish militia from their own Hutu families. The final onslaught by Zairian Tutsi guerrillas and Rwanda forces separated the people from the militia, who fled west.

DR. WILLIAM CLOSE, 84 Former physician of the president of Zaire Dr. William Close, a self-proclaimed country doctor who became the personal physician of Mobutu Sese Seko, former president of Zaire, and who played a key role in halting the 1976 outbreak of the lethal Ebola virus that terrified Zaire and surrounding countries, died of a heart attack Jan. 15 at his home in Big Piney, Wyo., according to his daughter, actress Glenn Close. During his 16 years in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dr. Close was for a time the only surgeon at the 1,500-bed Mama Yemo hospital in the capital, Kinshasa; he eventually became its administrator.