CONGOLESE government soldiers swept through the besieged strategic town of Goma yesterday, looting shops and killing the citizens they were meant to protect.
Frightened people who crouched in their homes and improvised refugee camps had been expecting the violence to come from the rebel Tutsi guerrilla army, which shelled Goma overnight and halted its advance about ten miles to the north and east of the
town.
Instead, the bloodletting came from the retreating Congolese government army, whose angry fighters, many of them drunk, looted homes and shops as panic gripped the town on the northern shore of Lake Kivu. One intoxicated soldier was seen wearing a Darth Vader mask.
From Goma, television reporter Patrick Barth told The Scotsman: "A restaurant owner was shot dead by government soldiers. His bullet-ridden body was left on the street. At least eight other civilians, including a 17-year-old boy called Merci, were killed by the soldiers.
"Earlier, at the border crossing point with Rwanda, just a couple of miles away, the road was clogged with vehicles fleeing the expected Tutsi assault. The immigration post was swamped with many of Goma's civilians and foreign aid workers desperate to leave as rumours circulated that the Tutsi fighters were on the way."
One Tutsi man, fleeing into Rwanda with his family, told Barth: "I've been here for hours, trying to get our exit documents. Look at them. Look in their eyes. People are gripped with fear."
He added that people feared Hutus in Goma would carry out reprisals after the rebels' advance to within a few miles.
Tutsi-Hutu enmity in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) mirrors tension between the two ethnic groups that led to the 100-day genocide in Rwanda in 1994 in which 800,000 were killed.
The present fighting for Goma is, in large part, a Tutsi-Hutu conflict, as well as a complex struggle to control some of the world's richest sources of minerals.
Hutus are the biggest tribe in eastern Congo, making up about 40 per cent of the population. Tutsis are about 3 per cent.
Barth, from the independent production company Frontier Africa TV, said hotels on the Rwandan side of the frontier were full with people fleeing the fighting.
Vehicles of numerous international aid organisations from DRC packed with expatriate staff were on the road from the border towards Kigali, Rwanda's capital. Frontier Africa TV, two of whose three directors are Scots, has been filming the Congo conflict for the past three days.
As government troops went on the rampage in Goma, the besieging Tutsi army honoured a temporary truce and stopped its advance in the hills on the outskirts to allow people trapped by the fighting to flee. However, the rebel leader, Laurent Nkunda, a renegade Congolese army general, hinted that the final push would not be long delayed.
Some 800 United Nations peacekeeping troops and a ragtag collection of demoralised government soldiers are now the only obstacles to a complete rebel takeover of Goma, home to 600,000 people before tens of thousands began fleeing.
Nkunda, in a phone call from a forward base,
warned his men would open fire on UN soldiers if they tried to halt the advance.
