President Laurent Kabila's forces and their allies squeezed Rwandan-backed rebels on the western front yesterday, blocking their march on the capital, Kinshasa, and advancing on them from the rear.
Witnesses in Angola's oil enclave of Cabinda reported Angolan troops and tanks crossing into the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the fall at the weekend of the rebel rear base in the west, the garrison town of Kitona.
"It was Angolan forces which in fact took Kitona and the surrounding area, that is Moanda and Banana," Mr Dominique Sakombi Inongo, Mr Kabila's communications adviser, said.
Mr Sakombi said that planes from Angola and Zimbabwe were supporting loyalist forces who were attacking the rebels from two sides in the strategic Congo River corridor linking Kinshasa to the sea. "What are they going to do? Who will supply them? They are people who are lost," he said. "They have no rear base . . . They are in disarray."
The Rebel political spokesman, Mr Arthur Z'Ahidi Ngoma, acknowledged setbacks on the western front. "We have made a strategic pull-back," he said.
But Mr Z'Ahidi, who said that the rebels took up arms to fight for democracy in the former Zaire, said that rebel forces had captured Congo's third city of Kisangani in the jungle interior. Mr Sakombi said he could not confirm that Kisangani had fallen but said that there had been fighting there, and blamed Ugandan troops advancing from Bunia.
The rebels hold Bunia, Goma, Bukavu and Uvira, the main towns along the eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Rebel commanders had earlier claimed to be as close as 30 km from Kinshasa but they said on Sunday that the capital was better defended than they had expected and that loyalist forces had attacked rebel positions with air strikes.
With the rebels holding the giant Inga hydroelectric dam in the western war zone, Kinshasa itself awoke after a seventh night without electricity but the city was calm yesterday.
Mr Kabila's Justice Minister, Mr Mwenze Kongolo, who represented him on Sunday at a southern African summit in South Africa called by President Nelson Mandela to end the crisis, said the rebels were "in disarray".
He said that a ceasefire call from the Pretoria summit took account of Congo's view that Rwanda and Uganda, accused by Mr Kabila of invading to fight alongside the rebels, should withdraw immediately.
"So long as they begin to pull out we will not fire on them but if they stay there and continue with their adventure we shall be obliged to expel them by force," he said.