Angola is accused of invading Zaire

The Zaire government said last night that Angolan troops had invaded its territory close to the border with Cabinda.

Zaire's state radio quoted a presidential statement that said thousands of traders and residents had fled the Zairean village of Yema, close to Muanda on the Atlantic coast and about 240 miles west of the capital, Kinshasa.

It said Angolan troops were also around Zaire's diamond-trading town of Tshikapa, in Western Kasai Province. Angola has been increasingly linked to Zaire's six-month-old conflict.

Warning of a potential "humanitarian catastrophe", the United States renewed its appeal yesterday to Zaire's rebel alliance to take steps to spare the lives of 100,000 Rwandan refugees in eastern Zaire.

While Zaire's ailing President Mobutu Sese Seko may be facing his last days in power, time is running out even faster for his country's legal opposition movement.

As peace talks in South Africa are postponed again, diplomats say the opportunities are dwindling for followers of the veteran opposition leader, Etienne Tshisekedi, to grab a meaningful stake in post-Mobutu Zaire. After two decades of sparring with Mr Mobutu, the former prime minister risks losing out to the rebel leader, Laurent Kabila, who has seized half the country and is promising to depose Mr Mobutu by force if needed.

Mr Tshisekedi's supporters in the Democratic Union for Social Progress (UDPS) say if Mr Kabila does take power, democracy will have been beaten by force. Some still claim, usually in private, that Mr Kabila is a foreign stooge backed by ethnic Tutsis from Rwanda and Burundi and their allies in Uganda. If he takes over, they say, Zaire will be run by another Mobutu with a different name.

If Mr Tshisekedi does fall at the last fence, his critics will say he only has himself to blame. They claim he has never been able to see beyond the events of 1991, when a largely self-selected gathering of the people called the National Sovereign Convention elected him head of an interim government.

The Convention and its interim government were supposed to prepare the way towards democracy, a transition forced on Mr Mobutu by the West. Instead, the wily President used an outbreak of mass looting in Kinshasa as a pretext to fire Mr Tshisekedi and replace the Convention with another unelected parliament.

In recent months, Mr Kabila's victories in the east appeared to weaken Mr Mobutu and strengthen parliament. Three weeks ago, it nominated Mr Tshisekedi to resume his post as Prime Minister, believing he had the credibility to negotiate an end to the war. When Mr Tshisekedi announced he was dissolving parliament and going back to the 1991 constitution, Mr Mobutu sacked him, replacing him with military hardliner, General Lukulia Bolongo.

Meanwhile, in eastern Zaire, UN agencies mounted an aerial search for 80,000 Rwandan refugees and accused Mr Kabila's rebels of trying to achieve a "final solution" by condemning them to death. The rebels said the former Rwandan Hutu troops and militiamen were evacuated from Kasese camp, 15 miles south of Kisangani.