ZAIREANS blocked roads and hijacked cars in Kinshasa yesterday, defying a government ban on protests, while more Tutsis fled the capital.
More than 1,000 Tutsis are estimated to have left Kinshasa since the ethnic-Tutsi rebellion broke out in eastern Zaire two weeks ago overwhelming the Zaire army there.
Protests erupted in many parts of the sprawling city but the focus was the university campus. Despite a police cordon, students broke out to vent their anger over government's handling of the fighting. Students said one demonstrator was killed.
Students cruised the city in dozens of stolen vehicles, calling for the part-Tutsi Prime Minister, Mr Kengo wa Dondo, to go and the radical opposition leader, Mr Etienne Tshisekedi, to take his place. Mr Tshisekedi was prime minister briefly before being sacked by President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1993.
A boat with 70 Tutsis arrived at Brazzaville, capital of neighbouring Congo just across the river Zaire from Kinshasa.
Onlookers jeered and threatened another 65 Tutsi men, women and children who waited to cross the river. The military shielded the Tutsis until they crossed.
Some Tutsis said they paid up to 3,000 a head to cross in dugout canoes. About 400 crossed in such canoes on Monday. Relatives and friends are still looking for missing Tutsis who have disappeared after their houses were looted and destroyed in the recent disturbances.
Chris McGreal adds from Goma: President Mobutu Sese Seko has only ever paid one visit to his palatial holiday home on Lake Kivu. It was six years ago. He won't be going again.
As Zaire's president recuperates from his cancer operation in another of his villas on the French Riviera, looters pick away at the bones of his sprawling mansion on the edge of Goma.
Rwandan-backed rebels took the provincial capital in eastern Zaire at the weekend. By then, hundreds of bodies littered the streets. Local Red Cross workers said they had already buried more than 400 in mass graves, most of them civilians.
Many of the city's surviving residents fled with the army. Some of those who remained said government soldiers gave civilians their weapons, told them to carry on fighting, and ran.
Few were so stupid. Some hid in their houses. Others went to loot. President Mobutu's lakeside holiday home was an early target, perhaps as much out of spite as for its pickings. Few people are so hated in the region as Zaire's leader. Perhaps it is why he has only ever been once.
The sprawling compound sits on the edge of Lake Kivu. The house at the front badly modelled on a French chateau offers spectacular views across the water. Out the back and around the corner are spectacular views of dozens of families crammed into half finished buildings and living in grinding poverty.