United Nations peacekeepers were braced for full-scale war in central Africa yesterday as Rwandan-backed rebels closed in on the Congolese city of Goma, sending government troops and civilians fleeing in panic.

Western aid workers described scenes of mayhem in the streets as columns of government tanks and military vehicles streamed out of the city and panicking civilians fled for cover.

Muddy roads were clogged with refugees fleeing into Goma after they had witnessed the retreat of government soldiers from the areas around their camps – only to find that troops had deserted the city too.

“There is absolute panic,” Karl Steinacker, an official with the UN refugee agency, told The Times by telephone from Goma. “The war has arrived in the streets. There are columns of army running away. They are basically abandoning the city.”

The retreat in tanks, lorries and cars and on motorcycles commandeered from civilians, leaves the UN peacekeeping forces – mostly Indians – as the only bulwark between Goma and forces loyal to the ethnic Tutsi guerrilla leader General Laurent Nkunda.

Last night the rebels declared a unilateral ceasefire “to avoid panicking the population of Goma”, but a spokesman confirmed that the city was still in their sights, saying they expected to be in control by this morning. General Nkunda’s forces are blamed for atrocities previously inflicted on civilians, from rape and mutilation to the forced recruitment of children.

UN commanders vowed to stop the rebels from taking the city and appealed to the Security Council for reinforcements to their 17,000-strong peacekeeping force, the largest such deployment in the world. “We are going to act against any effort to take over a city or any major population centre by force,” Alan Doss, the UN Secretary-General’s special representative to the Democratic Republic of Congo, said from Kinshasa, the capital. France urged its European Union partners to assemble a force of 1,500 that could be sent to the region within days, but admitted that they were “very reluctant” to join the fight.

The Security Council was due to hold an emergency meeting on the situation last night as the UN Secre-tary-General, Ban Ki Moon, gave warning that “the intensification and expansion of the conflict is creating a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic dimensions and threatens dire consequences on a regional scale”.

The fighting, which has intensified dramatically in the past two days, is by far the most serious since the UNbrokered ceasefire in 2003, and threatens to drag Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo into a broader regional war.

An estimated 5.4 million people have died in the six-year “Great War of Africa” and its aftermath, the biggest armed conflict since the Second World War. The eastern Congo region owes its volatility to a potent mix of lucrative natural resources and unresolved ethnic tensions from the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 victims, mainly Tutsis, died at the hands of Hutu militias.

General Nkunda is a charismatic evangelical Christian who styles himself as the saviour of the Tutsi minority in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire. He claims to be fighting to prevent a second genocide of the Tutsi people, citing Kinshasa’s tolerance of the Interahamwe, the thousands of hardcore Rwandan Hutu fighters who still live in the eastern Congolese forests where they fled to escape retribution. General Nkunda’s efforts, however, have served only to draw those militias deeper into the fight as ill-equipped and poorly motivated government commanders turn to them for assistance in the struggle against the rebels.

Exploiting Tutsi fears has helped him to expand his sphere of influence and, with it, control over more of the lucrative mineral trade for himself and his backers in Rwanda.

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