RWANDA TURNS DOWN PEACE TALKS WITH ZAIRE.

Byline: James C. MccKinley Jr. The New York Times

As fighting continued to spread chaos in eastern Zaire, Rwanda rejected on Monday a U.N. proposal for peace talks with that country, saying it was not responsible for a revolt by members of the same ethnic group that controls the Rwandan government.

``In no way is Rwanda involved in this,'' Foreign Minister Anastase Gasana told diplomats and reporters. ``We don't want to be a scapegoat for their problems.''

Zaire has accused Rwanda of sending in troops to help Zairian Tutsi rebels, who are resisting a government order to return to Rwanda, a land their ancestors left more than 200 years ago.

Diplomats fear that the conflict between the rebels and the Zairian army could grow into a regional war. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has called on the two countries to meet and resolve the conflict.

But Rwandan officials, who have been fighting insurgencies based in Zaire for two years, made it clear they had no interest in peace talks.

At a press conference, President Pasteur Bizimungu strongly denied that Rwandan troops had invaded Zaire to fight alongside the Tutsi rebels, who have in the past nine days seized a border region that used to be the base for guerrillas of the Hutu ethnic group fighting the Tutsi-dominated governments in Rwanda and Burundi. There are a million Hutu refugees in eastern Zaire.

Bizimungu, a Hutu, also rejected allegations that the Rwandan army had attacked a refugee camp near Goma on Saturday morning, killing at least six people in an artillery barrage and sending 195,000 refugees fleeing westward.

Waving placards and maps depicting the Rwandan kingdom of the 19th century, Bizimungu pointed out that the Tutsi now living in Zaire had been part of an ancient Tutsi kingdom. Their lands became part of Zaire in 1910, he said, when European powers redrew the map.

``They are in their homelands,'' he said, ``and if somebody wants to uproot them, if someone wants to disown them, let that country disown the land as well.''

But despite his hinting at a greater Rwandan kingdom, Bizimungu took pains to emphasize that Rwanda was not interested in annexing eastern Zaire. He said Rwanda did not have the resources to intervene in the conflict and that other countries had a responsibility to stop what he called a genocide against Zairian Tutsi.

``Morally, I support these people,'' he said. ``Between extermination and fighting, I would advise them to resist.''

As the president spoke in Kigali, the Tutsi rebels traded mortar and small-arms fire with Zairian soldiers in Bukavu, the regional capital of the south Kivu area. The rebels appeared to be pressing on the outskirts of the town, at the southern end of Lake Kivu, the Associated Press reported.

On the other end of the lake, near Goma, aid officials said the 195,000 refugees who abandoned a camp near the Rwandan border after it was attacked Sunday were being resettled in another camp about nine miles into Zaire.

Goma was quiet Monday, and no new fighting was reported in camps along the border, said Panos Moumtzis, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. Aid workers distributed high-protein biscuits to women and children and began setting up latrines and tents. The Mugunga camp now has more than 400,000 people, he said.

But 15 miles north on the main road from Goma to several large camps, the road was still blocked off because of the insurgents who attacked Kibumba on Sunday. The attacks on the road prevent trucks from bringing in relief food from Uganda, Moumtzis said, and stocks will last only two weeks.

So far, however, the attacks have prompted only a trickle of refugees from Kibumba to return to Rwanda - about 800 in the past three days.

Eastern Zaire has been a troubled and explosive place since late summer 1994, when 1.1 million Hutu refugees flooded over the Rwandan border, running from a Tutsi rebel army. Many of the refugees had taken part in a genocide against Tutsis as their government fell, in which at least 500,000 were killed.

Since then, the U.N. refugee camps have become havens for Hutu guerrillas who raid both Rwanda and Burundi. The anti-Tutsi ideologues in the camps have also stirred up local Zairians of other ethnic groups, prompting several pogroms against Zairian Tutsis.

In recent days, the advances made by the Zairian Tutsi rebels now operating in south Kivu province have dealt a blow to the Hutu guerrilla groups, giving the Tutsi-led governments in Rwanda and Burundi some breathing room, diplomats say. But many innocent refugees also have been forced to flee their camps by the violence, creating a flood of tired, hungry people moving north and west into the rugged hills to the west of Lake Kivu. The Zairian army, meanwhile, has begun looting aid agencies, prompting all of them to pull out of Bukavu.

The last aid workers took a airplane out of Bukavu on Monday afternoon, and U.N. food warehouses were immediately looted, Reuters reported.

``It's chaos, just chaos,'' said one diplomat in Kigali.

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PHOTO Refugees continue to arrive at a camp outside Goma, Zaire, which now holds over 414,000 people.

Associated Press