of military disadvantage, has swept it aside whenever he spied what looked like a military opening. Last spring, his forces pushed back rebels sponsored by Uganda in Congo's far northwest, only to lose the same ground months later. And on Oct. 15, Kabila's armies launched a massive assault on Rwandan-held positions in the southeast, striking 100 miles north of Pweto at the town of Pepa. Six weeks later, just as happened in the northwest, Kabila's forces once again lost far more than they gained.Now the Rwandans have driven them out of Pweto, clambering onto captured armor as their commander pointed out the escape route by which the Congolese army chief of staff, Joseph Kabila, the president's son, fled the battlefield. "We have a cease-fire," Col. J.B. Mulisa said with a dry chuckle, "a forced cease-fire."In a war that has been stalemated for so long -- Congo was broken into factional spheres of influence mere weeks after the war began, and so it remains -- such lightning gains might have finally given the Rwandans the upper hand. But senior Rwandan officials, when asked if they plan to push beyond Pweto farther into Congo, say they did not want to come even as far as they have. In fact, the forces occupying Pweto showed no sign of massing earlier this month.Officials of Rwanda's Tutsi-led government say, rather, that their focus is on eradicating the Interahamwe, the ethnic Hutu militia that orchestrated the 1994 massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda and fled into neighboring Congo. The farther into the vast Congo the Rwandan troops go, the harder that becomes."We were really talking about withdrawing" 120 miles to an operational zone closer to Rwanda, said Col. Charles Kayonga, a defense adviser to Rwandan President Paul Kagame. "Kabila must have misread our position. He apparently thought we were weak."Reversed AlliancesThe battle began at Pepa, a town of neat stone houses in the center of a vast cattle ranch near the southern end of Lake Tan...
