The World Must Get Involved

Mobuto Sese Seko ruled Zaire for 32 years by playing one interest group against another. He plundered the country, amassing enormous private wealth, leaving Zairians hungry and dispossessed. Mobutu’s approaching “dethronement” will send a signal to other African leaders who see political office as a divine opportunity to steal and abuse.

But what about Zaire, after Mobutu? Will the people get not just the change they crave, but respite from misrule and a new lease on life? Or is it, after Mobutu, the deluge?

Regrettably, rebel leader Laurent Kabila has been eloquent about the obvious shortcomings of Mobutu’s rule without promising much in exchange. This is the major problem with political leadership in sub-Saharan Africa. There is no shortage of men aspiring to leadership; there is a shortage of vision, efficiency and accountability.

Kabila, who heads the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, has all the rhetoric of a leader long in waiting. In the last few months, he metamorphosed from an unpopular outsider into a national hero and darling of the Western press. Yet his past record is not so inspiring. He is an ex-communist, an insatiable womanizer, a heavy drinker who is often drunk and a gold smuggler whose former associates include the Cuban Revolutionary Army and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. With his soldiers circling Kinshasa like vultures, the same melodrama that led to the death of Patrice Lumumba and the emergence of Mobutu Sese Seko in the ‘60s is being resolved differently, with a bad guy of the ‘60s becoming the good guy of 1997.

U.S. diplomatic intervention in the crisis highlights this irony and the limitations of U.S. foreign policy toward sub-Saharan Africa. It is for the most part an experimental policy, shorn of morality and based on expediency. This has proved to be a tunnel-vision approach, costly in the short term and in the long run blind to other significant considerations.

One of the major chapters of the Zairian crisis is that Mobutu, for all of his 32 years in office, was a stooge of the American government. During the Cold War, he held forth against communists like Kabila. Now the U.S. has had to ask its own man to step aside for an old enemy. Mobutu of course was his own worst enemy. He was a thief interested solely in power.

Mobutu’s exit should bring a measure of stability. But the Zairian crisis is far from over. Kabila may seize power, but the volatile ethnic animosity in the region remains.

Kabila has been supported mainly by the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi and their kinsmen in Zaire. Scattered all over the region are Hutus fleeing from genocide and the ghosts of more than 100,000 Hutus slaughtered by Tutsis revolutionaries. Kabila’s forces helped in this slaughter. His victory will please the Tutsis, but local tribes simmer with anger over the continuing presence of the Banyamulenge, immigrant Tutsis who have been living in Eastern Zaire for more than a century, and the Banyarwanda, ethnic Rwandans living in North and South Kivu. In 1992, at a national conference, local Zairian tribes voted to expel all non-Zairians. The Hutus also nurse resentment over their victimization by the Tutsis and local Zairians.

Mobutu managed to stay in power by manipulating these differences. Disaffection with Mobutu may have provided a rallying point for public anger. Now public attention may return to these ethnic differences. International responses to the Zairian situation overlook this ethnic complexity.

Kabila has promised a transition to democracy within one year, but a civil society in crisis, citizenship conflicts and issues of human rights may pose as serious a problem as Mobutu’s corrupt rule. The people of Zaire and the whole of Africa’s Great Lakes region will need international assistance in working out their differences.

Zaire’s condition calls for a coalition government sensitive to existing political differences. Kabila must stop being a guerrilla fighter and become a statesman. Hutu refugees across the region will have to be resettled; thousands in concentration camps in Rwanda and Burundi must be freed.

In order to recover its integrity as a sovereign state, Zaire must no longer be a playground for the self-interests of its neighbors.

The international community must see Mobutu’s exit as a nexus for a more structured intervention in Zaire and the whole of Central Africa.