Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 22:10:58 +0000
Subject: M-G: (Fwd) The Rise and Fall of Zaire's Mobutu


------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From:          "Janet" <janet-AT-wwpublish.com>
To:            "Workers World Service" <workers-l-AT-wwpublish.com>
Subject:       The Rise and Fall of Zaire's Mobutu
Date:          Wed, 26 Mar 1997 23:10:39 -0400 EDT
Organization:  WW Publishers


I thought Rolf might be interested in this article.  The WW paper is 
hardly the mouthpiece of Trotskyism. 
Dave.

-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Apr. 3, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

MOBUTU: WHAT'S WASHINGTON'S ROLE?
The Rise and Fall of Zaire's Mobutu

By Deirdre Griswold

With characteristic arrogance, the U.S. ruling class has 
sent troops to Zaire. As of March 25, some 600 U.S. troops 
are on the ground in neighboring Congo and Gabon. Another 
1,000 are on their way aboard a Navy warship, the USS 
Nassau.

Who asked them in? What gives them the right to intervene?

The State Department and White House explain it's to 
protect U.S. nationals in Zaire--about 500 people--and to 
evacuate them if necessary. But there is no fighting in 
Kinshasa, where the troops are headed. The fighting is 
hundreds of miles away.

There were thousands of African students and professionals 
in the United States during the civil-rights struggles of 
the 1960s. Just imagine if Ghana or Kenya had landed marines 
and paratroopers in Washington to protect them from possible 
harm. Would you ever hear the end of it?

U.S. troops have gone to Zaire because the U.S. ruling 
class has lucrative investments there and a strategic 
interest in all of central Africa.

MOBUTU REGIME CRUMBLES

The occasion for this latest intervention--it is not the 
first--is the fact that the Mobutu regime is crumbling.

The CIA installed President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1965. A 
general, he had helped liquidate the revolutionary 
liberation movement inspired by Patrice Lumumba, first 
president of the Congo--now called Zaire.

For over 30 years, Mobutu balanced between the interests 
of a number of imperialists--primarily the United States, 
France and Belgium. He also made himself very rich. Perhaps 
too rich in the eyes of his masters.

His regime has been shaky for some years. Since he was 
diagnosed with prostate cancer, his political demise has 
been only a matter of time. 

Now that much of his army has crumbled and rebel forces 
are advancing from eastern Zaire, there is of course relief 
among much of the population that Mobutu's corrupt rule may 
soon be over. But what occasioned his downfall? And what 
kind of a regime will replace him?

FALL FROM IMPERIALIST GRACE

Anyone following the collapse of the Mobutu regime must 
notice that the U.S. and British press are unanimous in 
having discovered--belatedly--how unpopular Mobutu is among 
the people. They dwell on the indiscipline of his troops, 
how in their retreat they are looting because they have not 
been paid. No one seems to ask why they haven't been paid.

Here is a dictator, immensely wealthy, with control over 
gold and diamond mines, fighting to hold on to power. And he 
doesn't pay his troops? Every sergeant trained in a colonial 
or mercenary army knows that the first thing you do in a 
crisis is pay your hired guns.

Maybe even double their pay, if the prize is worth it. And 
Zaire is definitely worth it.

On the other side, the so-called rebel army seems to have 
no lack of new uniforms, effective arms and cellular phones.

All this points to sabotage of the war effort from within 
Mobutu's leading ranks. Which really should come as no 
surprise, since the imperialist power that put in Mobutu and 
his entourage--the United States--has been conspiring to 
replace him for some time.

NO LONGER USEFUL AS A PUPPET

It has nothing to do with moral repugnance. Like many a 
puppet before him, Mobutu has outlived his usefulness to 
Washington.

He is both hated by the people and politically weak--a 
dangerous combination that could provide an opening to a 
genuinely progressive opposition.

U.S. imperialism has faced similar situations before. 
Several hand-picked dictators--Trujillo in the Dominican 
Republic, the Diem brothers in Vietnam, Marcos in the 
Philippines--became so hated that it seemed the masses might 
topple them. So Washington did the job instead, buying time 
for a new set of rulers who had been carefully groomed to 
step in.

In the case of Mobutu, there is also another factor. He is 
too closely identified with France. The rivalry between U.S. 
and French imperialism over dominating Africa has become 
downright vicious.

The French bourgeoisie think their colonial past entitles 
them to at least parity in a French-speaking country like 
Zaire. They seemed surprised by the virulence of U.S. 
expansionism in this age of the new world order.

Even as the troops of the so-called Alliance of Democratic 
Forces were taking Kisangani, a key city in eastern Zaire, 
French President Jacques Chirac was in South America defying 
the Monroe Doctrine. You don't have to be under the thumb of 
the United States, he told them.

To Washington, such talk is almost a declaration of war.

Before the collapse of Soviet power, the imperialists' 
bitter rivalry was subordinated to an anti-communist united 
front. Could they forget what had happened in 1917 and again 
in the 1940s? Two inter-imperialist wars, fought to recarve 
the colonial world, had so weakened the capitalist system 
that socialist revolutions broke out in Europe and then in 
Asia. 

But in today's euphoria over the "demise of communism," 
the U.S. imperialists are hungry to expand their world 
hegemony at the expense of their allies.

BOURGEOIS CALLS FOR U.S. INTERVENTION

Elements in Zaire's bourgeois opposition have for some 
time made appeals to Washington to step in against Mobutu. 
But anyone who thinks U.S. domination in Africa will somehow 
be better than that of France or Belgium--because it will 
bring new capital, or technology, or more respect for 
democracy and human rights--should consider the disastrous 
history of Central America, or the Philippines, or south 
Vietnam before liberation, or the CIA role in Angola.

They should also remember that the United States itself 
has the greatest gap between rich and poor among the 
developed countries, the most prisoners per capita, and a 
shameful history of institutionalized racism, including 
chattel slavery.

But why look any further than Zaire itself to see what 
greater U.S. control there will bring? Washington chose 
Mobutu in the first place. U.S. corporations have lusted 
over the Congo's mineral wealth since early in this century, 
when the Rockefellers opened their first copper mines there.

Technology to help develop Zaire? When General Electric 
and the Morrison Knudsen Co. got a $1.5-billion contract to 
build the Inga-Shaba Power Project, did the energy produced 
get to the people living in the area? Not a watt.

The 1,000 miles of high-tension power lines went directly 
to foreign-owned mines, bypassing nearby towns. These mines 
produce great wealth, but not for the people of Zaire.

The Zairean masses have every right to demand billions of 
dollars in cash and technology as reparations from U.S., 
Belgian and French monopoly capitalism. The amount stolen in 
over a century of plunder of the resources and the super-
exploitation of Congolese workers is immense.

Workers in the imperialist countries should whole-
heartedly support a demand for reparations. That is how 
international solidarity is built.

REBELLION IN EASTERN ZAIRE

Zaire's greatest mineral wealth is in the east--the region 
now mainly in the hands of the so-called Alliance of 
Democratic Forces. This group started its armed bid for 
power last fall, with an attack on a huge refugee camp near 
Goma. Several hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus had been living 
there.

The attack was coordinated with an assault by Rwandan 
soldiers who came across Lake Kivu from Rwanda in high-speed 
motorboats. These boats were supplied by the United States, 
a Zairean source has told Workers World.

Washington then dispatched Maj. Gen. Ed Smith, a former 
paratrooper in Vietnam, to the area. The story was that 
Smith was to lead a U.S. force to protect the refugees. 
Exactly what role Smith played has never been spelled out.

The attacks led to the refugees dispersing. Some returned 
to Rwanda. Others went deeper into Zaire. Many have since 
died, either from hunger and exhaustion or at the hands of 
the rebel forces, who are mainly Tutsis from eastern Zaire 
and Rwanda. Antagonism between the Tutsis and Hutus dates 
>from the colonial period, when Belgium accorded the Tutsis 
privileges and incorporated many of them in its 
administration. 

There have been many reports in the bourgeois press 
indicating that in the bloody internal struggle in Rwanda 
between Tutsis and Hutus, France sided with the former Hutu 
regime while the United States has backed the Tutsis.

An article in the Dec. 2, 1996, issue of Newsweek was 
entitled "Rwanda--An American Empire?" Newsweek called this 
small central African country "about the best friend 
Washington has in Africa these days--so good a friend that 
French diplomats mutter darkly about a plot to create an 
Anglophone empire stretching from Cape Town to Cairo."

This article was written soon after the rebellion began in 
eastern Zaire. Newsweek added, "Recent visits by Rwandan 
President Paul Kagame to London, Washington and Israel have 
fed suspicions that he may have sought a green light to move 
on Zaire through rebel proxies."

APPEARANCE OF KABILA

A month after the attack on Goma, the rebel force acquired 
a new image by bringing in a non-Tutsi, Laurent Kabila, as 
its most visible leader. Kabila is often described as a 
"former Marxist" who fought alongside Che Guevara in the 
1960s.

However, Kabila turned against Guevara. In recent years he 
has become a wealthy business executive living in exile.

What are Kabila's politics today? Can the force he claims 
to lead represent the many oppressed workers and peasants 
>from different ethnic groups who make up the vast majority 
of the people of Zaire?

Will this force take over from Mobutu? Will it coalesce 
with others who have been in the Mobutu camp? Or will there 
be a struggle to divide the mineral-rich east from the rest 
of Zaire?

Most important, can the masses take advantage of this 
struggle to press their own demands?

Workers World has received reports that the Alliance has 
already turned against some long-time progressives in Zaire.

A March 24 Reuters dispatch from Johannesburg gives a 
different picture of the Alliance of Democratic Forces than 
that projected by Kabila. It quotes an investment analyst, 
John Klemmow, on the relations opened up between the 
Alliance and foreign mining companies.

"The rebels are already offering [gold] concessions and 
they only liberated these places a week or two ago--you can 
see it is pretty open for business already," Klemmow said. 
The Alliance has seized one-fifth of Zaire, including most 
of its gold mines.

"Mining analysts see [Zaire] as one of the richest mineral 
areas in the world," reports Reuters.

Their next target is Lubumbashi, center of the country's 
copper and cobalt mining industry and base of the giant 
state mining company, Gecamines.

This seems to occasion no alarm among imperialist 
investors. "Zaire's mineral industry is going to go" to the 
rebels, said Klemmow.

                         - END -

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint
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Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail:
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