Tottering Leopard: Speedy Unraveling To Decades of Rule
INSHASA, Zaire -- In more than three decades at the center of his country's political stage, Mobutu Sese Seko was nothing if not an extraordinary survivor. But
his tenacity and resourcefulness finally failed him today as he left his capital stealthily, a defeated man.
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MASTER OF RUIN
A special report.
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Mobutu has been called one of the world's wealthiest heads of state, a brutal dictator, an inveterate meddler in the affairs of neighbors and a colossal ego. His style, at once bold and vainglorious, was for an entire generation
the very model of an African autocrat.
Resplendent in his signature leopard-skin cap and carved wooden scepter topped with an eagle, Mobutu -- through his canny courtship of Western support, destabilization of his neighbors, systematic corruption and grandiose economic schemes
-- left Zaire teetering on the brink of economic collapse. His cult of personality rose to such heights that for weeks at a time, Zaire's official press was forbidden to mention the name of any other Zairian than the president
himself.
Mobutu almost singlehandedly invented Zaire, even giving the country its name in replacement of the colonial name, Congo. But his personal appetite for luxury and wealth spawned a system of official corruption so rapacious that he leaves
behind a country in ruin, where revenue from lucrative mines has been squandered or squirreled away in foreign bank accounts.
Life in a vast country deprived of roads, health care, electricity, telephones and often education has reverted to a brutishness not known since the 1940's.
Still, even many of Mobutu's harshest critics acknowledge one achievement, and it is a major one in an Africa of artificially drawn states riven by ethnic animosities.
Inheriting a land of more than 450 ethnic groups that had French as an official language but no commonly spoken tongue, Mobutu managed to forge a sense of nationhood in Africa's third-largest country as strong as exists anywhere on
this continent. This was accomplished, in part, by successfully promoting the use of three major African languages -- Lingala, Swahili and Tshiluba -- to draw citizens together across ethnic lines.
At the same time, Zaire experienced a period of extraordinary cultural creativity, in song, in dress and in art. This came about partly as a result of deliberate efforts to favor local influences over foreign ones, and partly because of
the need of Zairians to survive by their own means in the absence of a functioning government.
Throughout a career that began at independence from Belgium, during the height of the Cold War, Mobutu seemed to thrive on crises, buying off enemies when he did not kill them outright, and currying favor with Washington by allowing his
country to be used as a base in wars against Soviet influence in central Africa.
But the rebel leader Laurent Kabila's seven-month fight revealed Mobutu's army to be toothless and his government an empty shell. In the end, the undoing of a man known as a master calculator resulted from a long series of costly
misjudgments of a sick and aging politician well past his prime.
RISING STAR: A Helping Hand From the CIA
obutu's ascent began in September 1960, at the dawn of Zaire's
independence, when he seized power during quarrels between the
pro-Western President Joseph Kasavubu and the nationalist Patrice
Lumumba, the country's first prime minister.
Mobutu, a journalist and army sergeant, had been picked by
Lumumba as chief of staff and prodded toward the center of the
political stage by the CIA, which had chosen him as its best tool
for keeping the nation out of the socialist orbit.
Although he has always denied it, many scholars believe that
Mobutu helped organize the 1961 execution of Lumumba at the urging
of the CIA.
During the early independence years, the CIA called most of the
shots in Zaire. Nonetheless, in those early years, Mobutu often
frustrated his CIA handlers.
In the words of Smith Hempstone, the former U.S. diplomat and
journalist, Mobutu, who became a general in the 1960s, was at the
time "one of the weakest strongmen in history, a black Hamlet,
plagued by indecision, unwilling to assume power himself."
But when Mobutu finally seized power outright on Nov. 24, 1965,
after U.S. help enabled him to extinguish a series of regional
uprisings by followers of Lumumba, he wasted little time putting
his stamp on Zaire.
By Zairian standards, Mobutu's early years in office were a
period of relative calm, even if sporadic troubles continued here
and there, notably in the Fizi-Baraka mountain range of South Kivu
Province, where a sputtering rebellion led by one Laurent Desire
Kabila refused to die.
Beginning with his first speech after seizing power, Mobutu set
a dictatorial tone, telling a large crowd gathered in a Kinshasa
stadium that it had taken five years for the politicians to lead
the country to ruin.
"This is why on Nov. 24, 1965, the stupid struggle for
influence in which political parties were engaged was ended," he
said. "For five years, there will be no more political party
activity in the country."
Almost immediately, Mobutu established a brand of unchallenged
one-man rule that lasted until 1990.
Mobutu ordered the creation of a sole, powerful political party,
the Popular Revolutionary Movement, making membership obligatory
for all Zairians. In the early years, at least, he set out to
attract the best and brightest of Zaire's small university
community, and was known for eagerly soliciting their advice.
With time, however, the effects of flattery and a growing taste
for power took over, and the president's style of rule became both
insular and absolute. Challengers, both imagined and real, often
paid with their lives, like the four former Cabinet ministers whom
Mobutu had publicly hanged before 50,000 spectators six months
after he took office.
As an unmistakable Mobutu style began to emerge in the late
1960s and early 1970s, it became clear that the Zairian leader's
ambition was to fashion a great African state. Mobutu began to
study other dictatorships, drawing freely from them.
"This man has spoken; he has written, set forth orientation and
decrees," Mpinga Kasenda, a former prime minister, said in a
characteristic speech of the period praising Mobutu and defining
the country's new system. "The sum total of his actions
constitutes Mobutism, just as the sum total of Mao's actions
constitutes Maoism."
Gregoire Batodisa remembers that every morning when he was an
elementary-school student, the first 15 minutes of school were
dedicated to dancing and shouting the name of the president.
"We had to recite one party, one country, one father, Mobutu,
Mobutu," said Batodisa, who is now a high school principal at a
private school in Kinshasa. "It was ridiculous. You knew it but
you could not do anything about it. Not to sing and dance was to
commit suicide. You just went along with it."
ALL-POWERFUL LEADER: From Mobutu To Mobutism
obutism quickly became the new national ideology, and since a
constitution written expressly to please him provided the president
unlimited powers, Mobutu's words took on the force of law.
By 1970, with mineral revenues growing fast, Mobutu felt secure
enough in his rule to make known his grandiose vision for Zaire. At
an extraordinary party congress that year, he announced a bid for
national greatness called Goal 80.
The plan consisted of a 10-year program to double copper
production, industrialize the country with steel mills and
deep-water ports, and undertake a program of huge investments in
Kinshasa, Kisangani and around the southern mining capital,
Lubumbashi.
The largest project of all was the Inga dam, near Kinshasa, at
the time one of the world's largest hydroelectric dams, followed by
the 1,110-mile-long Inga-Shaba power grid, spanning dense forest
and empty savanna on its route to the copper-producing,
independence-minded Shaba Province, which Mobutu's project aimed to
make dependent upon electricity supplied from afar.
When the World Bank refused to finance the project, believing it
to be far too costly, the U.S. Export-Import Bank stepped in, in a
gesture of political support for a man considered to be a vital
Cold War ally. But within a few years, the heavy debt incurred for
the $1 billion project, which has been operating since 1977, became
a crippling economic burden.
In 1971, Mobutu unveiled a new twist on the official ideology
with a program known as "authenticity." Zairians were obliged to
change their Western names to African ones, drop titles like Mr.
and Mrs. in favor of "citizen" and abandon European dress for
tunics for men and wraps of printed cloth for women.
Mobutu sought to set the tone by replacing his given name,
Joseph Desire Mobutu, with Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza
Banga, which has often been translated as "the all-conquering
warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win,
will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake."
Authenticity was followed, in 1973, by "Zairianization," a
program that expropriated farms, factories and businesses belonging
to foreigners, from Belgians who had remained since the colonial
period to the Greek, Jewish and Pakistani traders who had dominated
much of the country's small-scale commerce.
In a speech on Nov. 30, 1973, that surprised even many close
advisers, Mobutu described the new policy as "a decisive turning
point in our history," and justified it by calling Zaire "the
country, which until now, has been the most heavily exploited in
the world."
As might have been expected, the nationalizations and handing
out of businesses to politically selected Zairians were initially
popular. It was not long, however, before things began to go badly
wrong. With almost no prior experience in the businesses they
inherited, many Zairians quickly sought to lure foreigners back to
run them in their place. Others simply sold off their goods and
failed to re-stock.
Soon Zaire's economy was near collapse. One group of people,
however, benefited far more than others, and in lasting ways, from
the Africanization program: Mobutu and a small circle of relatives
and friends.
Takeovers under Zairianization were, in fact, but one of
Mobutu's many sources of wealth. The scholars Crawford Young and
Thomas Turner quoted 1978 Bank of Zaire estimates that 50 Zairian
companies had illegally secreted some $300 million abroad. Eight of
the largest of these companies were owned by Mobutu or his
immediate family.
BIGGEST 'BIG MAN': An Ego as Large As His Country
he collapse of the economy under Zairianization did not force
Mobutu to backtrack; instead, he rushed ahead into ever more
radical measures that over time helped undo him.
Returning home from a state visit to China and North Korea in
1974, Mobutu announced a 10-point program to eliminate what he
called the country's 10 scourges.
A food shortage, he said, would be ended by organizing
agricultural brigades. Unemployment was to be ended by decree.
Every community was ordered to begin building nursery schools, and
employers were told to provide free uniforms and supplies for their
workers' children.
Marked by his experience of the communist east, Mobutu grew ever
more grandiose, and his cult of personality ever more intense.
President Mobutu began to affect titles like the Helmsman and the
Guide, and the news on state television opened with images of
Mobutu descending from the heavens.
While the economy continued to decline, it was not until the
collapse of copper prices in the mid-1970's that Mobutu reluctantly
began to change economic course.
But by then, no one would lend to Zaire any longer, foreign aid
programs were bring cut back sharply, inflation was galloping and
the grand state that he had set out to build entered a long period
of gradual decay.
According to histories of this period, Mobutu, seeing no way out
of his country's economic and political crisis, briefly considered
abandoning power when he took his family to Switzerland in March
1976.
But he returned home to confront a series of major new crises,
the most serious of which were invasions of Shaba Province in March
1977 and May 1978 by remnants of the Katangese rebel force that had
sought independence for that region shortly after independence.
The two Shaba invasions, both from Angolan territory, quickly
revealed the battlefield ineptitude of the Zairian army, and in
both instances, foreign troops and U.S. transport planes had to be
summoned to put down the rebellions.
MASTER MEDDLER: A Finger in Affairs Of His Neighbors
he tremendous mineral wealth of Shaba, with 80 percent of the
world's cobalt reserves and 20 percent of its copper supplies,
helped Mobutu secure international military and financial support.
The West, and Washington in particular, also had been using
Zaire as a weapons supply and staging area for support of the
anti-communist Unita rebel movement fighting the Marxist government
in Angola.
Mobutu, acting with strong CIA encouragement, had been assisting
rebel movements fighting Angola's Marxist government. The first
involvement was a disastrous CIA-backed effort to seize Angola's
oil-producing Cabinda enclave, which began in 1975, the day before
Angola achieved independence from Portugal.
Mobutu's meddling in Angola, at the behest of Washington, set a
pattern for the rest of his rule. He constantly kept a finger in
the crises of neighboring countries, from Chad and Congo to Uganda
and the Sudan.
With its borders with nine other countries, Mobutu marketed his
country to Washington and Paris -- obtaining economic aid and
political support in exchange -- as a platform for interventions and
covert operations throughout central and southern Africa.
With the end of the Cold War, Mobutu's relevance to Washington
and most of the West declined sharply. In 1990, as a wave of
democratic change swept much of Africa, Mobutu was forced to allow
multiparty politics.
A tumultuous national conference that drew from many parts of
Zairian society convened and obliged Mobutu to accept his most
determined political rival, Etienne Tshisekedi, as prime minister.
When Tshisekedi sought to assert his control over state
finances, however, Mobutu removed him from office, setting off a
crisis that led to the first of two outbreaks of killings and
looting in the capital by government soldiers.
Popular support for Tshisekedi was so overwhelming that Mobutu
retreated from the capital, living for a time on his luxurious
houseboat, the Kamanyola, on the Congo River, and eventually in his
palatial home in the northern town of Gbadolite.
After the swift end of a second stint in office by Tshisekedi,
officials in Washington, Paris and Brussels in 1994 engineered the
appointment as prime minister of Kengo wa Dondo, a long associate
of the president and former finance minister.
Kengo was supposed to govern for a year, and his mandate was to
organize national elections, rein in galloping inflation and
restore the authority of a decaying state.
Despite unstinting Western support, Kengo's administration was
widely seen as a disaster. Civil servants were unpaid for months at
a time, no progress was made toward elections and corruption
continued as blatantly as ever.
Mobutu experienced a brief and unexpected return to
international relevance with the 1994 civil war and mass killing in
neighboring Rwanda. More than a million Rwandan Hutu, many of them
participants in the killing of members of the Tutsi minority, fled
into Zaire after a Tutsi-led insurgency seized power.
Foreign governments and international aid organizations were
obliged to deal with Mobutu, ending a period of diplomatic
isolation. Mobutu's relations with France, which had been a major
backer of the defeated Hutu government in Rwanda, nearly returned
to their historic warmth.
TOTTERING LEOPARD: Speedy Unraveling To Decades of Rule
he end for Mobutu came with surprising speed, after Rwanda's
Tutsi-led government supported an uprising by Zairian Tutsi who had
come under attack in eastern Zaire.
In three weeks in October 1996, what had been a Tutsi uprising
turned into a full-blown political rebellion against Mobutu led by
Kabila.
Once Kabila's newborn Alliance of Democratic Forces for the
Liberation of Congo seized the major cities of Zaire's far east,
African patrons with scores to settle against Mobutu lined up to
help the rebels with money, men and arms.
The anti-Mobutu coalition came to include Rwanda, Uganda,
Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and, with major support
provided toward the end of the seven-month war, Angola, where
Mobutu had interfered the most in three decades of rule.
When Bill Richardson, the U.S. delegate to the United Nations
and President Clinton's special envoy, visited Zaire early this
month to engineer Mobutu's resignation, the aging, cancer-ridden
president asked him why, after years of loyal service and
friendship with the West, he had been abandoned.
"I said the mess you are in is not our mess," Richardson said.
"You just didn't govern your own country."
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