Word: congo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...many of the eleven years that Mobutu Sese Seko, 46, has ruled Zaïre, that huge central African country (once known as the Belgian Congo) has dined out on its promise of wealth. The country's enormous, and still largely unexploited, deposits of copper served as a kind of collateral on which Zaïre managed to borrow extensively abroad. It now owes $2.9 billion, $800 million of which is due private lenders in the U.S., Europe and Japan. But instead of achieving steady growth, Zaïre became a textbook example of how a Third World nation...
...result, three major projects have languished. A $500 million hydroelectric power transmission line that is supposed to snake over 1,200 miles of forest and bush from the Zaïre River (once the Congo) to the copper belt in Shaba (formerly Katanga) is far behind schedule. Construction of a huge addition to the state-owned Gécamines copper mine, financed by the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the Libyan government, is 18 months late. Work has stopped on the giant new Tenke-Fungurume copper mine, and international backers are handing over $750,000 a month just...
...prospects for white-ruled Rhodesia after it becomes black Zimbabwe rest squarely on the ability of the nationalist factions to unite around a responsible leader. A decade ago, white settlers all over Africa shuddered at the thought of "another Congo" in their midst. Today, African observers wonder if in the splintered makeup of the Rhodesian nationalists there could be the seeds of another Angola. As always in Africa, the qualities of the man who emerges as leader will be all-important ? in determining whether the country will undergo an orderly transition, and whether enough whites will remain to help...
...more than a decade, Mobutu Sese Seko, 45, has ruled Zaïre with style and forcefulness-a fact that his countrymen are seldom allowed to forget. Commonly referred to by his own government and press as Le Guide, Mobutu restored stability to the former Belgian Congo and unified its 100 tribes into a true nation after the bloody civil war of the 1960s. Since then, the shy, scholarly army commander has become a flamboyant, African cult figure whose rule sometimes seems akin to that of a god-chief. Mobutu's portrait, capped by the leopard-skin hat that...
...young countries. Zaïre has known a lot of turbulence in the past-secessions, rebellions, civil war, and that is what I feel is going on in Angola. There was much more violence than we had, much more vested interest from the outside than in 1960 [in the Congo]. The thing that concerns us is the quantity of heavy sophisticated arms and equipment that the Russians and Cubans have amassed in that country. We cannot, in the face of that, be indifferent. [But] I really don't think the Russians and Cubans intend to repeat their Angola experience...