Word: congo
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...ridiculing those who thought it imperative to react "every time [Leonid] Brezhnev sneezes." What eventually brought the President to the point of taking a different line was the latest crisis in Africa, this one in the huge copper-rich nation of Zaïre, once known as the Belgian Congo. There, a force of 1,900 French and Belgian paratroops, assisted by 18 U.S. jet transports, had just routed another invasion of Zaire's Shaba region (formerly Katanga province) by secessionists based in Angola...
...Kolwezi massacre had awakened the West to the threat of Marxist involvement in Africa. Many black leaders seemed far less outraged than they had been in late 1964, when the West mounted a similar rescue mission to save 1,300 whites stranded in Stanleyville (now Kisangani) during the Congo's Simba rebellion. But they were still acutely aware that the enduring problem was that of a continent unable to govern its own affairs. As the Zambia Daily Mail observed, "The almost casual ease with which European powers can fly into an African country and airlift its nationals or occupy whole...
...more than 1.5 million Lunda tribesmen, who also live in northwestern Zambia and eastern Angola. The rebellion was led by Mo'ise Tshombe, whose followers were seeking to preserve their mineral wealth from their enemies, the government in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and the Bak-ongo tribes of the lower Congo. In those days the secessionists were thought to be rightists in the hire of the Belgian and French mineowners. Although their successors in the Congolese National Liberation Front (F.N.L.C.), who just attacked Kolwezi, talk vaguely of installing a radical regime in Kinshasa, they are probably more accurately described as misguided...
Economic violence was the quieter accompaniment to the obvious political repression: the colony's economy was structured to benefit the Belgians, and the Belgians alone. When the Congo gained independence, social security payments in Belgium dropped 40 per cent--an indication of the importance of the huge African country for its colonial masters. The rich copper mines in Shaba, then Katanga, were owned by a Belgian state monopoly. The Belgians had hoped to continue their economic control even when political power had passed into African hands...
...relations with his neighbors are strained, to say the least. Angola in particular has had problems with his erratic and belligerent style. Mobutu's designs on Angola have never been secret: he wanted to acquire the oil-rich enclave of Cabinda--which is separated from Angola by the Congo River--along with whatever else he could grab. When the Portuguese agreed to leave Angola, Zairean and South African troops joined local groups to fight the Movimento Popular de Liberacion d'Angola (MPLA), which had established itself as the best-organized and most popular nationalist movement. In this "Second...