Word: kabila
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Kabila meant to turn that promise into a future. Between his arrival in office in May 1997 and the outbreak of civil war last August, he changed the name of the country back to Congo (from Zaire). He brought inflation down from 900% to 5%. He attempted to build a professional army. But what Kabila didn't do was broaden his political base beyond his own tribe. And he began using arrests of politicians and journalists as a management tool...
...never had a chance," says Daniel Simpson, U.S. ambassador to Zaire when Kabila arrived. "He was a minor opponent of Mobutu who had been operating for more than 30 years in the bush. He never had an army; he never had an ideology. He couldn't delegate as President. He became obsessed with his personal security and became dependent on people from his tribe in the south of the country...
Almost immediately his allies turned against him. The first was Major General Paul Kagame, Rwanda's Vice President and Minister of Defense. It was Kagame, with Uganda's and Burundi's support, who had chosen Kabila to replace Mobutu. In exchange, Kagame made one demand: he wanted Rwandan officers to retrain the Congolese army, as a way to help stop cross-border attacks by Congo-based Hutu warriors on Rwanda's Tutsi population...
...Kabila's rule rotted, Kagame lost patience. Kabila, who belongs to the Luba tribe, had begun to look like another Mobutu: paranoid and willing to use ethnic violence to maintain his rule. The idea terrified the Rwandans, who encouraged a faction of the Congolese army to oust Kabila. In response, Kabila recruited thousands of Rwandan Hutu fighters. By last September, the country was in an all-out civil war. Says a U.S. official: "The threat of more genocide is what is behind this...
...wasn't only the Rwandans who worried about that. Tutsi-led Burundi, whose soldiers have been fighting Kabila, has been pressing to use the Congo as a buffer zone. It is 100 miles from the capital of Rwanda to the Congo border but just 10 miles from that border to Burundi's capital--too close in the eyes of Burundians, who worry about a contagion of Rwanda's ethnic chaos...