Word: kolwezi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Throughout Africa, reaction to the rescue operation was relatively restrained. The French-speaking countries were, as a whole, delighted. White South Africans argued that apart from demonstrating the "savagery" of Africa, the Shaba invasion and the 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...
...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 nationalists than leftists...
Although the rebels had come on foot, many rode home aboard an estimated 350 vehicles stolen from Kolwezi residents. TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood, who visited northern Zambia last week, reported that the improbable parade looked like "the largest and best organized stolen-car ring in history: dozens of sparkling Peugeots and Fiats, sedans and pickups, careening along amid clouds of dust, blue-and-gold Zaïre license plates glinting in the sun. One overloaded car carried a man clinging to its hood. Occasionally a stolen truck passed by jammed with rebels, not in uniform but arrayed...
...Kolwezi was a city of the dead. Almost as swiftly as it had begun, the seven-day battle for control of the industrial heart of Zaïre's copper-rich Shaba province ended last week. Driven from the city by the hard-fighting paratroopers of France's Foreign Legion (see box), an estimated 2,000 Katangese rebels faded back into the bush, retreating toward their home bases in eastern Angola. The paratroopers took up new positions at Lubumbashi, 160 miles away, turning over their guard duty to Zaïrian troops loyal to President Mobutu Sese Seko...
Virtually all of the city's 2,250 white residents had been airlifted to Belgium, where many told anguished stories of rebel terror and massacre. Thousands of Kolwezi's 100,000 blacks fled elsewhere, fearing reprisals that were only too soon in coming. The city was without food, without water, without electricity; streets were littered with unburied bodies rotting in the hot African...