Word: laurent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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KINSHASA: As Laurent Kabila?s rebels entered Zaire's second largest city Lubumbashi to the sound of cheering crowds, preparing to move on Kinshasa, ailing Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko made a feeble attempt to regain the power he held for three decades, ousting the country's new prime minister Etienne Tshisekedi and naming the army chief of staff to head the government. The White House demanded that Mobutu step down and go into exile, effectively ending U.S. support of the African dictator. "Mobutuism is about to become a creature of history," White House press secretary Mike McCurry said. Tshisekedi...
MBUJI-MAYI, Zaire: Standing before 50,000 rapturous supporters in the diamond-mining center of Mbuji-Mayi, Laurent Kabila seemed to make a promise to all Zaire: to topple Mobutu Sese Seko and retrieve a nation's stolen wealth. "The diamonds of Mbuji-Mayi went to Kinshasa," Kabila said. "We must go there to find the people who took the diamonds of Mbuji-Mayi." There's a lot of symbolism there, says TIME's Marguerite Michaels. The main message is, without question, he is going to Kinshasa. Meanwhile, another branch of Kabila's army was closing on Lubumbashi, capital...
...marches at the head of that insurrection is Laurent Kabila, 56, a short, rotund guerrilla leader who has been battling Mobutu for more than 30 years. Since the early 1970s Kabila has waged a haphazard and by several accounts rather incompetent struggle against Mobutu's government from the jungle highlands around Lake Tanganyika. Although Kabila's Marxist-inspired People's Revolutionary Party received support from the Soviet Union, China and Cuba (Che Guevara once spent several months training with them), the obscure group never amounted to more than a nuisance. But the experience did enable Kabila to forge a valuable...
...last days other than trying to fight off prostate cancer, he isn't saying. Government officials say Mobutu's return will revitalize the army and restore Zairian pride, and turn the tide against the rebellion in the east. Yet although the evening news Monday reported that rebel leader Laurent Kabila had been "trembling" since he heard of the President's return, Mobutu brings no army with him. The outgunned Zairian forces have been consistently beaten and humiliated, and it seems unlikely that leadership alone can halt the rebel advance. What Mobutu's arrival is generating so far is a maximum...
...another wavelength, most U.N. officials, aid workers and the leader of the Tutsi rebels, Laurent Kabila, talked of a more grandiose mission entirely. They expected not just simple handouts but a major effort to settle the violent tribal and political quarrels. Kabila told a news conference that any force that came in without a mandate to disarm the Hutu militias "would be useless." Others figured events and pressures on the ground would induce mission creep. "Let's get them in on one mandate," said a U.N. official in New York City, "and see what happens when they get shot...