Word: mobutu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...role played by the Soviet Union and by Cuba, which now has 20,000 soldiers and 4,000 civilians based in Angola. In addition, the U.S. and its European allies were concerned about how to extend some limited military support to the Zaïrian government of President Mobutu Sese Seko...
...Though Mobutu is as inept as he is ruthless, most Western governments feel there is no real alternative to him in sight as a ruler for a huge country (905,562 sq. mi.) with seemingly insoluble tribal conflicts. The French government is anxious to remove the 700 Foreign Legionnaires who freed Kolwezi and replace them with a peace-keeping force to be furnished by several African states. Last weekend U.S. transport planes began flying French troops out of Zaïre and replacing them with Moroccans as the first units of a peace-keeping command. But unless the legionnaires are replaced...
...Mobutu and Zaïre, that would mean disaster. The copper and cobalt mines of Shaba are responsible for two-thirds of the nation's foreign exchange earnings, and Zaïre needs them to survive. Although the region was relatively calm last week, no one precluded the possibility of another rebel attack from across the border, or of a general uprising by a population suffering from severe poverty and the oppression of its country's own plundering army...
...rian forces added to the death toll. In Kolwezi, suspected rebel sympathizers were taken in a long line to a quarry on the city's outskirts for interrogation; from time to time the sharp rattle of gunfire filled the air. Toward week's end, President Mobutu ordered his troops to clear civilians from a 65-mile stretch of Shaba province along the Angolan border. The area, he warned, would be a fire-free zone, in which Zaïrian troops would have permission to shoot at anything that moved...
...size of the operation, and the captured weapons can easily be replaced. In an interview last week with the Paris-based weekly Afrique-Asie, F.N.L.C. Leader Nathaniel Mbumba said that the Shaba incursion had resulted in an "irreversible situation" and that the rebels were determined to drive President Mobutu from power. The next stage in that effort may be a low-level campaign of harassment that Zaïre's 40,000-man army will find hard to counter. Late last week F.N.L.C. troops made probing attacks on two towns near the Angolan border, about 300 miles from Kinshasa...