Word: mobutu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...endgame in Zaire arrived sooner than anyone expected. President Mobutu Sese Seko, the country's corrupt "Supreme Guide" for 32 years, finally ran out of moves. When he grudgingly flew off last Friday for a possible meeting with rebel leader Laurent Desire Kabila, Mobutu could choose only his manner of exit: to resign, as his neighbors and former friends were urging, or be thrown out at gunpoint, as Kabila's advancing troops intended to do in short order. Since last October the rebels of Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces have surged across two-thirds of the vast nation, while...
...Mobutu has to be as surprised as everyone else. He was out of the country for cancer treatment last fall when thousands of Zairean Tutsi living in the southeast rebelled in the face of a tribal pogrom supported by Mobutu's army. Led by Kabila, who has been involved in uprisings in Zaire for 30 years, well-armed fighters not only halted the pogrom but swiftly overwhelmed the government forces in the region. Kabila's Tutsi-led forces kept right on winning, and are now poised to take over the whole country...
...Clinton Administration dispatched U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson last week to push Mobutu into a face-to-face meeting with Kabila to arrange a "soft landing," allowing the President to retire on grounds of ill health. Richardson carried a letter along those lines from Clinton. The special envoy was also trying to persuade Kabila that he should accept a cease-fire, commit himself to early elections and open the way for aid agencies to help feed and evacuate tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled the fighting only to starve in the Zairean jungle. Both men disliked the terms...
...held territory. More than 1 million Hutu fled into Zaire from Rwanda in 1994 after genocidal tribal warfare there, and an unknown number have been running ever farther west to escape Kabila's advancing Tutsi-led fighters. In recent weeks they have become the hapless victims of many attackers: Mobutu's retreating troops; Kabila's rebels; local Zaireans resentful of the aid the refugees were receiving; and the death-dealing ravages of malnutrition, cholera and dysentery...
...turmoil attending Zaire's galloping insurgency against Mobutu has obscured the wider change. With Museveni as its godfather, this realignment of Africa's old order tends to be Anglophone in its international voice, pro-American in its diplomacy and attuned to Adam Smith in its economics. Says Barnett Rubin, an official at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: "The Zaire rebellion has become a trans-Africa struggle. It's very messy, but the prospects for better governance lie with these newer forces...