Word: mobutu
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...Kinshasa residents, still exuberant over the rebels' easy victory, are content to wait. Most businesses have reopened and the streets are once again clogged with traffic, Graff reports. Underneath, though, runs a current of revenge, as the gruesome mob lynchings that have claimed more than 200 suspected looters and Mobutu soldiers continue in the capital...
KINSHASA, Zaire: Following a Thursday evening meeting in which his top generals said they could no longer protect him or Kinshasa from Laurent Kabila's advancing rebel army, President Mobutu Sese Seko quietly gave up power and fled the capital Friday morning. After 32 years as the head of a kleptocracy that looted the vast natural wealth of a country the size of Western Europe, Mobutu returned to his palatial home at Gbadolite in northern Zaire. He reportedly will fly within the next few days to Morocco. Concluding that the government's ragged army will not be able to hold...
...rebel forces advanced within 60 miles of Zaire's embattled capital, U.N. mediators worked feverishly for a last-minute peace deal and State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns urged Americans to leave, saying "the end game is approaching." U.S. troops were preparing to evacuate Americans from the capital. On Tuesday, Mobutu Sese Seko's government imposed a dusk to dawn curfew on the city's residents. Although officials said the restrictions were imposed to prevent looting and unrest among civilians, it is government soldiers who have ransacked other cities as Kabila's troops advanced. Fearing that the final battle is near...
...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...
Last October Kagame staged a cross-border incursion, joining Zairean Tutsi rebels to rout murderous Hutu militias that had fled across the frontier with the civilian refugees. When Mobutu's army vanished in the face of this onslaught, a full-scale Zairean rebellion suddenly seemed possible. Museveni told his Rwandan friend to tap Laurent Kabila as the leader of a broader movement, and today Kabila, with key help from Kagame, is ready to take Zaire...