Word: mobutu
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...with a laptop and jewelry. Ngugi thinks the attack was politically motivated, the work of Moi supporters who believe Wizard of the Crow's despicable despot is based on the former President. (In fact, he's a mix of infamous dictators: a touch of Moi, a pinch of Mobutu, a dash of Pinochet.) The men were eventually caught, and now Ngugi only goes back to attend their trial. Yet he still hopes to move back one day. He's comforted by the support of his fellow Kenyans. "They come up close to us on the street and start apologizing...
Some of the credit for Kabila's "soft landing" in Kinshasa may be owed to the persistent intervention of President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, who together with Richardson spent weeks trying to broker a deal that would avoid major bloodshed. It was partly at Mandela's urging that Mobutu relinquished his dictatorship. But early last week the South African leader's effort appeared to have collapsed, after Kabila failed to appear for a meeting with Mandela and Mobutu aboard a South African naval vessel docked off the port of Pointe Noire. Mandela, who had been host aboard the same...
Kabila's ascension to the leadership of Zaire, a nation of 45 million people the size of Western Europe and rich in diamonds, gold, cobalt and copper, came with stunning speed. Mobutu's ouster was the culmination of a seven-month military campaign that began as an uprising among Tutsi tribesmen in southeastern Zaire after they were ordered expelled from the country. With backing from the anti-Mobutu governments of Uganda, Rwanda and Angola, Kabila took control of and expanded the rebel movement, sweeping east to west across the vast Central African nation almost without opposition until he was camped...
...stiffest resistance Kabila confronted came not from the Zairian army but from the Angolan rebel group UNITA, led by Jonas Savimbi, a cold war ally of the U.S.'s and great friend of Mobutu's. One of the hardest-fought battles of the civil war was two weeks ago in the southern town of Kenge between Kabila's troops and UNITA rebels, who have long depended on Zaire as a pipeline for weapons and other supplies. UNITA fighters were also among the last defenders of Kinshasa's international airport. But by Friday they too bowed to the inevitable and headed...
Whatever his program, Kabila could not be worse than Mobutu, who reduced a nation that should be among the richest in Africa to utter penury. Meanwhile, Mobutu and his cronies looted the treasury of billions of dollars. In addition to his many secret bank accounts, Mobutu owns nine villas in Belgium, an estate on the French Riviera and an apartment in Paris; property in Johannesburg, Dakar, Abidjan and Morocco; a coffee plantation in Brazil; and, in the cellars of his estate in Portugal, 14,000 bottles of past-its-prime wine from 1930, the year of his birth. The dictator...