Word: mobutu
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While President Mobutu celebrated the first anniversary of his military regime in the Congo last week, everyone showed a special interest in his highest-ranking official guest, King Ntare V, 19, of neighboring Burundi. At a round of parties, guests wondered openly how the shy boy King would fare in Maryland-sized, blood-torn Burundi, from which he only last July ousted his own royal father...
Micombero warned that if King Ntare tried to return to Burundi he would be treated "as a criminal." No difference. Ntare could find little support for any comeback attempt. Mobutu offered his sympathy, but was not about to do more. An ex-King at an age when he still has time to pick a less perilous career, Ntare sadly abandoned the Congo and headed off for Europe...
...hundreds of others into the bush. Part of the Katangese force managed to escape in a column that included 14 commandeered beer trucks and all the city's ambulances, but it did not get far. When reconnaissance planes spotted it on the highway south toward Katanga last week, Mobutu dispatched troops to a river crossing 450 miles from Kisangani, where the Kats were virtually wiped out. An ambush destroyed the first trucks to cross the river, and Congolese air force planes took care of the rest, leaving the survivors to sue for peace to make their way on foot...
Diplomatic Break. Mobutu seized the occasion to launch a general political attack on his enemies everywhere. Tshombe, he claimed, was using his exile in Madrid to mount a plot against the Congo's military government, hiring mercenaries in Europe, training them in southern France, and, with Portuguese collusion, massing troops across the Congolese border in Angola...
Tshombe and the Portuguese government denied everything, but none of the disclaimers had any effect. Still ranting about "the satanic plans of the enemies of our country," Mobutu last week broke relations with Portugal and ordered all foreign countries, friend and foe alike, to close their consulates in the Congo's interior...