Word: mobutuism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Backed by the CIA, army general Joseph-Desire Mobutu took over the Republic of the Congo in 1965 and later called himself Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1971 he renamed the country Zaire. Throughout his rule, Mobutu has dealt brutally with opponents, civilian and military. His country's mineral wealth and location kept Mobutu valuable to Western interests for years, but when the threat of communist expansion disappeared, his worth diminished. By 1993 his horrific human-rights record and his refusal to yield the throne had led to an economic squeeze of Zaire by three major trading partners--the U.S., France...
...would expect to find diamonds on the souls of evangelical American missionaries in Zaire? Situated in the bull's-eye of Africa, Zaire has 43 million citizens scratching out a living on roughly $500 a year apiece. Zaire's cruel, old-style dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, however, does not subsist on $500 a year--he has many millions stashed away, and right now he makes a decent income off his country's roughly $300 million-a-year diamond trade. Now, with Mobutu's permission, Zaire's diamond business has a new entrant--Pat Robertson, the American televangelist and ex-presidential...
Robertson could hardly engage in these activities without Mobutu's help. ``Diamonds are Mobutu's principal source of revenue,'' says William Harrop, who served as U.S. ambassador to Zaire from 1987 to 1991. ``It is virtually impossible to operate in that field without his permission.'' One man who helps run ADC in Zaire is Bill Lovick, a former Assemblies of God minister who was dismissed from the church in 1985 for ``a lack of ethics in raising Assemblies of God monies,'' according to a letter dispatched to him on Nov. 22, 1985, from the church's district secretary-treasurer. Lovick...
Washington -- Former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young was recently invited to Zaire by military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko for a secret meeting that focused partly on ending that country's estrangement from the U.S. The two discussed the ! possibility of using the good offices of the Carter Center in Atlanta to supervise elections in the central African country later this year. Young's visit was made with the knowledge of the U.S. State Department, and after Young returned to Washington, he delivered a letter from Mobutu to President Clinton...
...anarchy mounts, Zaire's Mobutu calmly enjoys his spoils...