Word: mobutuism
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...when it rolled across the border, hoping to carve out a buffer zone to prevent Hutu militiamen using sanctuaries in the state then known as Zaire for their genocidal campaign against Rwandan Tutsis. As they moved westward, the Rwandans encountered no resistance - the army of the reviled dictator Mobutu Sese Seko had no interest in defending the borders of a state that hadn't paid them for years. Mobutu's kleptocracy had finally reduced Zaire to an empty shell of a state. And that gave the Rwandans the idea of marching on the capital together with Uganda and Angola...
...expect to see many of those who cheered Laurent Kabila's march to power mourning over his assassination. Because the diminutive guerrilla leader, who assumed the presidency of the Congo only four years ago as the Rwandan army led an insurrection that swept aside the four-decade dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, had become a caricature of the man he'd replaced. He headed up a corrupt, inept and duplicitous government that delivered little to its long-suffering people except more war. Kabila was reportedly shot dead Tuesday by one of his bodyguards, in what may have been part...
...those who'd brought him to power. The former guerrilla leader tapped into resentment of his "outsider" regime in Kinshasa by initiating a pogrom against Rwandan Tutsis - the very army that had transformed him from a minor regional insurgent into the president. Rwanda had installed Kabila precisely because Mobutu had provided shelter to the Hutu genocidaires who had killed a million of their Tutsi countrymen in 1994, and Kabila had failed to deliver on promises to stop the Hutu gunmen operating from bases inside the Congo. When he turned on the Rwandans in his capital and made common cause with...
...hype in Warsaw notwithstanding, democracy has never been the linchpin of U.S. foreign policy. During the Cold War, the very term "democratic" was simply a synonym for anticommunist - Suharto, Mobutu, Generals Diem and Pinochet, the medieval Islamists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and many other dodgy candidates were all in the "democratic" camp, remember. Even since communism's decisive defeat has allowed Washington to abandon such questionable company, it's simply not true to proclaim democracy as the basis for U.S. foreign policy...
...Rwanda. They make their camps in the wilds of eastern Congo - formerly known as Zaire - wreaking havoc there or across the border in Rwanda, and current Congolese president Laurent Kabila has shown little inclination to control them. (Rwanda, the region?s military heavyweight, once backed Kabila?s rebellion against Mobutu Sese Seko because Mobutu would not control the militias; now it is backing the new Congo rebels against Kabila for the same reason.) So what happened in Zambia on Tuesday was that everybody signed except the people who kicked off the bloody back-and-forth of the last five years...