Word: shaba
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...countrymen, many of whom had just snake-danced through the streets of the capital. Waving an elaborately carved cane, he pointed contemptuously at a pair of bedraggled, badly wounded prisoners-the first, apparently, to have been captured by government forces in nearly two months of fighting against invaders in Shaba province (TIME, April 25). Mobutu's gestures brought cries of "Mort, mort," (Death, death) from the crowd. Looking as hapless as Christians facing an arena of lions, the two men were paraded before foreign newsmen and testified through interpreters that Cuba and Angola were behind the invasion by Katangese...
Most of the battlefield gains seem to have been made by the Moroccans. In part, though, the lift in Zaïre's fortunes was due to the fact that Mobutu belatedly shipped additional pay, food and weapons to his 4,000 soldiers in Shaba. In the interests of boosting their morale, he made a rather bizarre request of Washington: that some 16,000 cases of canned Coca-Cola be included in the $15 million in "nonlethal" military equipment the U.S. is sending to Zaïre. It seems that potable water for the thirsty soldiers is in short...
Arbitrary Borders. Initially, Mobutu's Western supporters shied away from getting bogged down in another Congolese war. Belgium, France and the U.S. sent token military supplies last month-and hoped the threat would just go away. It did not. The Katangese occupied much of the copper-rich Shaba area without opposition. Mobutu's big break came a fortnight ago when Morocco's King Hassan II, whose army is still fighting leftist guerrillas in the former colony of Spanish Sahara, decided that the time had come to bail out a friend. Egypt's President Sadat was also...
...built palaces for himself in each of the country's nine regions), "le Guide," as Mobutu likes to call himself, has brought Zaire to the verge of economic collapse. Nonetheless, with so much Western aid on the way, there seems a fair chance that the "invasion" of Shaba may eventually be reduced to the kind of low-level guerrilla warfare that has smoldered on, in parts of southern and eastern Zaire, for much of the past 17 years...
During the week at least 1,000 Moroccan soldiers joined the 4,000 Zairian troops at Kolwezi, center of Shaba's copper-mining district. Implying that the tide of battle was turning, Kinshasa claimed that 30-40 rebel soldiers had been killed by week's end. But nobody could be quite sure since the government had taken the precaution of ordering all foreign journalists out of the fighting area. Stated reason: some of the previous news reports had contained "military secrets" and thus were "tantamount to espionage...