Word: za
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...Kolwezi by the self-styled Katangese "Tigers" had been thoroughly organized. A year earlier, an estimated 2,000 rebels had launched Shaba I, an incursion into the region that was halted short of Kolwezi after 49 days of fighting between the F.N.L.C. forces and the French-supported Moroccan and Zaïrian troops. The rebels promised to return to Shaba and overthrow Mobutu's regime. They carefully planned this infiltration. After the liberation of Kolwezi, French paratroopers found three railroad cars filled with weapons, ranging from Soviet AK-47 automatic rifles to Israeli-made UZI submachine guns. Along with...
...ammunition were .stores of food, including U.S. military rations, cans of fruit salad, and frankfurters. Much of the material had been either stolen or purchased illicitly from the Zaïrian army, whose soldiers are so poorly paid that corruption is endemic...
Then came the uncovering of horrors. Most of the slaughtered Europeans had been killed in clusters-including one group of 34 who were gunned down in a small room of a house where they had taken refuge. Bodies were left lying in the streets for days. The Zaïre news agency AZAP lamely tried to explain that "for purposes of identification and to facilitate the work of the press and the Red Cross, all bodies have been left at the spot where they were killed." As the stench became intolerable and the threat of a cholera epidemic grew...
...Zaïrian forces added to the death toll. In Kolwezi, suspected rebel sympathizers were taken in a long line to a quarry on the city's outskirts for interrogation; from time to time the sharp rattle of gunfire filled the air. Toward week's end, President Mobutu ordered his troops to clear civilians from a 65-mile stretch of Shaba province along the Angolan border. The area, he warned, would be a fire-free zone, in which Zaïrian troops would have permission to shoot at anything that moved...
...devastated European section of Kolwezi, where houses had been shattered and looted by both sides (Zaïrian troops walked off with whatever the rebels had left behind), houseboys by habit padlocked gates and tended gardens, waiting for their employers to return. In Brussels, however, the majority of white survivors insisted that they would never go back, out of fear that a reign of terror in which so many friends had lost their lives could be repeated...