Word: za
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...radio in Kinshasa, Zaïre's capital, called the invaders an army of "mercenaries led by other mercenaries from across the Atlantic and prompted by a third country with an ideology of international conquest"-clearly a charge that the Cubans were involved actively and the Russians indirectly. In fact the soldiers were Zaïrian rebels who had fought in the army of Katangese Leader Moise Tshombe in the early 1960s. Remember Tshombe? He tried to set up his own regime in the copper-wealthy province of Katanga and secede from the Congo. After the central government crushed...
Imperial Manner. The invasion started quietly a fortnight ago when the Zaïrian rebels-probably no more than 2,000, though Kinshasa placed their number at 5,000-slipped across the border into Zaïre's Shaba region (the former Katanga province) and began to move toward the copper mines. According to U.S. reports, the Katangese had crossed the border in trucks provided by Angola, and were equipped with Soviet-made rockets. They were accompanied by a number of white troops; these could have been Cuban soldiers, but they could also have been Belgian or other European...
...essential fact of national life in Zaïre is that the central government must have the revenues from the copper mines to survive-and once again, the government's control of those mines is in jeopardy. Over the past 16 years, the U.S. has always helped Zaïre in moments of crisis. Despite his imperial manner and lavish personal taste, President Mobutu has so far managed the considerable feat of holding his mineral-rich country together. Almost helpless to influence the sudden state of affairs in Zaïre, the U.S. dispatched two planeloads of military supplies...
Wide Influence. The attack on Zaïre is the latest-and perhaps most ominous-indication of the fast-growing presence in black Africa of the Cubans, whom former U.N. Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan called "the Gurkhas of the Russian empire." Besides the approximately 13,000 Cuban troops and 4,000 advisers in Angola, Western intelligence sources believe that Havana now has military and/or civilian advisers in the Congo (Brazzaville) (2,000), Sierra Leone (200-300), Guinea (300-500), Equatorial Guinea (300-500), Guinea-Bissau (300), Mozambique (500-600), Tanzania (500), Somalia (650) and, for the past month...
...Soviet Union. To some extent, Castro's trip was undoubtedly an exercise in extending fraternal greetings to African regimes that he regards as sympathetic to Cuban socialism. But Castro's views about "exporting revolution" are too well known to be dismissed lightly. And as the fighting in Zaïre demonstrated last week, a relatively small fighting force, trained in the techniques of modern warfare, has an enormous capacity to destabilize young and fragile nations...