Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, has long viewed his resource-rich African country as little more than a personal plantation, to be plundered, oppressed and consigned to misery. So while distressing, it’s not surprising that the ailing Mobutu has opted to inflict one last tragedy on his suffering people by digging in for what looks like a hopeless resistance to rebels who have already overrun most of the country.
Instead of slinking off after three decades of rule, Mobutu declared emergency law and appointed a top general as prime minister, a misguided move that might delay but won’t prevent the dictator’s inevitable overthrow but in the meantime could drench the country in one final blood bath.
What’s more, by shunting aside the opposition prime minister he named less than a week ago, Mobutu has probably dealt a fatal blow to the chance of a third force emerging to rein in the ambitions of rebel leader Laurent Kabila and bolster the fragile prospects for a more humane future. There’s growing worry that Kabila, who has been fighting Mobutu since the 1960s and who still describes himself as a Marxist, will turn out to be just one more cruel, greedy warlord of the type that has inflicted so much grief on Zaire since it achieved independence in 1960.
Concerns about Kabila have been intensified by reports that his forces have been massacring civilians since the insurgency began last year. A United Nations investigator has identified the sites of 40 mass graves where he believes victims of rebel atrocities are buried, and the Clinton administration called Wednesday for a full investigation. Unfortunately, by the time the whole truth is known, Kabila could be heading up a new regime in Kinshasa, Zaire’s capital.
Washington, through African intermediaries, has been privately urging Mobutu for weeks to step down and go into exile while there’s yet some opportunity to schedule free elections and forestall new tyranny. On Wednesday, that effort was stepped up when White House spokesman Mike McCurry declared, “Mobutism is about to become a creature of history, because the support for President Mobutu is not sufficient to lead Zaire into the next chapter of its history.” Even Mobutu, at some level, must grasp the fatal accuracy of this assessment.
The sad truth is the U.S. lacks sufficient leverage to make Mobutu see the light, especially without the all-out support of the French government, which is paralyzed by fears that Mobutu’s fall would diminish the status of the French language in Africa. It seems to us that one sure way of bolstering that status is to articulate the facts of life to Mobutu in a Parisian accent.
