Laurent Kabila: The best hope for future Africa

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): One of life's little pleasures over the past few months, as Laurent Kabila's ragtag but disciplined liberation army swept inexorably across Zaire, has been tracking the statements of U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. His arrogance and ignorance epitomize the bafflement of Western governments in the face of an Africa that is leaving the bad old ways behind.

"Mr. Kabila...needs to think about being a responsible person who can lead a government," said Burns in March, shortly after Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL) took the city of Kisangani. "In anticipation of that, he needs to think about ways to preserve life."

Now, the ADFL's eight-month march across Zaire has been just about the least bloody war in African history. Virtually nobody was killed in the liberation of Kisangani. Yet for months the United States has been predicting a holocaust if the war ended with Kabila's troops marching into Kinshasa instead to agreeing to share power. And Burns, who was still in school the last time Kisangani was 'liberated', regularly lectured Kabila about responsibility.

Kabila was already a 'rebel' in the eastern Congo when Kisangani was last in the news (under the old colonial name of Stanleyville) 32 years ago. In fact, Kabila was already one of the leaders of the guerrilla movement fighting to revive the Democratic Republic of the Congo, proclaimed in 1960, whose first president, Patrice Lumumba, was killed by Gen. Mobutu at the instigation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 1961.

In 1965, when the rebels seized what is now Kisangani, U.S. planes flew in Belgian paratroops from a British base to kill them and bring it back under Mobutu's control. (Even then, Mobutu's own army was so corrupt as to be utterly useless). Laurent Kabila knows all about where responsibility lies in this part of the world.

Yet right through this March and April, as Kabila's forces closed in on Kinshasa, taking the copper capital of Lubumbashi, then the diamond center of Mbuji-Mayi, then Kikwit and Kenge -- all with practically no violence -- a chorus of Western voices, echoed by lazy media, treated Kabila like a wayward child who didn't understand the danger of his actions. Zaire would break up if the war did not stop at once. (Why?) The war would spill across Zaire's borders and set all Central Africa aflame. (How?)

The South Africans were roped in to chair negotiations for a 'transitional government' in which Kabila would have to share power with Mobutu's people and figures from the Kinshasa 'opposition' who were more amenable to Western manipulation. European Union Human Rights Commissioner Emma Bonino even warned that if Kabila replaced Mobutu, it would not necessarily be a change for the better.

As the ADFL troops closed the ring around Kinshasa last week, Nicholas Burns returned once again to the task of instructing Kabila in his responsibilities. "We are at a time of testing for Mr. Kabila," he intoned. "... And we hope very much that he will be able to meet these tests. We have very high standards."

Higher these days, presumably, than in the quarter-century just recently past when Washington solidly backed the dictator Mobutu despite the ruination he was visiting on his country, and funneled money and weapons through Mobutu to rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in neighboring Angola, thereby fueling a terrible war that devastated that country for two decades.

But Burns can't recall any of that stuff now. He is just concerned, in his high-minded way, that Kabila "does not have a track record as a government leader. He has held a variety of political and ideological positions throughout his long career in opposition. And we hope that he will be a responsible leader who believes in what the Zairean people deserve. And that is economic reform and reconstruction and political freedom."

If somebody patronized me in public as blatantly as that, I would seriously consider hitting him. Mercifully, an ocean separates Burns and Kabila, and the latter seems to have outgrown such childish impulses in any case.

So forget Washington's ham-handed attempts to corral Kabila into an "inclusive transitional government", and just consider what is really going on in the Congo (as we must now start calling it again) and in Africa.

Firstly, black Africa's third most populous country (only Nigeria and Ethiopia are bigger) has escaped from the brutal dictator who has looted it ever since independence. Kabila cannot bring economic recovery overnight, and he does not intend to hold an early election -- maybe in four years' time, guessed Kabila's spokesman Raphael Ghenda -- but things were already getting better in the areas under his control, even in the midst of a war.

Studying Kabila's past for clues as to how he will behave in power today is about as useful as studying chicken bones: a man plays many roles in 35 years as a revolutionary leader. But four important things can be said in his favor: he was the only opposition leader never to compromise with Mobutu; he has never been suspected of serious corruption or wanton cruelty; he fought a clean war with minimum force -- and he has the right friends.

The people who back Kabila are the region's best leaders: honest, competent men like Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi. They are the leading edge of a wave of second-generation leaders who are the best hope for Africa's future.

And who tried to keep Kabila from power? There were the Hutu militias who carried out the genocide in Rwanda and were then given shelter by Mobutu, and Mobutu's old friend Jonas Savimbi whose UNITA insurgents wrecked Angola. Plus the French, who helped organize white mercenaries to defend Mobutu and rallied the puppet presidents of client states like Gabon and the Central African Republic to give him diplomatic support. And (even though it didn't actually back Mobutu), there was also the U.S. State Department.

A man is known not only by his friends, but also by his enemies. On both counts, Laurent Kabila scores very high.