The price of Mobutu

Zaire is paying an increasingly heavy price for the misrule of lingering autocrat Mobutu Sese Seko. As if the country's poor development and his corruption were not enough, Zaire is in the throes of a civil war that is inflicting a terrible human toll and could lead to national disintegration. The country's immensity, strategic location, ethnic diversity and capacity to set an example add up to great potential trouble for all of central Africa.

The civil war is Mobutu's creation. Last fall his forces undertook to expel a Tutsi minority that had lived peacefully for two centuries in eastern Zaire. That minority, helped by Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, then geared up to unseat the Mobutu regime, whose army of looters hangs on now thanks to its longtime imperial-minded patron, France, some of France's African clients (Morocco, Chad and Togo) and some Russian and Serbian mercenaries. There is the usual flow of refugees abused by the men with the guns. There is no peacekeeping force to speak of and no visible prospect of one.

African states are alert to the regional perils of an unconstrained struggle in Zaire. Nelson Mandela, encouraged by the United Nations and the Organization of African Unity, has launched talks designed to install a cease-fire and open political negotiations. But the rebels have the military momentum, the regime shrinks from negotiating from weakness, and the talks in South Africa languish. In his fourth decade of power, Mr. Mobutu hogs the leadership despite a degree of physical deterioration that has him again in France, near his stolen billions.

An accident of the calendar found Al Gore in South Africa as the Zaire talks were getting under way, and he and his team of experts helped. But the Americans have chosen, wisely, not to get out in front of the man everyone wants to get behind, Nelson Mandela.

Washington supports the traditional and still pervasive African attachment to the territorial integrity -- that is, to the colonially drawn boundaries -- of African states. This doctrine comforts the ins but, in this instance, legitimates President Mobutu's power grab. Multiethnic Zaire and its parts, as they loosen, need not only a democratic structure but an arrangement among all the neighbors to respect ethnic frontiers and flows as well as the old colonial lines. This takes a larger, almost permanent negotiation, not simply a single piece of paper.

-- The Washington Post