Zaire's Mobutu enters his final days

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The wicked old man has been around so long that it's hard to believe he could ever be driven from power, but it's actually happening. Kalemia, in the southern Shaba province, fell to the rebels on Feb. 4, Punia and Lubutu in the east-central region fell over the weekend, and Isiro in the north-east is next.

Africa's second-largest country is about to be liberated from the grip of Mobutu Sese Seko, president, marshal, guide and helmsman of Zaire.

"Liberated" is the correct word. This is not just another meaningless tribal squabble over who gets the loot. It is a carefully planned, highly organized campaign to wrest control of Zaire from the man who has done more harm to Africa than any other single dictator, and it is chewing up the Zairean army and its mercenary allies with admirable efficiency.

The rebels are advancing in at least four separate columns, separated by hundreds of kilometers and diverging further as they go. Against a competent opponent, this strategy would be a recipe for disaster, but against the thugs who make up the Zairean army (motto: "We loot, we rape, we flee") it makes perfectly good sense.

If the white mercenaries Mobutu has hired don't fight a lot better than they have so far, then in another week or so the rebels will capture Zaire's second- and third-biggest cities, Kisangani in the north and Lubumbashi in the south. And they won't stop there.

"Mobutu has no army. His generals are mere traders whom we shall defeat across this country," said Laurent Kabila, leader of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo- Zaire (ADFL), setting a deadline of Feb. 21 for Mobutu to start negotiating or face a major offensive on the capital, Kinshasa.

As usual, various parties are rushing around trying to stop the fighting. Some of them even mean well, but the French don't. Paris is pulling out all the stops to get a United Nations military intervention in Zaire, but it's just trying to save Mobutu from the fate he so richly deserves.

So far, U.S. pressure has kept Paris from sending its own Africa-based troops into Zaire. Good. Mobutu's efforts to round up military support from other old Cold War allies like Morocco and Israel have yielded no troops whatever. Even better. Because the last thing Zaire needs now is a stalemate or a cease-fire.

The best thing about the present situation is that it's quite easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys -- and, for once, all the good guys are on the same side.

Laurent Kabila is no plaster saint. Anybody who has been resisting Mobutu's dictatorship since 1965 has made the occasional shabby compromise here or there. But Kabila has built up the ADFL as a multitribal alliance of people who are genuinely committed to saving Zaire, not just carving it up.

Kabila flirted with Marxism when he was allied to the Cubans during the 1965 uprising, but since the mid-1970s he has been severely pragmatic. His strategy has been to create small political cells in the towns and promote literacy programs and agricultural cooperatives in liberated areas in the mountains -- and there's no more talk of nationalization. He just wants the government to get a fair price for Zaire's resources, and stop the chronic theft: "We will sell our mines to whoever can offer their services."

After 32 years of looting by Mobutu and company, Zaire is scarcely a country today. The roads generally stop a short distance out of town, and the regions pay just enough to the center to keep Mobutu's mafia at bay. Few of the 35 million Zaireans receive a proper education; even fewer have decent medical care, let alone a job. But 10 years of honest government could work a miracle even in Zaire -- and Kabila is backed by a coalition of other African governments that have already achieved what he is aiming for.

The ADFL's arms and training come mostly from Rwanda, where the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) drove the genocidal Hutu regime from power two years ago. The ADFL's political model, like the RPF's, is Uganda, where Yoweri Museveni's rebels won power a decade ago on a non-tribal platform and ended 20 years of tyranny, pillage and massacre by the likes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. Less directly involved, but offering at least moral support and perhaps military advisers to the Zairean rebels, are the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

You could not have a sharper contrast. On one side, a roll- call of east-central Africa's best second-generation governments -- Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea -- support the Zairean rebels (though they must deny it in public for diplomatic reasons). On the other side are African troops who would work for any regime that gives them license to loot, and European troops who have no business being in Africa at all.

Among all the bandit armies that serve African kleptocracies, the Zairean army is rock bottom. Its soldiers rob and murder their own fellow countrymen, but they cannot fight. And when they run away, the other troops available to fill the gaps in the line are a distinctly motley crew.

There are some hundreds of white mercenaries, many of them Serbians fresh from atrocities on the battlefields of Bosnia. France is giving undisclosed amounts of military aid (probably including some advisers) to its old protege Mobutu. And finally there are Interahamwe militia troops who carried out the Hutu genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, and subsequently fled into Zaire with French help.

That is an impressive array of villains, but it is not a coherent military force. What's more, the Libyan aircraft that Col. Qaddafy promised to Mobutu have not arrived, Egypt isn't sending any troops this time, and both the United States and South Africa will oppose France's attempt to save Mobutu with a UN force.

It may take some time, but Mobutu is a goner. One painful, bloody step after another, Africa is rescuing itself.