Chris McGreal writes from Kinshasa on the machinations behind the chaos in Zaire
THE gatekeeper shakes his head in despair at mention of the leopards of President Mobutu Park. No one fed them, he says, until one by one they disappeared from their cages along with the lions and rhinos. Only a few starving monkeys remain, and the plump crocodiles for which meat is unaccountably found.
The sprawling park named after President Mobutu Sese Seko was once a flamboyant playground in his honour on the banks of the Congo River. Visitors were welcomed to its exotic zoo and water theme park at a Chinese pagoda. And in the midst of the park sat the headquarters of the only political party once permitted in Zaire.
But like all else touched by Zaire’s ailing autocrat it has fallen into ruin. Water to the slides dried up. The animals withered away. The road to the zoo is all but impassible. The restaurant still opens its doors but there are few customers who want to be associated with Mobutu anymore.
And he, apparently, wants little to do with them. Zaire’s desperately sick ruler of 32 years flew home from cancer treatment in France last week and promptly hid. Mobutu refused to come off the plane to meet his own prime minister or the army chiefs helpless to stop the ceaseless advance of Laurent Kabila’s rebels across a country which the Zairean leader has turned into a vast version of his dysfunctional park.
Mobutu, once so feared and admired, is now derided and openly scorned. Yet even near- powerless and close to death, his return to Zaire sends a shudder through the population.
Some among the masses of poor, like cobbler Gerard Bolombe who works 18 hours a day on a Kinshasa street corner, believe they will never be rid of him.
“Mobutu doesn’t just go to France and die, he keeps coming back to haunt us. He hangs over our country like a ghost. Even if we bury him in the ground, even if we burn his body and grind it to nothing, we will never escape Mobutu. Every day we are hungry, every day we have to beg for work, we will remember Mobutu.
“His gravestone is our destroyed country,” he said. The rebels occupy about one quarter of Zaire. They are still hundreds of miles from Kinshasa. But from the air of defeatism hanging over Mobutu’s regime they might be pressing at the gates of the capital. Even the army chief of staff, in saying the war is not lost, then adds “yet”.
Many of those who have reason to fear the rebels are not waiting. Politicians and businessmen are shuffling their families across the water to Congo. Even some of Mobutu’s relatives have fled. Flights to Brussels and Beirut are booked solid with Europeans and Lebanese diamond dealers.
Senior army officers have moved wives and children into fancy hotels guarded by trusted soldiers. The hotels do not expect to be paid, but will be grateful for the extra security if the army embarks on one of its ritual looting sprees.
Others, including Kithima Bin Ramazani, general secretary of Mobutu’s Popular Revolutionary Movement (MPR) for the 22 years it was the only legal political party, are staying to participate in the last scramble for money before the final collapse.
“People don’t know what they want. Just a few years ago Mobutu was their idol. Then suddenly he was a dictator and he should go. It doesn’t surprise me. Whoever the next president is, he will be in office one or two years and then they’ll all miss Mobutu. I know Zaireans,” he said. “It’s easy to say Mobutu is bad. You Europeans say he is very rich but you’ve never shown us where the money is. I’m black and in our village we have only one chief. When you have something, you give half to the chief.”
There was a time when Mobutu could call Zaire his own. He named the country, and the giant river coursing from its heart. He defined its politics in his own image, even to the extent of calling it Mobutuism.
Zaire’s leader styled himself the “Father of the Nation” and discarded the name he was given at birth in favour of a title. Joseph Desire Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Mgbendo wa Zabanga, “the all powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake”.
And then he ground his sprawling nation into the dirt. Zaire’s decline was not the by-product of a misguided policy, as elsewhere in Africa. It was the deliberate wrecking of a country to satisfy the greed of an elite, and a strategy to undermine any challenge to Mobutu’s rule.
His own personal fortune runs into billions. He owned 11 palaces in Zaire alone, until the rebels started to seize them, and property from Cape Town to Paris.
Yet the state ceased to exist in the traditional sense. Bloated civil services, with more people than desks, are a common enough bane of African life. Not so in Zaire. Most of the ministry buildings are depopulated shells.
At the Information Ministry, a skyscraper built in the post-independence boom, there is almost no sign of life until the 16th floor. The lift operator comes when called only by furious banging on the door. The sewage pipes have burst.
Tiles droop from the ceiling. In the minister’s conference room, the sun has faded Mobutu’s portrait to a ghostly image.
Few ministries administer services. Some barely supervise their employees, who are mostly unpaid but unwilling to abandon a job in which they may be able to wrest cash from some unfortunate in desperate need of one piece of official paper or another. The Ministry of Social Security has impressive offices in the centre of the city. No one can remember when it last paid out.
The ministers, politicians and businessmen who became extraordinarily wealthy under Mobutu’s patronage have little but contempt for those less fortunate than themselves. Each day their Mercedes sweep through poverty and hardship, unremarkable because it is so common.
But Kithima, the former MPR general secretary, argues that whatever Zaire’s problems, they are not the fault of Mobutu.
“The responsibility for our deterioration lies with those who want us to have democracy. Before that Kinshasa was very, very nice. Now we have a minister of finance and a minister of planning so why blame Mobutu?” he argued.
Kithima lives in the luxury Intercontinental Hotel. The elite outfitters with shops in the hotel cater for the desire to spend money as much as dress well. Typically a suit costs the equivalent of about R11 000 which could be had in London or Paris at a tenth of the price. Neither are the children of the elite forgotten. The Intercontinental is laying on an Easter party for them at R150 a head, 10 times what most Zaireans earn in a month.
Supposedly protecting all this was the greatest illusion of all, Zaire’s army. The military has a far from glorious past. Within days of independence in 1960 the “Force Publique”, as it was then known, mutinied. In the ensuing anarchy the country got its first taste of the army on a rampage of looting and rape. Soldiers arrested their Belgian officers, and white colonists fled the country in their thousands.
The newly installed government attempted to calm the revolt by promoting every soldier. For a while, the Zairean army was the only one in the world without a single private.
Sadly for Zaire, that time seems a relative golden age. To most people today the army is an occasional instrument of terror. More often it is an organised crime syndicate. Its senior officers made vast sums skimming from weapons deals and running protection rackets for diamond dealers and foreign businessmen, or their own smuggling operations.
Ordinary soldiers were given a uniform and a gun and told to make a living as best they could. Robbery was the obvious method. The soldiers say they have little choice. Even their pathetic wages of about R15 a month were paid sporadically.
And when six years ago Mobutu moved to subvert the transition to democracy he agreed to only under foreign pressure, the army was let loose to pillage and murder in another manoeuvre to create chaos and division.
But Zaire’s army was never prepared for war. Mobutu saw little threat from outside his country’s borders. If one loomed, the French, Americans or Belgians would always be at hand to stave it off.
Mobutu met his match with Zaire’s tiny neighbour, Rwanda. After the Tutsi rebels won the war in 1994 and put an end to genocide, Zaire’s president sided with the Hutu extremists. He allowed them to camp on his soil, to continue to persecute Tutsis and to plot to reinvade Rwanda. But this time he had misjudged the character of his opponent.
Rwanda’s army is part of a new breed of African military of relatively disciplined troops, trained to fight and, most importantly, with a cause to fight for. Underpinning the new militaries is a revolutionary philosophy contemptuous of the generation which saw Africa to independence and their armies which were as often instruments of repression as of defence.
Uganda’s National Resistance Army was the first of the new breed in the region. It gave birth to Rwanda’s rebel movement- turned-government, which in turn moulded Kabila’s fighters.
When the war came to Zaire six months ago, the army shaped in the image of Mobutu’s park never stood a chance.
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