Mobutu’s regime

Mobutu’s second coup, on November 24, 1965, occurred in circumstances strikingly similar to those that had led to the first—a struggle for power between the incumbent president, Kasavubu, and his prime minister, this time Tshombe. Mobutu’s coup saw to the removal of Kasavubu and Tshombe, and Mobutu himself proceeded to assume the presidency. Unlike Lumumba, however, Tshombe managed to leave the country unharmed—and determined to regain power. Rumours that the ousted prime minister was plotting a comeback from exile in Spain hardened into certainty when in July 1966 some 2,000 of Tshombe’s former Katanga gendarmes, led by mercenaries, mutinied in Kisangani. Exactly one year after the crushing of that first mutiny, a second broke out, again in Kisangani, apparently triggered by the news that Tshombe’s airplane had been hijacked over the Mediterranean and forced to land in Algiers, where he was then held prisoner and later died of a heart attack. Led by a Belgian settler named Jean Schramme and including approximately 100 former Katanga gendarmes and about 1,000 Katangese, the mutineers held their ground against the 32,000-man Congolese National Army (Armée Nationale Congolaise; ANC) until November 1967, when the mercenaries crossed the border into Rwanda and surrendered to the local authorities. Schramme himself later turned up in Brazil, where he remained in spite of attempts by the Belgian government to have him extradited.

The country settled into a semblance of political stability for the next several years, allowing Mobutu to focus on his unsuccessful strategies for economic progress. In 1971 Mobutu renamed the country Zaire as part of his “authenticity” campaign—his effort to emphasize the country’s cultural identity. Officially described as “the nation politically organized,” Mobutu’s MPR, the sole political party from 1970 to 1990, may be better seen as a weakly articulated patronage system. Mobutu’s effort to extol the virtues of Zairian “authenticity” did little to lend respectability either to the concept or to the brand of leadership for which it stood. As befit his chiefly image, Mobutu’s rule was based on bonds of personal loyalty between himself and his entourage.

The fragility of Mobutu’s power base was demonstrated in 1977 and ’78, when the country’s main opposition movement, the Congolese National Liberation Front (Front de la Libération Nationale Congolaise; FLNC), operating from Angola, launched two major invasions into Shaba (which Katanga was called from 1972 to 1997). On both occasions external intervention by friendly governments—primarily Morocco in 1977 and France in 1978—saved the day, but at the price of many African and European casualties. Shortly after the capture of the urban centre of Kolwezi by the FLNC in May 1978, an estimated 100 Europeans lost their lives at the hands of the rebels and the ANC. Apart from the role played by the FLNC in spearheading the invasions, the sharp deterioration of the Zairian economy after 1975, coupled with the rapid growth of anti-Mobutu sentiment among the poor and the unemployed, was a crucial factor in the near success of the invasions of Shaba. The timing of the first Shaba invasion, a full 11 years after the creation of the Popular Movement of the Revolution (Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution; MPR) in 1966, underscored the shortcomings of the single-party state as a vehicle for national integration and of “Mobutism” as an ideology for the legitimization of Mobutu’s regime.

Circumstances changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Former supporters on the international scene, such as the United States, France, and Belgium, pressed for democratic reforms; some even openly supported Mobutu’s rivals. In April 1990 Mobutu did decide to lift the ban on opposition parties, but he followed that liberalizing act with the brutal repression of student protests at the University of Lubumbashi in May—resulting in the death of 50 to 150 students, according to Amnesty International. In 1991 France reduced its monetary aid to the country, U.S. diplomats criticized Mobutu before the U.S. Congress, and the World Bank cut ties with Mobutu following his appropriation of $400 million from Gécamines, the state mining corporation.

Mobutu grudgingly agreed to relinquish some power in 1991: he convened a national conference that resulted in the formation of a coalition group, the High Council of the Republic (Haut Conseil de la République; HCR), a provisional body charged with overseeing the country’s transfer to a multiparty democracy. The HCR selected Étienne Tshisekedi as prime minister. Tshisekedi, an ethnic Luba from the diamond-rich Kasaï-Oriental province, was known as a dissident as early as 1980, when he and a small group of parliamentarians charged the army with having massacred some 300 diamond miners. Tshisekedi’s renewed prominence highlighted the key role that natural resources continued to play in national politics.

Meanwhile, Mobutu, resistant to the transfer of authority to Tshisekedi, maneuvered to pit groups within the HCR against each another. He also ensured the support of military units by giving them the right to plunder whole regions of the country and certain sectors of the economy. Eventually these maneuvers undermined Tshisekedi and resuscitated the regime; Mobutu reached an agreement with the opposition, and Kengo wa Dondo became prime minister in 1994. Mobutu agreed to government reforms set forth in the Transitional Constitutional Act (1994), but real reforms and promised elections never took place.

The Rwandan crisis of 1993–94—rooted in long-running tensions between that country’s two major ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi—and the ensuing genocide (during which more than 800,000 civilians, primarily Tutsi, were killed) afforded Mobutu an opportunity to mend his relationships with the Western powers. Following the late-1993 invasion of Rwanda by the forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led Rwandan exile organization, Mobutu offered logistical and military support to the French and Belgian troops who intervened to support the Hutu-led Rwandan government. This move renewed relations with France and ultimately led Belgium and the United States to reopen diplomatic channels with Mobutu. Business ventures that promised foreign firms privileged access to the country’s resources and state enterprises further bolstered external support.

Mobutu also encouraged attacks against Zairians of Rwandan Tutsi origin living in the eastern part of the country; this was one of the maneuvers that ultimately sowed the seeds of his downfall. The attacks, coupled with Mobutu’s support of a faction of Hutu (exiled in Zaire) who opposed the Rwandan government, ultimately led local Tutsi and the government of Rwanda to join forces with Mobutu’s opponent Laurent Kabila and his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre; AFDL). Kabila’s opposition forces also gained the backing of the governments of Angola and Uganda, as Mobutu had supported rebel movements within those countries. (Mobutu’s associates had engaged in diamond trafficking with National Union for the Total Independence of Angola [UNITA] rebels; Mobutu also had allowed supplies for Ugandan rebels to be transported via a Zairian airport.)

In October 1996, while Mobutu was abroad for cancer treatment, Kabila and his supporters launched an offensive from bases in the east and subsequently captured Bukavu and Goma, a city on the shore of Lake Kivu. Mobutu returned to the country in December but failed to stabilize the situation. The rebels continued to advance, and on March 15, 1997, Kisangani fell, followed by Mbuji-Mayi and Lubumbashi in early April. South African-backed negotiations between Mobutu and Kabila in early May quickly failed, and the victorious forces of the AFDL entered the capital on May 17, 1997. By this time, Mobutu had fled. He died in exile a few months later.