By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Mar 23 1997 (IPS)

After 35 years of loyal – if embarrassing – support, the United States is preparing to bid adieu to its closest African ally of the cold war, Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko.

Mobutu, whose avaricious reign helped coin the word ‘kleptocracy,’ returned Friday to Kinshasa for what may be his last days as president as U.S. officials conceded the wily leader had run out of tricks.

“He’s too sick, and his army is too weak, to withstand what is happening now for very long,” according to one senior official who added Mobutu’s prostate cancer is likely to kill him within six months “if his generals don’t get him first.”

To the frustration of many African specialists, Washington is still not demanding publicly that he step down. Its hope is that he will bless a ceasefire and negotiations for a new government with Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader whose insurgents have swept across eastern Zaire since October and now hold sway over almost one-third of the country’s vast territory.

Officials here also hope that he will bring a halt to the smuggling of hundreds of tonnes of weapons to UNITA, the Angolan rebel group which, despite a peace accord with Luanda that commits it to disarm, appears to be stockpiling weapons at the southern Zaire air base at Kamina.

Mobutu and his family are making millions of dollars off the smuggling, according to a Washington Post account confirmed by U.S. officials Friday.

“This is perfect,” said one. “His army is disintegrating, and he’s still making a buck by selling its arms to (UNITA leader Jonas) Savimbi. I think that says it all, doesn’t it.” the official added.

Washington is worried that the arms-supply operation has given Angola, which has already dispatched 1,500 ex-Katangan fighters to join the rebels in the east, a pretext for direct intervention. According to reports, UNITA has already sent 5,000 of its own troops to guard Kamina. “The last battle for Angola may be fought in Zaire,” said one intelligence official here earlier this week.

Kamina is a fitting symbol of the relationship which has kept successive U.S. presidents locked into a sometimes reluctant embrace with Mobutu since 1960, when Col. Joseph Desire Mobutu, as he was known then, took control of the Congolese Army.

Originally a Belgian base, the Pentagon first used Kamina in 1964 to base a joint U.S.-Belgian operation to evacuate missionaries from rebel-held Stanleyville, renamed Kisangani.

In 1977 and again in 1978, U.S. military forces used Kamina to support French, Belgian, and Moroccan troops helping to recapture the Kolwezi mining centre in Shaba province from Katangan fighters who had infiltrated from Angola.

When Ronald Reagan embraced Savimbi as a ‘freedom fighter’ in the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) built up the air base as its local headquarters. By 1987, the Pentagon was pressing Reagan to invest millions of dollars in upgrading the base as part of a formal agreement with Mobutu that would make the base the major U.S. facility for all of central and southern Africa.

As the Angola war wound down, however, the plan was quashed. Of course, Washington’s relationship with Mobutu goes back even further than Kamina to the darkest days of the Cold War.

A lowly sergeant in the Belgian colonial army, Mobutu found himself at the centre of the East-West struggle when the Congo gained its tumultuous independence in 1960. He rose swiftly through the ranks, becoming number two in the army as the young country faced its first secessionist challenges the same year.

With its fabulous mineral wealth and strategic location in the heart of Africa, the Congo was transformed overnight into the Cold War’s latest major battleground. The firebrand new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, reminded U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower far too much of Cuba’s revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro.

“It is safe to go on the assumption,” wrote then-CIA director Allen Dulles in July 1990, “that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists; this also, however, fits with his own orientation.”

It was roughly at this moment, if not before, that Washington bought Mobutu. He became the key link in a plan to replace Lumumba with what a National Security Council note-taker called a “pro- western group,” using assassination if necessary. In September, Lumumba was ousted in a CIA-backed military coup led by Mobutu.

Mobutu ruled the Congo from behind the scenes until 1965 when he declared himself head of state. With strong western economic and military support, he quelled several rebellions, nationalised foreign businesses, and began pillaging the country’s economy in earnest.

By the early 1970s, when copper prices reached their peak, Mobutu’s wealth — and self-image — had become outsized. As ‘Le Guide’ in his trademark leopard-skin hat, he adopted a philosophy of ‘authenticity’ which required the citizenry to ‘Africanise’ their names. His became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, meaning “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.”

When copper prices nosedived in 1976, the Zairean economy collapsed. Despite huge loans by the World Bank and successive bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, it has never recovered. Most agriculture has become subsistence farming; many roads and riverways have become impassable; and malnutrition and absolute poverty wreak havoc on many of Zaire’s 47 million people.

Zaire’s economic decline, however, was not shared by Mobutu, whose fortune, estimated at between five and 10 billion dollars, includes chateaus in Spain and Belgium, villas in Paris, Monte Carlo, and Cote d’Ivoire, an estate in Switzerland, and a ranch in Portugal. Washington, and most of the rest of the West, supported him throughout.

Even in 1991, when Washington cancelled bilateral aid to his government and the World Bank had stopped lending, the United States couldn’t quite let go.

U.S. officials argued that “Mobutu is the only one who can hold the country together” and that his involvement in any transition was required “to control the military forces.” One senior administration official declared at the time “The truth is, we need him.”

By 1995, he had even made something of a comeback, emerging as a player in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. With a million Rwandan Hutus camped on his territory, Mobutu tried to use the crisis both to regain leverage with the West and to sell weapons to the “genocidaires.”

The move backfired last October when Zairean Tutsis, backed by the Rwandan army, attacked the camps to push the Hutus eastward away from the border. The Zairean army collapsed in the face of the rebel onslaught, setting the stage for Mobutu’s final exit.

“Mobutu is one of the most destructive legacies of a generation of U.S. involvement in Africa,” says Salih Booker, head of Africa programmes at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

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