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Congo ‘<i> Glasnost</i> ‘ Flourishes as Marxist State Moves Competitively Right

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REUTERS

While glasnost blooms in Eastern Europe the superpowers are waging a cordial contest of cultural centers in Congo, a Marxist state whose leader’s ideas sound more and more like those of a Western conservative.

The opening salvo came from the United States. Last month in a renovated three-story bank it opened a gleaming center housing a library, offices and language-training facilities.

Every day in quiet Brazzaville, capital of French-speaking Congo, the Center Culturel Americain packs people in for live satellite transmissions of American television.

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“Marxism has practically nothing to teach us,” said Roland, 27, watching a wide-screen broadcast and struggling to understand an encounter between Dan Rather and Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.

“The Soviets give us a lot of books to read, but people can’t eat books,” said Roland, who hopes English lessons will land him a job.

Across the city’s main commercial street, Soviet cultural attache Oleg Prokopenko admitted that his center, housed in a cavernous old bank that still looks like a bank, had nothing to compete with the American multiscreen television array.

But Prokopenko said he, too, wanted to build a new cultural center and hoped to have full-time satellite transmission of Soviet television soon.

In the meantime he boasts of Africa’s only branch of the Pushkin Institute for Russian-language training and described relations with the Americans as a “friendly rivalry.”

Times have changed in Congo, a country of two million people that was the administrative center of French Equatorial Africa before independence and afterwards became one of Africa’s Marxist strongholds.

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Under former President Marien Ngouabi, assassinated in 1977 but still the country’s ideological mentor, Congo developed a mixed economy of state and private enterprise and followed a pro-Soviet line in foreign policy.

In the 1970s and early 1900s Soviet technical advisers held sway in the Congolese army. Cuban troops on their way to Angola frolicked in Pointe Noire, an oil port. The United States and Britain closed their embassies.

But the great red tide that some Europeans and Americans feared would sweep post-colonial Africa has receded.

Today Congo has military advisers from France, far and away Congo’s biggest trading partner and aid donor.

The country’s key oil fields are run by French, Italian, British and American companies.

The Cubans are leaving Angola and are all but gone from Pointe Noire. The British and U.S. embassies have long since reopened and France, which maintained close ties to Congo even at the height of Marxist fervor, is keeping up with the superpowers by building its own new cultural center.

Diplomats and other analysts attribute most of the change to President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, 46, a colonel who took charge in 1979 from an interim administration formed after Ngouabi’s assassination.

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“Sassou-Nguesso officially is a Marxist because that helps keep things in line,” one Western diplomat said. “But what he has done is put around him technocrats with no ideological interest.”

In October, Sassou-Nguesso outlined a five-year economic plan that owed more to conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher than to Karl Marx.

The president, who sometimes wears tailored military fatigues on state occasions, endorsed economic reform programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, saying Congo needed “Draconian” measures.

He berated civil servants for absenteeism and laziness. He said the bloated bureaucracy would be pruned and warned graduates they could no longer count on a government pay check.

He said loss-making state firms would be closed or sold and private enterprise promoted, a decision certain to please international lenders and donors anxious about Congo’s ability to repay its estimated $4-billion foreign debt, among the highest per capita in the world.

“The private sector . . . especially in rural development will be encouraged by a series of measures to cut through government red tape and protect it from unfair competition,” Sassou-Nguesso said.

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He was true to his word. Less than a month later Congo said it would sell off the money-losing distribution arm of the national oil company Hydro-Congo.

However, Congo will retain the company’s profitable research and exploration divisions in charge of developing substantial offshore reserves that make Congo black Africa’s fifth biggest oil producer.

Revenue from oil, its main export, has fallen 80% in four years, leaving the country saddled with debts for projects begun when oil prices were double current levels.

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