A Cause That Gives Zaire Pause

The three guerrillas looked menacing amid the market stalls. Two held shiny assault rifles. Their leader, a huge man with a bushy beard, wore a pistol at his side and a brown beret atop his dusty fatigues. Suddenly they stopped and gruffly ordered Marie Lifaefi to fill a bottle with cooking oil from the vat at her feet.

When she finished, the leader slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out . . . money. He smiled, paid for the palm oil, and the rebels wandered on.

Behind them, Lifaefi, 40, seemed stunned.

“Before, soldiers took everything by force,” she explained. “I was always afraid. It was impossible to resist.”

For years, the lawless soldiers of Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko took her oil, demanded protection money, robbed her at roadblocks and banged on her door at night to steal her savings. Such stories are common here.

“If you have money, you pay. Otherwise they kill you,” she declared. “There is a difference with the rebels. They don’t ask for our money. They don’t disturb us. They respect people.”

She added softly, “There is peace at night. We can sleep now in peace.”

More than anything else, the end of official banditry and the restoration of order explain why an obscure guerrilla force that only emerged from the jungle in October appears on the verge of toppling Africa’s longest-serving tyrant and seizing the continent’s third-largest nation.

Led by Laurent Kabila, a onetime smuggler and aging revolutionary who once fought beside guerrilla Che Guevara, the rebels have seized one-third of Zaire.

In town after town, they have been met by cheering women waving palm fronds and long lines of men and boys eager to enlist.

Mobutu’s long-feared army and murderous Serbian mercenaries have melted before the juggernaut, unwilling to die for a despot who is himself dying of prostate cancer. They have looted and run away without fighting, often fleeing on rumors that rebels were coming.

Indeed, the war that many initially feared would engulf Central Africa in slaughter has seen little real combat. The rebels’ chief obstacle has been Zaire’s colossal size and rugged terrain and the challenge of creating civil administrations in a territory that grows by the day.

But now, as the rebels plan their final push toward the capital, Kinshasa, doubts are growing about Kabila’s promises to deliver multi-party elections and to rebuild the economy for the destitute nation’s 45 million people.

“What really does he want, and what does his group want?” a senior Western diplomat in Kinshasa asked. “It’s a big unknown.”

The evidence so far is mixed.

Kabila has pledged to usher in democracy. But he has banned political activity in rebel areas until the war ends and insists that he won’t share power with Mobutu’s allies or other major political parties.

His troops have been disciplined toward fellow Zairians. But a United Nations human rights report says the rebels may have massacred fleeing Rwandan Hutu refugees and buried them in mass graves. The rebels deny the charge.

And while Kabila has blasted Mobutu’s patronage and nepotism, he has named a son as military commander of Kisangani and a cousin as foreign minister. The rebels have also rehired many of Mobutu’s sinister security police.

“People who are opposed to Kabila are afraid to express their ideas,” said Pionus Katuala, a biology professor at the University of Kisangani. “We have other liberties now. But freedom of expression? I don’t know.”

Even Mwenze Kongola, Kabila’s justice minister, acknowledges that many Zairians are skeptical of Kabila’s long-term aims, even as they applaud his efforts to end the venality and repression of Mobutu’s 32-year reign.

“The majority of the population is not in the movement,” said Mwenze, who joined Kabila in January after spending six years issuing warrants in the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia. “I think they want a choice. We say we’ll give them a choice after we start the transition” to democracy.

A Marxist Rebel Who Became Warlord

Trained as a Marxist, Kabila led several failed revolts in the 1960s and 1970s. Ernesto “Che” Guevara and 100 Cuban troops even came to help in 1964. But the Argentine guerrilla later bitterly criticized Kabila’s jet-setting style, saying he avoided the front for chic hotels and bars.

Diplomats say Kabila then became a warlord, financing his politics by smuggling gold. They say he also directed the kidnapping of three American students and a Dutch researcher in Tanzania in 1975. The group was released unharmed after an undisclosed ransom was paid.

“He’s just another criminal,” warned an African ambassador in Kinshasa. “I don’t think he’s got any democratic principles.”

Forced into exile in the 1980s, Kabila was forgotten until he launched a new revolt in eastern Zaire last fall.

At first, he said his guerrillas were fighting to secure rights for persecuted Zairians of Tutsi descent. But as Mobutu’s forces folded, Kabila announced that he would go all the way to Kinshasa.

Mwenze, who meets with Kabila regularly, insists that the rebel leader has shed his Marxist past.

“I think he’s changed a lot,” Mwenze said. “I haven’t heard him speak of a socialist approach to any of the problems we have.”

Officially, Kabila is president of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, a coalition of little-known opposition groups. The alliance has created transitional administrations in cities and provinces in the area that it now calls the Democratic Republic of Congo.

After capturing this crumbling Zaire River port in mid-March, for example, the rebels brought in 120 members of their political cadre.

They banned bribes and gave looters two days to return cars and relief supplies stolen during the final frantic hours of government control. Among the items returned: 800 barrels of fuel.

“There’s a real change of attitude,” marveled Gerald Selenke, a Roman Catholic missionary from Kansas who has worked here for 16 years. “People know they can’t get away with the old corruption anymore.”

But Selenke added that the rebels have found it easier to conquer than to rule.

“They’ve got a long way to go to get organized,” he said. “They’ve got people in charge, but they don’t necessarily know what they are doing.”

The new governor here, Jean Yagi Sitole, is a 41-year-old gynecologist and university professor.

Although he has no government experience, Sitole was “elected” by acclamation at an open-air rally led by Kabila shortly after the city fell. Until then, Sitole was provincial leader of a rival political party headed by Mobutu’s just-ousted prime minister, Etienne Tshisekedi, a man whom Kabila has publicly denounced.

“I was not associated with Kabila’s movement,” Sitole said.

He agreed to join Kabila, he said, after he decided that their goals were the same: “The common idea is democracy, to be free, to respect human rights.”

The new regime has been lenient with former civil servants, in part because there is no one to replace them.

Several especially corrupt officials have been arrested or fired as public examples, but most government employees have been rehired in their same jobs, with orders to obey the law.

“There is a big pardon for everybody,” Sitole explained. “Even if the son of Mobutu was here in Kisangani, he would be free. Because all of us were in the system. . . . People are being forgiven.”

A veteran U.N. aid worker is skeptical.

“The people staffing the jobs are the same people who ran this network of graft and corruption for 32 years,” the aid worker said. “Changing that system will be very difficult.”

Measures to Help Revive the Economy

Reviving the paralyzed economy will be equally demanding.

Under Mobutu, government services collapsed. Roads, bridges, airports and other basic infrastructure fell into disrepair. Four-digit hyper-inflation was the rule.

The new regime has responded with a variety of measures. They have lowered duties on most imports and exports and encouraged foreign investment. The rebels have ordered prices halved for fish, fabric, soft drinks and beer. But other prices, especially for rice, have risen sharply.

In the long term, Kabila’s aides have promised to cut the public work force by 10%, increase salaries and stop printing money.

Although it now controls gold mines, diamond-producing areas and other rich resources, the alliance says it is broke and cannot pay salaries for the foreseeable future.

Instead, the rebels have told wealthy Zairians that they must contribute to the war effort.

Bartholomy Okito, one of about 70 diamond dealers in Kisangani, said he will gladly pay if Kabila keeps his promises.

“All the diamond money in the past went for Mobutu,” Okito said in the shop that he has named Maison Dollars. “Now the money will go in the bank for the government and the people. . . . We need roads, schools and hospitals.”

The rebel “capital” is Goma, which lies on the border with Rwanda.

After taking the city in November, Kabila’s forces seized gold, cars, coffee and other supplies. The confiscations quickly ceased, however, and the city now bustles with trade and activity.

But the rebels banned the collection of rents in Goma between November and March, then cut future rent payments in half. While tenants obviously were delighted, landlords like Antoiwe Batchibola, a state worker who depends on renting seven small houses to survive, were distraught.

“I’ve got eight children, and I’ve gone one year without a salary,” he complained. “Now I don’t have any money. . . . My problem is I live from these houses.”

Hope for Change From Poverty, Misrule

The explanation, such as it is, comes at mandatory “re-education courses” that the rebels have organized for government workers.

At a recent session, about 1,000 people packed into a steamy tin-roofed church for lectures on ideology, democracy and clean government. Then came questions.

No, the speaker said, rebel soldiers do not have the “right to stay in your house. They must stay in camps.”

Several people applauded.

Any civilian who owns a gun must surrender it or face arrest, he said. He was stumped only when asked about people who build too close to the road. The alliance has yet to consider local zoning codes, he conceded, drawing laughter.

Stanislas Mwekassa Sumbu, a 53-year-old pharmacist, said he and others in the class will volunteer to help administer rebel-held towns.

“We will teach people their rights and their rights before the state,” he said proudly.

Such enthusiasm is palpable here, from the barefoot boys who ferry passengers on bicycle taxis to the bedraggled youths awaiting military training at a rebel recruitment center.

For most, Kabila represents hope for change from a life of grinding poverty and cruel misrule.

“I am 38,” Emmanuel Biselenge, a hospital bookkeeper in Kisangani, said as he boiled a pot of cassava leaves for his family. “I have five children. But I have no house, no bike, no money.”

His salary, rarely paid, was $1 a month. Mobutu’s soldiers raided his wife’s market stall each day, he said. And when they fled the city, troops stole bananas, pineapples, chickens and a pig from his farm.

Kabila, he said, will improve all that.

“We are a rich country,” Biselenge said. “We have diamonds, gold, coffee, many things here. I am sure that after some time, we will have a better life.”