U.S. Influence in Zaire Questioned Amid Upheaval

It is obvious what the United States wants of Laurent Kabila and the country he has renamed Congo: democratic government, speedy elections, safety for refugees, respect for human rights and an end to Marxist claptrap.

The big question, African experts say, is whether the United States has the will and influence and interest and patience to get what it wants.

A State Department official insists that there is no doubt on that score. “As the world’s only superpower, we have political clout,” he said Wednesday. “Kabila is well aware of that. He can’t just write off the U.S. We are going to watch him very carefully.”

But there is another reality about Washington’s African policy that Kabila is equally aware of: American moral influence has been crippled by years of support for the tyrannical dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. “Having put up [with] so much that Mobutu did for so many years,” said respected Africa specialist Irving Leonard Markovitz of Queens College in New York, “for us to demand that this new guy hold elections is absurd.”

American interest in Africa has plummeted since the end of the Cold War. The record shows that the United States has done little but exhort from the sidelines over the past decade as states such as Liberia, Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire cascaded into chaos. Somalia was the single exception, and the lesson taken by the Clinton administration from that debacle was to keep out of African adventures.

With that in mind, some Africa specialists wonder whether the administration will turn a blind eye, or at least a less watchful eye, toward Kabila once he slips off American newspapers’ front pages.

The State Department official thinks not. “We will not ignore him,” he said. “Too much has happened in the last year for us to ignore him. Kabila is under the spotlight.”

Both government and private analysts agree that the U.S. government does have leverage to influence Kabila. First of all, the U.S. can offer foreign assistance. The Agency for International Development, however, has limited funds for Africa. And according to senior administration officials, Kabila already has turned down a U.S. offer of $10 million in American aid and $50 million from Europe if he schedules elections soon.

The U.S. government also can help or hurt Kabila through its influential role in decisions on loans and other assistance by international agencies such as the World Bank.

Kabila also needs investment from foreign corporations to revive Zaire’s economy. The country has rich deposits of cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, silver, tin and other minerals, but most of its mines are in ruins.

“He can’t eat the cobalt,” said Markovitz, a political science professor. So Kabila is signing contracts with North American companies to develop the mining sites.

The presence of American firms may ensure that the United States maintains its watchdog role. “If American companies come in,” said Julie Werbel, a Zaire specialist at the consulting group DFI International, “we [the United States] will protect their interests.”

In any case, the United States already has found Kabila difficult. Kabila pledged to U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson that he would attend peace talks with Mobutu aboard a South African ship last week, for example, but failed to show up.

Even if American efforts at influencing Kabila prove successful, they will probably be a pale shadow of the kind of interventionism the United States practiced in Africa, especially Zaire, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The United States propped up Mobutu, supplied him with transport planes and Cuban American pilots and pooh-poohed his tyranny. But that was during the Cold War, when the United States looked on Mobutu as a bulwark against communism.

“Since the end of the Cold War,” said Randall Robinson, director of TransAfrica, a Washington-based lobbying group, “the U.S. has apparently not puzzled out any policy toward Africa at all.”

Although the United States tried for most of the 1990s to persuade Mobutu to turn over power to a democratically elected government, the swift success of the Kabila rebellion took American officials--and almost everyone else--by surprise.

The limited recent American involvement obviously reflected the attitude of U.S. officialdom toward Africa’s most chaotic areas. The administration would like to see calm and stability there, but it does not want to take the risk of using American soldiers to try to enforce tranquillity.

At a public meeting at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last week, Howard University professor Stephen R. Weissman called on the U.S. government to support intervention in Burundi, a neighbor of Zaire, to prevent further genocide there. Weissman, a Burundi specialist, said 150,000 people have been massacred there in the past three years--after the slaying of hundreds of thousands during the preceding quarter-century. Most of the victims were ethnic Hutus killed by the minority Tutsis who rule Burundi.

Weissman scoffed at those who expressed fear about sending outside troops into a dangerous African melee. “Let’s not look at the Burundian army as this tremendous juggernaut,” he said, adding, “this army that has fought no one.”

But Richard Bogosian, the State Department’s special ambassador on Rwanda and Burundi, responded that policymakers find themselves caught between two syndromes: the Somalia syndrome, which convinced many Americans that helping Somalia was not worth the deaths of the 18 U.S. service personnel killed in a single gun battle there, and the Rwanda syndrome, which left many Americans believing that much of the genocide there could have been avoided with early intervention by the United Nations.

“That’s the dilemma we find ourselves in,” Bogosian said.

The first sign that America was turning its back on Africa came in 1989, when civil war erupted in Liberia and the U.S. made no attempt to intervene. For more than a century, Liberia had been regarded as practically an American colony.

The Somalia failure prompted the administration to issue new and stringent guidelines for American participation in and financial support of U.N. peacekeeping operations. They came out just before Rwanda erupted in April 1994 with a mass slaying by the majority Hutus of more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, followed by the cross-border flight of about 2 million Hutus. Armed with the new guidelines, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, delayed Security Council approval of an intervention force. Even after the council approved the force of 5,500, it took many months to persuade governments to send in troops.