Dead or Alive, Congo’s Kabila Is Shrouded in Mystery

Day or night, sober or drunk, Laurent Desire Kabila wasn’t shy about calling his chief U.S. contact at the height of his war against Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

“He frequently called me at my house, sometimes in the middle of the night,” recalled Peter Whaley, a now-retired diplomat who served as political officer at the U.S. Embassy in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, at the time of the 1996-97 conflict. “Once he called me, drunk as a skunk, and he said: ‘Mr. Whaley, I took the moral high ground! I didn’t attack. Aren’t you proud of me?’ ”

But in the end, the guerrilla chieftain who seized power in Africa’s third-largest country left little for which he could be proud. He stunned outsiders by leading a ragtag rebel army across the heart of Africa and toppling the continent’s most entrenched strongman. But after appointing himself president, and renaming the country the Democratic Republic of Congo, he quickly became as brutal, corrupt and despotic as the late Mobutu had been.

Like much of his life, President Kabila’s fate remained shrouded in mystery Wednesday, a day after he reportedly was shot five times by an aide at his palace in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. There were conflicting reports all day as to whether he was alive, and his Cabinet announced that command of the government and military had been turned over to his son Joseph.

“There are continuing, conflicting reports,” said Susan Pittman, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman. “We also have reports that he may have been transported [to Zimbabwe], but it wasn’t as a live person. We are working under the assumption that he’s dead, but we don’t have confirmation of that.”

A White House spokesman, Daniel Cruise, cited “credible reports” that Kabila is dead. “Although we don’t have independent confirmation of that,” he said, “we do believe, at this stage, that he was killed.”

The confusion seemed appropriate for a man who led most of his life in the shadows. The 61-year-old Kabila spent nearly 40 years planning and plotting as an obscure warlord in remote areas known as Fizi and Baraka in eastern Zaire, emerging into the headlines only in the mid-1990s.

His rule in the jungle enclaves apparently was absolute, and he became known for allegedly burning his enemies--and rivals--at the stake. Later, his supporters demanded millions of dollars in ransom after kidnapping a group of young Western scientists and students at the Jane Goodall gorilla research center in Tanzania.

Kabila was an avowed follower of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first and only legitimately elected leader. In an odd twist of history, Lumumba was assassinated under still-unexplained circumstances 40 years ago Wednesday.

Soon after Lumumba’s death, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the legendary Latin American revolutionary, led a force of fellow guerrillas to shore up Kabila’s campaign for power. Guevara later wrote in his diary that he quickly quit in disgust after concluding that Kabila was a fraud, more interested in drink, plunder and magic than real revolution.

“He was a pretty boy,” said Stephen Morrison, director of Africa studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “He spent most of his time in shiny suits in Cairo. He was a gold smuggler and had a small militia, a couple of hundred guys. But he was locked back in time. He could never get past the 1960s perspective that he carried around, and his paranoia. He was way out of sync with the world when he came to power.”

Kabila remained a marginal and forgotten figure until November 1996. A bald, roly-poly figure in a baseball cap and open-necked shirt, he unexpectedly appeared before the world media to claim leadership of a mysterious band of ethnic-based rebels attacking refugee camps along Zaire’s border with Rwanda. He quickly announced that he planned to march all the way to Kinshasa.

The U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa insisted in diplomatic cables that Kabila was “not to be taken seriously.” U.S. Ambassador Daniel Simpson warned Nov. 14, 1996, that “every cubit that we add to the stature of Kabila makes more likely the disintegration of what is left of Zaire. If we like Afghanistan, Somalia and Liberia, we are going to just love a Zaire of 45 million people.”

But U.S. diplomats in Rwanda saw no alternative to Kabila and began dealing directly with him. Whaley began meeting him in Kigali, or in various homes in and around Goma in eastern Zaire, along the shores of Lake Kivu. Other U.S. officials provided Kabila with a satellite phone that allowed them to communicate more easily--and allowed U.S. intelligence to monitor his calls.

“Because he had been isolated in Fizi all that time, he held Marxist ideas that had never been disproved in his mind,” Whaley recalled Wednesday. “He spent 30 years believing this ideology. But what he really was about was promoting Kabila.”

It took only 6 1/2 months for Kabila’s army--secretly helped by soldiers from Angola, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda--to march across the vast reaches of Zaire and enter the capital. The ailing Mobutu was ousted from power and died soon after in exile in Morocco.

Although Kabila was initially welcomed as a liberator, he quickly lost support both at home and abroad.

Kabila refused to schedule elections, mismanaged relations with other African nations and most of the international community, and allowed his family and cronies to loot vast reserves of gold, diamonds, cobalt and other minerals. A bloody civil war has raged for most of his rule, drawing in armies from half a dozen African nations.

“Kabila’s legacy? Disorder,” said professor I. William Zartman, director of African studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “He disproves the common judgment that you can’t be worse than Mobutu. Mobutu took half of the wealth of the country and left the rest for people to fight over. Kabila tried to take all the wealth of the country.”