‘Liberator’ of a Nation--and Man of Mystery

KINSHASA, Zaire — Eight months ago, virtually no one outside a small group of Africa specialists had a clue who Laurent Kabila was. The 59-year-old revolutionary was a forgotten figure, waging a seemingly futile insurgency in the mountains of eastern Zaire.

Today, Kabila is in the international spotlight, hailed by Zairians as the man who unyoked their exhausted country from the 32-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko--but even now, few can honestly say they know who Laurent Kabila really is.

Marxist fossil? Perhaps, but the wily Kabila has also demonstrated an aptitude for capitalist wheeling and dealing, having struck multimillion-dollar exploration deals with international mineral interests even before he began his final push on the capital, Kinshasa.

National liberator? Yes, but many here in Kinshasa worry that Kabila’s Zairian loyalties are blurred by the outside support he gets from such countries as Rwanda, Angola, Uganda and Burundi.

Grizzled jungle revolutionary? When the storied Argentine guerrilla fighter Che Guevara came to fight alongside Kabila in the mid-’60s, he found the young insurgent disappointingly soft and susceptible to the allures of Mercedes-Benzes, beautiful women and fine restaurants.

Rightful leader of a new Zaire? Not if the impoverished residents of this newly “liberated” capital have anything to say about it. In random interviews, they repeatedly expressed gratitude to Kabila for ridding them of the despised Mobutu but warned that he must call elections promptly and share power with the civilian politicians who have created opposition parties here in the capital over the past seven years.

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“Zairians will let Kabila lead the country for a couple of months or so because we are grateful,” said Didier Bolondo, a 30-year-old unemployed teacher who feeds his family of five by selling sundries from a battered wooden table in the street. “This is a period of transition. But then Kabila must respect the [civilian] opposition parties.”

Kabila himself has said that he will hold elections after 12 months.

“I don’t think that’s a wildly unreasonable period of time,” said a Western diplomat in Kinshasa, pointing to the many difficulties involved in organizing elections in a country where it can take months just to travel a few hundred miles.

“I don’t have any problem working with him,” the diplomat added. “But then, my standards are pretty low.”

Kabila started his rebel career as a follower of Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist and Soviet ally who served as this country’s first post-colonial prime minister and was murdered in 1961. During the violence that accompanied independence from Belgium, Kabila participated in a string of unsuccessful revolts, including the period in 1965 when Guevara brought 100 Cuban troops to help advance the revolution in what was then called the Congo.

Guevara left sick and disappointed after six months but not before writing in his diary: “A revolutionary leader . . . has to be serious and possess an ideology and a spirit of sacrifice to accompany one’s goals. Until now, Kabila has not shown any of these traits.”

Africa experts say that Kabila evolved from revolutionary into warlord, living by his wits in the bush, financing his movement by smuggling gold and, in one case, directing the kidnapping of three Americans and a Dutch researcher working at a game station in Tanzania.

“There’s no doubt that Kabila has been involved in some pretty nasty things over the years,” said a Western diplomat in Kinshasa. “This is a guy who has lived in a climate of violence his entire adult life.”

Kinshasa residents recall that in the 1980s they used to hear the occasional vague report about a guerrilla leader named Kabila out in the bush, but they didn’t fear him, respect him or even pay him much attention. In the army, Zairian veterans say, when an officer wanted to chew out an incompetent subordinate, he would typically lash out with a cutting, “What are you, a Kabila soldier?”

But that pejorative use of Kabila’s name changed in October after the guerrilla leader--with the help of Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government--launched a revolt in the name of Zaire’s own persecuted Tutsis. The revolt started small but spread like brush fire when people realized that it could bring about the end of Mobutu.

As they worked their way across Zaire, Kabila’s people have undertaken improvements in captured territory, setting to work on the gluey wallows that pass for roads in this country and sending citizens to re-education courses where they are supposed to unlearn such bad habits as the solicitation of bribes.

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But events in Kabila-controlled territories have hardly been cause for unambiguous rejoicing. Human rights organizations have repeatedly accused Kabila of letting his forces carry out retaliatory, ethnically motivated killings and general abuse of tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled to Zaire after the genocide in Rwanda in 1984.

Furthermore, there have been complaints from aid workers trying to help the Hutus and from investigators trying to assess the scope of the violence that Kabila has blocked their work.

Ominously, too, Kabila said in March that his Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire would be the only political organization tolerated in guerrilla-controlled territory. Although he subsequently softened that stand, not a few Zairians worry that in their liberator they are seeing a new, post-Mobutu authoritarian.