Che's Man in the Congo
SCHWARTZ, STEPHEN
Che's Man in the Congo How did the U.S. and its allies end up supporting a thug like Laurent Kabila? BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ IN THE KIND OF COINCIDENCE on which Africa thrives, but which went...
...Team Guevara trained combatants for the so-called "Simba" uprising against then-president Moise Tshombe...
...Kabila never did...
...But Kabila's kleptocratic habits were widely noted in the world press...
...But as noted above, he might not have lasted even a week without the astonishingly beneficent gaze of the Western capitals...
...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ IN THE KIND OF COINCIDENCE on which Africa thrives, but which went unnoticed in most Western media, Congo-Kinshasa dictator Laurent Kabila was shot to death only a few hours before the 40th anniversary of the demise of his presumed revolutionary role model, Patrice Lumumba...
...Unlike Mandela, who gained deserved respect after demonstrating his capacity for dignified statesmanship, Kabila proved an outstanding graduate of the Castro-Guevara school of politics, promoting violence within his domain...
...It was as if the man's entire previous career had never existed...
...Kabila continued his depredations with patronage from Nyerere, although he eventually took time out to traffic in precious commodities, always a lucrative sideline in the region...
...Che was greeted in Tanzania by dictator Julius Nyerere and introduced to Kabila and another Congolese revolutionary leader...
...Let's hope the Bush administration looks more closely when it comes to congratulating new political heavies in the hotspots of the world...
...He prevented Guevara and his cohort from assuming direct command over the Congolese soldiery, very sensibly realizing that black rebels were unlikely to take orders from a white man...
...Stephen Schwartz's latest book is Intellectuals and Assassins, a collection of essays on Stalinism...
...The Argentine insurrectionary had left Cuba for an African tour, traveling first to Algeria and then to Mali, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea, Ghana, and Dahomey (now Benin), all then Moscow-friendly one-party states...
...Livingstone, since Guevara was also a physician by training...
...His demise closes the books on a chapter in Clinton-era foreign policy...
...One might even entertain the thought that each at least subconsciously saw in the other, beneath the Marxist costume, a racial cliche...
...By the end of 1967, Guevara was dead in Bolivia...
...Kabila was a professional...
...He became a champion revolutionary tourist, stopping in to see Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat...
...Guevara then repaired to Congo where, with 100 Cuban colleagues, he dedicated several months to "the revolutionary war...
...That was 30 years ago," Winter said...
...Yeltsin was a Marxist 30 years ago too...
...The Simbas waved their banner into the 1980s, from a Khmer Rouge-style "liberated zone" in Congo, and Kabila showed off his uniform...
...Che's Africa campaign did not last long...
...He soon went back to Cuba...
...He enjoyed indispensable military support from the Cuban-sponsored regimes of Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe...
...And he seemed bent, in a sense, on proving Jeane Kirkpatrick right in her distinction between authoritarianism, exemplified by Mobutu, and the totalitarianism Kabila represented...
...Nearer to the front line, Kabila commuted between saloons and whorehouses, according to the puritanical Argentine...
...This tale would be of little global significance were it not for the fact that the Clinton administration, its European partners, and the international cadres of humanitarian imperialism rushed so obscenely to congratulate Kabila as the savior of Congo...
...In an outrageous comparison that was all too typical, Roger Winter, the director of the U.S...
...Mobutu took over from Tshombe in Congo...
...What escaped comment was the extraordinary enthusiasm with which the Clinton administration, as well as European chancelleries, embraced Kabila as a putative factor for stability in Congo and preferable to Mobutu...
...Kabila was in fact a kind of evil twin to South African leader Nelson Mandela...
...Mobutu was an amateur tyrant...
...Two years after Lumumba's death, Kabila joined the martyred leader's followers in the National Liberation Committee...
...In 1965, he met Che...
...Guevara viewed Kabila as a loose, lecherous African, and Kabila may have considered Guevara a white adventurer, an updated Dr...
...But from the time his Alliance of Democratic Liberation Forces emerged as a leading contender to pick up the pieces of Mobutu's regime, Kabila made it clear he remembered very well the particular Guevarist principles that have turned out to be his lasting legacy in Africa: Where guerrilla revolution fails, dictatorship can succeed...
...But a lot of us, Boris Yeltsin included, came to our senses...
...Both men benefited from the political and financial support of the former Soviet empire and its Cuban client, but Kabila was an unre-generate revolutionary thug who gloried in his long-ago involvement with the granddaddy of all radical gangsters, Ernesto "Che" Guevara...
...On his victorious march to Kinshasa, Kabila announced that his government would not tolerate multiple parties or a competitive press...
...His asthmatic constitution was undermined, and he found nobody among the Congolese in whom he could feel confidence...
...Committee for Refugees, who "met Kabila a couple of times," was quoted by ABC News declaring that Kabila was no longer a Marxist...
...They deserved each other, even if they didn't like each other...
...But Kabila knew things Che did not...
...Simba" means "lion," yet Kabila was anything but...
...Well, yes, and so was the author of this article...
...Laurent-Desire Kabila first gained attention four decades ago as a member of the Baluba nationalist militia...
...Along with Tanzania, Kabila gained the on-and-off patronage of Libya, Sudan, faithful Cuba, and North Korea...
...In a personal narrative, Guevara described Kabila as a coward who preferred partying in Cairo and Paris, "issuing communiques and drinking Scotch in the company of beautiful women...
...Of course, given how power now works in Africa, it was surprising to nobody that during his three-and-a-half year rulership Kabila resembled his immediate predecessor, the corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko, more than the ascetic and idealistic Lumumba...
Vol. 6 • February 2001 • No. 20
