29.05.1997

Ex-‘Marxist’ accepts imperialism’s embrace

Laurent Kabila now seems safely installed in power. Zaire has been renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo, which had been its title up until 1971. Kabila has even told the United Nations that his country’s national flag will revert to the one used when the former Belgian colony was granted independence in June 1960.

Significantly, Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire is now considering moving the Congo’s capital from Kinshasa to the southern city of Lubumbashi. Such a move, if it ever happened, would clearly be an attempt to weaken secessionist moves in the south and, perhaps more crucially, would shift the new Congo’s ties from francophone countries in the west towards southern and east Africa - thus falling more into the orbit of Mandela’s South Africa and, by extension, US imperialism.

Kabila’s latest move, which does not bode well, has been to ban all political parties - of which it is said there are hundreds, many set up by Mobutu himself - in order to ‘smooth the transition’ to power. He has declared his support for the so-called “Ugandan model”, under which all ministers sit in the cabinet purely as ‘individuals’, as opposed to representing ‘partisan’ interests.

There has been much speculation about Kabila’s political past and history, and about his character. A persistent charge has been that he is more interested in profiteering and self-enrichment than fighting for political principles. This accusation goes right back to the mid-1960s, when Kabila fought alongside Che Guevara.

Chris McGreal of The Guardian wrote last week that Guevara became

“disillusioned with Mr Kabila’s preference for women and drink. Among other things, the young Zairean revolutionary ran a brothel. Guevara concluded that he was using cross-border rebel operations between Tanzania and Zaire to smuggle the profits” (May 21).

This is open to debate. In John Lee Anderson’s new biography, Che Guevara: a revolutionary life (review to follow shortly in the Weekly Worker),the Argentinean revolutionary is quoted as saying that Kabila was “clear, concrete and firm”. True, Guevara was not exactly over the moon when he discovered that Kabila part-ran a brothel bar in Kigoma, on the Tanzanian shore of Lake Tanganyika, whose main function was to provide “rest and recuperation” for the rebels. But Guevara waved that aside, on the ground that Kabila’s admirable hatred for “North American imperialism” - and the understanding that it was the main enemy - more than made up for any minor ‘indiscretions’.

What Guevara did become impatient and disillusioned with was the chronic in-fighting between the rebels, which led to bloodshed on occasions. Guevara noticed more than once that Kabila denounced other rebel figures as “demagogues” and refused to cooperate with them. This lack of trust led to innumerable military fiascos, so much so that Guevara at one point despairingly described the Congolese rebels as “really pathetic”. However, all the blame for the rebels’ resounding defeat at the hands of Mobutu and his CIA backers cannot be laid at Kabila’s door - at least in the view of Che Guevara.

One thing that is clear is that Kabila no longer believes that US imperialism is the main enemy. The United States is de facto backing Kabila, who in turn views it as a useful ally.

Paul Greenaway