Kabila's Forces Ready To Take Over A Nation

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday March 22, 1997

By ED O'LOUGHLIN Herald Correspondent in Goma

IN the large school hall near Goma's airport, 1,000 adults sit hunched over notebooks and scraps of paper, their pens moving together. From the stage, a man in a blue denim shirt dictates slowly into a microphone.

"Lesson One: The seven errors leading to the failure of the 1964-1965 Congo Rebellion. Lesson Two: The basic cell. Lesson Three: Social classes and the class struggle. Lesson Four: The principal aims of revolution."

With the war against President Mobutu Sese Seko's regime going its way, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire has launched a series of seminars to "re-ideologise" some of the most brutalised, cynical and downtrodden people on the planet.

After 10 lessons - voluntary, the rebels insist - candidates will be ideologically evaluated and the best may be hired as public servants.

For a movement which professes to believe in the free market, and which enjoys tacit diplomatic support from the United States, the Marxist teaching material might seem a little strange. The rebels are poised to destroy the Mobutu regime, but nobody knows what they will put in its place.

Originally a revolt by persecuted ethnic Tutsis in the Kivu region, the alliance has broadened to include members of ethnic groups from all over Zaire. Veteran Marxist bush fighters like the rebel leader, Commander Laurent Kabila, a one-time colleague of Che Guevara, have been joined by free marketeers such as the alliance's Finance Minister, Mr Mawampanga Mwana Nanga.

The alliance is also strongly influenced by the governments of Rwanda and Uganda, whom Kinshasa has accused of fomenting the rebellion, and of supplying troops and weapons.

The only thing which unites everyone in the rebel movement is the desire to get rid of the corrupt Mobutu regime.

A rebel spokesman, Mr Louis Hamuli, says that planning for the future will only be a priority once the war is won. The program so far is: an end to corruption, a new constitution, reconstruction, elections, respect for human rights. He laughs off the suggestion that his movement is pushing Marxist doctrine which is now past its sell-by date.

"We want a society that looks after all the people," he said. "For more than 30 years we had a dictatorial regime, with no political agenda or social programs, and the population's ideology was damaged. We now need to transform them to create a new country."

BUT with corruption deeply ingrained in this country, Commander Kabila's Congo Republic - he plans to reinstate the name of the socialist state abolished when Mobutu seized power in 1965 - will have to police itself tightly if it is to prove better than the present regime.

Since the rebels took over last November, the Rwanda-Zaire border post in Goma has become more expensive and more hostile than ever. Young soldiers manned the barrier last Saturday, strutting back and forth with sticks and AK47s, harassing and at times beating a group of local women returning from a market in neighbouring Rwanda.

Inside the immigration office, officials exacted a whopping $US700 ($898) for allowing a laptop computer and a television camera to enter the country. The alliance's Information and Finance ministries later admitted that no such "tax" had been authorised, but did nothing to recover the money or punish the officials.

The Ministry of Information, Communication, Press and Propaganda censors all publications and has taken over Goma Radio, renaming it "The Voice of the People" and broadcasting praise for the alliance's troops and denunciations of the "bloody enemy". People in the street lower their voices and look round when asked their opinion of the rebels.

Most say they are willing to make sacrifices in the hope of a brighter future, but others complain about commandeered cars and houses, and high "import taxes" on goods from Rwanda.

"They say they have come to reconstruct Zaire," said one Goma native. "We will wait and see if this is the case."

The runaway military success of the alliance means itscivilian politicians may soon have a chance to measure up to their promises. There is little to stop the rebels advancing all the way to Kinshasa.

The biggest battle in the capture of Kisangani occurred at the main airport, where the Zairean armed forces went on a looting spree and clashed with the Serb and Croat mercenaries hired to support them.

Both sides then fled - the mercenaries by air, the troops in boats across the Zaire River - and the rebels were able to take the town without a fight.

This week, Commander Kabila told The Sydney Morning Herald his forces had found enough small arms and heavy weapons abandoned in Kisangani to equip 15,000 soldiers. The Zairean troops were defecting in hundreds, he said.

The capture of Kisangani leaves the rebels in control of the main hub of central Zaire, with attack routes open to the north, south and west.

ACCORDING to Commander Kabila, his forces are equipping themselves with boats so they can move down the Zaire River towards Kinshasa - after 32 years of Mobutu's rule, Zaire has few passable roads.

He said his troops were only 300 kilometres from the southern city of Lumumbashi, the capital of mineral-rich Shaba province, and that most of the Zairean soldiers they encountered were surrendering.

A greater worry for the alliance forces was the presence near Lumumbashi of several thousand fighters from Angola's UNITA rebel movement. The UNITA troops, toughened by two decades of civil war against the socialist Government in their own country, have been sent by their leader, Jonas Savimbi, to bolster his allies in Kinshasa. Money from diamond mining has sustained UNITA in the years since it lost the backing of the United States and apartheid South Africa, and Savimbi needs friendly bases in neighbouring Zaire to fly supplies in and smuggle diamonds out.

As the alliance commanders prepare for their final offensive, politicians in the rear are beginning to say the attacks may be unnecessary.

Mobutu is very ill, and nobody on the streets of Goma takes seriously his son's claim that the President will return home this weekend. Many believe he is already dead.

In Kinshasa, demonstrators, unhindered by the police or army, have called for Mobutu's removal. The Parliament's muddled attempts to sack the Prime Minister, Mr Kengo wa Dongo, have highlighted the regime's inability to close ranks against the looming threats of rebel attack and popular uprising.

Many Western observers believe even a military coup would do little more than delay the collapse of Mobutu's Zaire. Little prospect remains for foreign intervention to prop up the regime.