>Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 16:27:16 +0000
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>From: James Heartfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<snip>
>
>The assassination of Congo president Laurent Kabila was greeted with
>ill-disguised glee amongst Western commentators. It was not always thus.
>US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described Kabila as a 'beacon
>of hope' and a 'strong new leader' when he took power from the ageing
>dictator Mobutu in 1997. Then Kabila was supported by the State
>Department's favorite regional dictators Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and
>Yoweri Museveni of Uganda - the three lionised as a new generation of
>African leaders. But since then Kabila, Museveni and Kagame fell out,
>and the Rwandan army that had taken him to power, took arms against him,
>plunging the country into war.
>
>Most surreal of all the comments on Kabila is the bandying about of
>Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's assessment of Kabila's role in the Congo wars of
>the 1960s. Very few present-day politicians would have met the Cuban
>guerilla leader's exacting standards, but Guevara's critical comments on
>Kabila are regularly quoted by newspapers that have no sympathy with
>Guevara's goal of ridding the Congo of imperialism. Indeed, Richard
>Gott, who republished Guevara's Congo diaries as a blast against Kabila
>at the same time charges him with having 'alienated foreign investors by
>refusing to make payments on the gigantic foreign debt of $14bn incurred
>by his profligate predecessor' (Guardian January 19, 2001).
>
>The truth is that the future of the Congo continues to be decided by
>forces outside its borders. On independence, the United Nations' own
>envoy Conor Cruise O'Brien charged the UN with complicity in the murder
>of radical prime minister Patrice Lumumba. The United States backed
>dictator Mobutu's regime as a base for attacks on the radical
>nationalist movement in Angola. Kabila's own rise to power was not
>popular, but simply better supported. His subsequent fall was decided
>not in the Congo, but Washington.
>
>--
>James Heartfield
