How the U.S. Helped Create the Disaster in Zaire

About the current fighting and misery -- which has created critical refugee crises in both Zaire and neighboring Rwanda -- Americans are wont to shake their heads and ask, "Why do those people do that to each other?" Americans tend toward historical amnesia about what the United States has wrought. Zairians I met in Kinshasa insist, "You put him there; you kept him there; you get him out."

Who, us?

A history lesson would be useful.

In the early 1960s, a peasant uprising spread until two-thirds of the country was in rebel hands. CIA bombers piloted by Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs strafed opposition targets, and U.S. transports carried Belgian paratroopers to end the threat to Mobutu's power.

Then the United States endorsed Mobutu's 1965 coup. He ended civilian rule and began the 30-year rape of the country. Schools, hospitals, infrastructure and industry disintegrated under his neglect or theft. He enforced his rule with imprisonment, torture and murder.

In the early '70s, U.S. Ambassador Sheldon Vance got fat deals for Mobil Oil and Morrison Knudson, the giant construction company. Morrison Knudson contracted to build a $1.5-billion cross-country power line that U.S. embassy officials correctly predicted would be a disaster. Manufacturers Hanover, General Electric and Westinghouse also made millions from the deal, which had the U.S. government's Export-Import Bank guarantees and hastened Zaire's impoverishment.

In 1974, after the Portuguse withdrew from Angola, Zaire became a pin on Henry Kissinger's strategic map. The CIA used Kamina Air Base to ship arms first to Holden Roberto and then to Jonas Savimbi, who led rebels seeking to overthrow the Angolan government. Mobutu took his cut.

When congressmen wondered why the United States was funding a corrupt dictator, the State Department offered its recurring line, "Mobutu or chaos. He is the one man who can hold the country together." Officials periodically told Congress that Mobutu was making reforms. In 1977, Zairians who had fled to Angola in the '60s sought to retake their homeland in copper-rich Shaba. They marched along the railway telling villagers they had come to liberate them. Local troops melted away.

President Jimmy Carter's administration sent transports to ferry French and Moroccan forces to repulse the invaders. Zairian troops returned and murdered local people who'd had contact with rebels.

The next year, the exiles attacked again. Zairian troops ran away again. U.S. transports carried French and Belgian soldiers to save Mobutu's rule again. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued both times that the rebels were supported by Cuba. A State Department employee said she and her colleagues were ordered to "find the smoking Cubans," but they never did, because there weren't any.

Pressure from the Carter administration helped persuade Mobutu to allow some critics to run for parliament, but after Ronald Reagan was elected president, Mobutu jailed them.

Reagan's ambassadors didn't speak to oppositionists. That changed only after the fall of communism, when the Americans pressed oppositionists not to demand very radical changes and recognized Mobutu's hand-picked prime minister because he appeared committed to paying back international loans that had funded the power line and other white elephants. Besides, Mobutu promised elections. That was in 1990, and there haven't been any.

Richard Moose, Carter's assistant secretary of state for Africa, told me, "Mobutu would run circles around us. And, at the end of the day, the CIA was always there whispering in his ear, because he was always useful to them." After more than three decades of deception, anyone who claims to believe Mobutu's promises is a fool or a liar.

We put him there; we kept him there. Washington should insist that Mobutu abdicate and leave Zaire forever. Then, as in Haiti, it should broker a peace that disarms the security forces and uses United Nations authority and troops to establish the rule of law.