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Zaire Armed Opposition
The best-known of the groups committed to armed
struggle
probably is the Front for the National Liberation of the
Congo
(Front pour la Libération Nationale du Congo--FLNC), whose
armed
forces invaded Zaire's Shaba Region in 1977 and 1978, from
bases in
Angola
(see
Shaba I;
Shaba II
, ch. 5). The FLNC was led by
Nathaniel Mbumba, a former police officer. On the basis of
its
activities on Zairian soil and its declarations, the FLNC
had no
discernible program other than to overthrow Mobutu.
Despite
recruiting largely from Lunda and other ethnic communities
of
southwestern Shaba Region, there was no sign of Shaba
separatism in
its pronouncements or actions. The FLNC continued to exist
in the
early 1990s, but it had expelled Mbumba in 1987; neither
the party
nor its one-time leader played a major role in the
transitional
period after May 1990.
Some observers noted the FLNC's failure to coordinate
its
activities with the other major armed opposition group,
the PRP.
Headed by Laurent Kabila, a leader of the Lumumbist
insurrection of
1964-65, the PRP maintained a "liberated zone" in the Fizi
area of
southeastern Kivu (in present-day Sud-Kivu). This zone had
been out
of government control since 1964. PRP forces in the area
apparently
existed in symbiosis with the government forces sent to
exterminate
them. Assignment to that theater of operations reportedly
was
popular with Zairian military officers, who profited from
smuggling
gold, ivory, and other commodities out of the PRP zone.
In contrast to the FLNC, the PRP had a well-defined
program for
social revolution. According to one publication, it
foresaw
regrouping peasants in cités agricoles, which would
be
organized as agricultural cooperatives, and equipped with
a
dispensary, maternity clinic, nursery school, playing
fields, movie
theater, market, and branch of the savings bank. It was
unclear how
this socialist paradise in rural Zaire would be financed.
The PRP was briefly in the headlines in 1975, when its
guerrillas kidnapped four foreigners (three American, one
Dutch) at
a Tanzanian wildlife research station. In 1984 and again
in 1985,
the PRP captured the town of Moba (eastern Shaba, on Lake
Tanganyika) before being expelled each time by the Zairian
army.
The government claimed that 1,500 PRP fighters surrendered
in 1986,
but in the early 1990s, the PRP apparently held its small
pocket of
rural territory.
Another Lumumbist group, the Congolese Liberation Party
(Parti
de Libération Congolaise--PLC), attacked small army and
police
posts and government transport around Beni, between Lake
Edward and
Lake Albert, Kisangani, and Kwilu in 1987. At the end of
the 1980s,
the PLC apparently still had a small guerrilla force in
the
Ruwenzori Mountains, along the Ugandan border. Abandoned
by their
leader, Marandura Kibingo, some of the PLC fighters
reportedly were
hiding their guns and descending to western Uganda to grow
food. In
the meantime, Marandura was said to be living in Dar es
Salaam on
money supplied by Libya to the PLC.
The Congolese National Movement-Lumumba (Mouvement
National
Congolais-Lumumba--MNC-Lumumba) was involved over the
years in
small-scale, low-visibility border incursions from the
east, which
did not pose a serious threat to regime stability. In
1984,
however, the MNC-Lumumba claimed responsibility for bomb
blasts at
the Voice of Zaire and the central post office in
Kinshasa, in
which one person was killed. Zaire placed the blame for
the
incidents on Libya, but the Belgian government expelled
MNC-Lumumba
secretary general François-Eméry Lumumba Tolenga (son of
Patrice
Lumumba), saying it "would not permit acts of terrorism to
be
organized from Belgian territory." The 1984 blasts
remained
isolated incidents of urban terrorism.
In March 1994, in Luanda, Angola, a group calling
itself the
Congolese National Army (Armée Nationale Congolaise--ANC)
announced
its intention of beginning an armed struggle in Zaire. The
ANC
presented itself as the military wing of the "radical
opposition,"
and said that its main objective was "to restore
legitimacy and
democracy" to the "ex-Zaire" or "future Democratic
Republic of the
Congo." It claimed that it had fighters based in Uganda,
Tanzania,
Zambia, and Angola.
Data as of December 1993
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