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Zaire National Gendarmerie
On August 1, 1972, President Mobutu dissolved the
National
Police and merged it with the largely rural gendarmerie
into a
single force, the National Gendarmerie. This move
significantly
increased the size of the national police force and made
it an
institutionally distinct component of the FAZ,
hierarchically
equivalent to the other services. By transferring the
national
police force from the Ministry of Interior to the Ministry
of
Defense (Ministry of Defense and Veterans' Affairs in
1993), Mobutu
brought the police under his direct control. Key personnel
from the
police force were retained, and others were mustered out.
Despite
this reorganization, a large number of the local, or
collectivity
police, remained outside the national government's
control,
possibly totaling between 25,000 and 30,000.
Military authorities, rather than local civilian
administrators, normally approve all significant
deployments,
including those required to perform typically civil police
duties.
This arrangement, combined with the National Gendarmerie's
relatively poor training, discipline, and equipment,
sorely limits
the organization's capability to function as an effective
police
force. Furthermore, the typical gendarme is grossly
underpaid, if
he is paid at all, and so often uses his position to
extort
resources from the very people he is charged with
protecting. As a
result, the gendarmerie has contributed little to the
maintenance
of law and order in Zaire.
In August 1993, the chief of staff of the gendarmerie,
on the
twentieth anniversary of its founding, gave a speech in
which he
noted that the nation's roads are insecure because of
widespread
banditry, much of it perpetrated by gendarmerie personnel.
He also
acknowledged that members of the gendarmerie are involved
in
murder, the illegal possession of weapons, extortion, and
armed
robbery.
Data as of December 1993
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