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Zaire The Civil Guard
In part as an effort to improve the state's performance
of the
police function, and in part as a redistribution of power
and
influence, in 1984 Mobutu once again decentralized police
powers
and created a national civilian police organization, known
as the
Civil Guard (Garde Civile), to perform normal civilian
police
duties, as well as customs and border control. The guard's
precise
name is the General Elite Peace Force. The guard, trained
and
equipped by the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)
and
Egypt, appeared initially as if it might provide more
effective and
rational law enforcement than that which had been provided
by the
gendarmerie. However, it too has suffered, among other
things, from
insufficient pay and is just as ineffective and feared by
the
citizenry as the National Gendarmerie. Nevertheless, in
the early
1990s the Civil Guard was regarded as loyal to Mobutu. In
conjunction with the elite DSP, it was deployed to harass
the
opposition and transitional government on Mobutu's behalf
and was
generally paid--or at least paid more regularly than
ordinary
military and security units.
Although the Civil Guard was designated to take primary
responsibility for police matters in Zaire, it probably
had no more
than 10,000 personnel in its ranks in the early 1990s, and
its
deployment was limited largely to the country's urban
centers. The
National Gendarmerie was still the prominent organization
in rural
areas and a competitor for dominance in most urban areas
as well.
Data as of December 1993
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