Congo Leader Reportedly Dead After Being Shot by Bodyguard By NORIMITSU ONISHI President Laurent D. Kabila was reportedly shot by a bodyguard. BIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Jan. 16 - President Laurent Kabila of Congo, who deposed one of Africa's great dictators but then brought his country into even worse disarray, was shot and killed today, diplomats and associates said. The president was shot by one of his bodyguards, according to John E. Aycoth, a lobbyist and public relations consultant in Washington who acts as Mr. Kabila's spokesman in the United States. He said he had talked to top Congolese officials, who told him that the president was dead. The killing was also reported by Louis Michel, foreign minister of Belgium, Congo's former colonial ruler, who said he was told of Mr. Kabila's death by "two trustworthy sources." The circumstances of the shooting were not immediately known, but one report said that it had involved a dispute between Mr. Kabila and some of his generals. The Congolese government gave no details of the incident, but announced that it had sealed borders, closed the airport and imposed a night curfew. A televised address by President Kabila's personal chief of staff, Col. Edy Kapend, suggested the seriousness of the events. Soldiers surrounded the presidential palace, according to reports from the capital, Kinshasa, though the city itself appeared calm. There was no indication who was in charge. Ordering senior commanders to bring their units under control, Colonel Kapend said: "No shots may be fired, for whatever reason, without prior order. The population must not be thrown into panic and the troops must not grow agitated." The government's minister of interior, Gaetan Kakudji, one of Mr. Kabila's closest allies, went on state television to say that the president himself had ordered the curfew, suggesting that he was still alive. But in Washington, a senior administration official said the United States has received several reports from credible sources that Mr. Kabila had been assassinated. "Our operating assumption is that he is dead," the official said. Mr. Kabila's death would dramatically alter the dynamics of a two- and-a-half-year war that has drawn in half a dozen African nations and destabilized all of Central Africa. Mr. Kabila, who deposed the longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, had long been considered the main obstacle to any diplomatic resolution to the current conflict, and had become increasingly isolated in his four years in office. It was not clear tonight who might have led the shooting of Mr. Kabila, though his standing in the military had fallen recently. After months of stalemate during which the warring parties had seemed satisfied with carving up Congo and feasting on its natural resources, Mr. Kabila's forces suffered a serious defeat late last year in Katanga, the mineral-rich province in the southeast. Shots were heard this afternoon near the presidential palace, where fighting also had occurred, according to the United Nations in New York, citing Kamel Morjane, the United Nation's special envoy to Congo, who was in Kinshasa. While Mr. Kabila had promised to deliver the Congolese from the years of Mr. Mobutu's dictatorship, he immediately banned all political parties after coming to power. And he never followed through on his promise to hold elections in April 1999, instead running the country himself, with the help of a strong military. Mr. Kabila steadily lost popularity in the capital. He traveled only at night, because during the day pedestrians would lift their shirts to show their bellies at his passing motorcade as a sign that they were hungry. article finishes at: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/17/world/17CONG.html?pagewanted=2 **************************************** U.S. Military and Corporate Recolonization of the Congo by Ellen Ray The United States' involvement in Congo since before independence from Belgium in June 1960 has been steady, sinister, and penetrating. Most notable was the CIA's role in the overthrow (September 1960) and later assassination (January 1961) of Congo's first Prime Minister, the charismatic (and socialist) Patrice Lumumba. The full extent of U.S. machinations was not known for years,1 but the failure at the time of the United Nations to protect Lumumba was patent. And questions continue to linger over the mysterious plane crash in September 1961 that killed U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold as he was flying to the border town of Ndola to meet with Moise Tshombe, president of the breakaway Katanga Province. The plane fell from the sky, killing all aboard.2 Is it any wonder that in Congo today there is little trust of Washington or respect for the United Nations? Introduction In October 1996, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL), commanded by and composed mainly of Tutsi military forces from Paul Kagame's Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), along with Tutsi refugees from Zaire and some Congolese patriots,3 all under the titular leadership of Congolese exile Laurent Kabila, crossed into Zaire from Rwanda and Burundi. In May 1997, after only seven months of fighting, they had overthrown the 30-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.4 While marching west across the vast expanse of the country, divisions of this army had wreaked terrible vengeance on the Rwandan Hutu exiles encamped since 1994 in eastern Zaire, where they had been driven from Rwanda by the RPA on the heels of the horrendous massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis, encouraged and supervised by extremists in the Hutu-dominated government. In Kinshasa, with Kabila named President, key cabinet posts and the new Congo army and security forces were immediately staffed at the highest levels by Rwandan Tutsis. http://www.covertaction.org/full_text_69_01.htm ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges within Marxism in the tradition of V.I. 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