Renouncing the Rebels

What ever happened to the Congolese rebels? When the "People's Republic of the Congo" collapsed before advancing government columns in March, its leaders disappeared in headlong flight across the Sudanese border--President Christophe Gbenye in the Rolls-Royce he had expropriated along the way. Most of them ended up in Cairo, where under the friendly eye of Nasser and with money scrounged from Communist embassies, they hoped to plot their triumphant return. It didn't quite work out that way, for soon they were spending most of their time plotting against each other.

Trouble All Over. Occupying expensive apartments and frequenting nightclubs and bars, the rival Simbas began accusing one another of living it up on revolutionary funds. Attempts by Nasser to bring them together only drove them further apart. Rebel Defense Minister Gaston Soumialot announced that he had deposed Gbenye, who retorted angrily that he was undeposable. From his exile quarters in the Sudan, People's Army Commander Nicho'as Olenga renounced them both, claimed that he alone spoke for the revolution--until last month, when the Khartoum government charged that he had been conspiring with the Sudan's own rebel movement and threw him in jail.

There were other setbacks. The rebels' Chinese Communist allies were kicked out of Burundi on the Congo's eastern frontier. Algeria, which had once trained Simbas in the art of guerrilla warfare and had been one of their principal suppliers of arms, suddenly ordered all local rebels to stop plotting or get out, refused to allow Gbenye to enter the country even for a brief visit.

On the Lake. The final disaster came this month, when three drunken Simbas began brawling in Cairo's residential Zamalek district. Before the battle ended, two of them had been shot dead. The surviving Simba resisted arrest on the grounds that "I am a general." That was too much for even Nasser, whose security police had been urging him for months to get rid of the troublesome Congolese. He ordered remaining Simbas rounded up, then packed them aboard a government airliner and shipped them out of Egypt. When last seen, they were headed for Kigoma, the Tanzanian railhead on Lake Tanganyika.

Their destination was hardly good news for Premier Moise Tshombe, who was busy in Leopoldville preparing for the opening this week of the first Congolese parliament to meet in two years. Although Tshombe had managed to put down the bloody Simba rebellion and hold elections throughout most of the Congo, there was still a large rebel pocket in the mountainous area of the eastern Congo around Fizi, just across the lake from Kigoma.

Mercenary Commander Mike Hoare has been ordered to attack Fizi as soon as he has trained his latest batch of white recruits, but it will be no easy task. Advised by a dozen Castro Cubans (who carry Spanish-Swahili dictionaries), the rebels have turned the Fizi region into a fortress of sorts. They are well equipped. Their every need is supplied by a fleet of rebel-operated "fishing" boats--which make regular runs across Lake Tanganyika between Fizi and Kigoma.

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