WAITING FOR KABILA

By Kevin Fedarko

Perhaps the only thing more remarkable than the heartbreaking squalor visible everywhere in Zaire these days is the extent to which the man responsible for it has insulated himself from the despair and the destitution. For more than 30 years Mobutu Sese Seko has imposed an uneasy unity on nearly 250 tribes strung across an expanse of Central Africa the size of Western Europe. The natural richness of this region and the willingness of Western governments to bankroll his regime have enabled Zaire's President to indulge in an uninterrupted saturnalia of misrule and kleptomania. He has squandered his country's wealth, ravaged its resources and impoverished its citizens--all while adroitly managing to remain untouched by the consequences of his abusive stewardship. Until now, that is.

During the past five months, Mobutu's regime has rapidly and spectacularly begun to unravel. In the streets of Kinshasa his opponents have been clamoring for him to step down. In two of Zaire's most remote provinces, long-sputtering secessionist movements have burst into flames. But it is the full-scale rebellion now sweeping across five eastern provinces that seems most likely to bring Mobutu's rule to an abrupt and unceremonious conclusion.

The man who marches at the head of that insurrection is Laurent Kabila, 56, a short, rotund guerrilla leader who has been battling Mobutu for more than 30 years. Since the early 1970s Kabila has waged a haphazard and by several accounts rather incompetent struggle against Mobutu's government from the jungle highlands around Lake Tanganyika. Although Kabila's Marxist-inspired People's Revolutionary Party received support from the Soviet Union, China and Cuba (Che Guevara once spent several months training with them), the obscure group never amounted to more than a nuisance. But the experience did enable Kabila to forge a valuable connection with another African guerrilla bush fighter, Yoweri Museveni, who is now the President of Uganda. That friendship would one day be critically important.

All but unknown until five months ago, Kabila's name has now become a household word. His face is emblazoned on the front page of newspapers all over Zaire, often accompanied by shrill headlines like THE BEGINNING OF THE END! At colleges in the capital, students have scrawled his name in chalk on the doors of their dorm rooms. The entire country appears to be monitoring his progress with a near religious sense of anticipation. "We are all just waiting for Kabila," declares one woman in Kinshasa. "He is like Jesus Christ for us."

Central Africa's military messiah is accompanied by a bizarre band of apostles. Many of Kabila's soldiers are clad in rubber Wellington boots, and their uniforms are gleaned from several different armies. Until recently, they were assisted by Mai-Mai tribesmen, who smoke marijuana, worship water and festoon themselves with bathroom fixtures--mainly faucets and hoses--in the belief that these fetishes will aid them in battle. For the moment, the rebel leader has established his headquarters in Mobutu's former home in Goma. He has dubbed his new residence "the Museum of Shame" because its ostentatious decor mirrors the incorrigible excesses of Mobutu's rule. Visitors to Kabila's headquarters, however, are struck by an even more telling reflection. Much like Mobutu's imprimatur these days, the elegance of his erstwhile estate is largely hollow. Almost everything that is ostensibly an objet d'art is fake--the marbleized plastic dining table, the plinths inlaid with artificial malachite, the spanking new Oriental rugs.

Unlike those bagatelles, Kabila's threat to Mobutu is very real. The rebels control a chunk of territory 1,000 miles long. By last Saturday, Kabila's forces had not only taken the airport at Kisangani, the government's last major stronghold in the east, but had also captured the city. Mobutu's troops have been powerless to stop them. His success has instilled Kabila with such confidence that he seems to regard victory as a foregone conclusion. "This regime is completely worn out," he said with a laugh during an interview with TIME. "Mobutu can go wherever he wants...to die. He can go to Nice. He can go to [his village of] Gbadolite. We will guarantee his safety, but he must relinquish power. That is our condition for a cease-fire."

Mobutu, no doubt, would dearly love to demolish such boastfulness. But at the moment he is preoccupied by an enemy even more formidable than the rebel legions. For the past seven months the Zairian President has been undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. In December he rose from his sickbed at his villa on the French Riviera, declaring that he was returning to Zaire to "take things in hand." Supporters greeted him with euphoria but swiftly discerned that Mobutu was incapable of dealing with problems he needed to solve. He shunned the opposition and said nothing about appointing a successor. And then, to the astonishment of those who had welcomed him back, he left--returning to France. The day he departed, catcalls followed his motorcade.

All this seems rather shocking for a man who was once regarded as Africa's most durable dictator. The son of a hotel maid, Mobutu rose to head Zaire's army upon independence in 1960, then seized power five years later. In the decades since, he has kept his balance by continually shunting friends and enemies in and out of favor. A favorite technique for keeping underlings in line has been to switch without warning from generosity to savagery. He has been known to have a man arrested, tortured and forced to drink his own urine before awarding him a prestigious (and lucrative) Cabinet post.

Over the years, Mobutu also devoted considerable energy to enriching his own coffers, dipping into the national treasury as if it were a kind of personal cash machine. No one knows how much he is worth; his visible assets include mansions in Switzerland and Spain, several homes in Belgium, a town house in Paris, a villa near Monte Carlo and a horse ranch in Portugal. But while the President and other members of his kleptocracy profited handsomely, Mobutu's leadership laid waste the economy. In 1994 Zaire's per capita GNP was $125 (70% lower than it was in 1958), and prices rose an average of 23,773%, the highest level ever recorded anywhere. Industry runs at 10% capacity--which means that while the wives of government ministers peruse posh Kinshasa boutiques for $2,000 dresses imported from Europe, 80% of the population can't find jobs.

Nor can they find much else. In Kinshasa's fetid slums, there is a new and sinister edge to the desperation. People who cannot afford soap wash their clothes with papaya leaves. Families that cannot pay for funerals bury their dead in rude holes. Single mothers who cannot find jobs feed their babies only once every other day. "Look at me," says Andre Miku, a retired mechanic whose children are hungry because he has sold the television set and the refrigerator and now there is nothing left to hawk. "I've grown so thin. It's not because I'm sick. There is simply no food. I used to be a very strong man. Now, I am the walking dead."

Such penury seems baffling when viewed against the backdrop of Zaire's extravagant natural endowments. Beneath its vast territory lie 60% of the earth's cobalt and much of the world's supply of industrial-grade diamonds, plus substantial reserves of zinc, copper, manganese and gold. But ever since the prices of metals began dropping in the 1970s, Zaire's economic progress has been frozen. Stagnation turned into catastrophe in the late 1980s, when the cold war ended and the Western powers that had bankrolled Mobutu as a bulwark against communism informed him that his credit had run dry. In response, the President distanced himself from day-to-day governance, and Zaire's threadbare cohesion started to pull apart. The worst unraveling took place in North and South Kivu provinces, sparking a crisis that bequeathed to Kabila what he likes to call his "bon moment."

The problem started in 1994 when the Kivus found themselves playing host to some 1.2 million Hutu refugees from Rwanda. Many of those refugees were members of the former Rwandan government, which had orchestrated the genocide of nearly 1 million Rwandan Tutsi. When the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front took over the country in July, Hutu began pouring into Zaire to escape retribution. There they set up vast encampments, from which their leaders launched raids and incursions back into Rwanda. By July 1996 the Hutu refugee militias were also murdering Tutsi tribesmen who lived in eastern Zaire.

All this proved too much for Paul Kagame, Rwanda's strongman. Enraged, Kagame recruited some 2,000 ethnic Tutsi living in eastern Zaire and trained them with his army. In October, when the Hutu persuaded local Zairian authorities in the Kivu provinces to expel all ethnic Tutsi from Zaire, Kagame ordered his commandos back into Zaire. The alliance of Zairian Tutsi rose to resist the edict, and Zaire's notoriously undisciplined army turned and fled. Within two weeks, the rebels had seized a swatch of eastern Zaire 600 miles long.

Kagame realized, however, that the rebels could not fight Mobutu alone. This opinion was shared by Kagame's close personal friend, President Museveni in neighboring Uganda, an implacable foe of Mobutu's. So Museveni put Kagame in touch with his old friend and fellow bush fighter, Kabila. The two men cut a deal: in exchange for being given command over the 2,000 Zairian Tutsi soldiers, Kabila agreed to conduct a broadly based revolution aimed at toppling Mobutu from power.

The assistance didn't end there. The rebel leader stays in close touch with his foreign patrons. At least twice each week, Museveni talks with Kabila on a satellite phone and dispenses what he calls "political advice." Museveni denies Zairian claims that large numbers of his troops are fighting with the rebels, but diplomats do not rule out the possibility that the assistance he provides Kabila has been more than verbal.

As Kabila's troops surge west, his message of economic prosperity and political stability is greeted with immense enthusiasm. That, plus his military victories, may soon catapult him into the presidency of Zaire. But in recent weeks the delight has been tempered by a sense of trepidation. As Zairians contemplate the possibility of getting rid of one despot, they shudder at the prospect of replacing him with another. "If Kabila were in power," muses one surgeon in Kinshasa, "we would have to make him understand that we do not want to live under dictatorship. I have suffered so much. I cannot live like that again."

--Reported by Peter Graff/Kinshasa and Marguerite Michaels/Goma

With reporting by PETER GRAFF/KINSHASA AND MARGUERITE MICHAELS/GOMA