Congo: Why Few Will Mourn Kabila

Don't expect to see many of those who cheered Laurent Kabila's march to power mourning over his assassination. Because the diminutive guerrilla leader, who assumed the presidency of the Congo only four years ago as the Rwandan army led an insurrection that swept aside the four-decade dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, had become a caricature of the man he'd replaced. He headed up a corrupt, inept and duplicitous government that delivered little to its long-suffering people except more war. Kabila was reportedly shot dead Tuesday by one of his bodyguards, in what may have been part of a coup attempt. His government is still denying the reports, although on Wednesday it named Kabila's son, Joseph as acting head of state.

An African version of World War I

There would certainly be no shortage of suspects in the slaying of a man whose grip on power depended on the nimble manipulation of ethnic, political and regional rivalries. But early speculation is that the assassination plot may have originated in his own military, grown weary of his endless exhortations to fight on in a civil war that has drawn in six neighboring states and been likened to World War I. Some reports suggest that the shooting occurred as a group of generals confronted Kabila after he'd reportedly tried to sack them. Many observers believe the prospects for ending the war are somewhat brighter in Kabila's absence, since his tendency to find pretexts for breaking agreements or avoiding them altogether had begun to exasperate even some of his regional allies. Kabila's army was reportedly incensed by a speech he made over the weekend in which he ordered a final assault to eliminate the Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed rebel forces in the east. But a power vacuum in the capital could also accelerate the dismemberment of the vast country into fiefdoms controlled by neighboring states.

Biting the hand that brought him to power

Many of Kabila's officers had begun to express frustration over the war, which began in earnest early in 1997 when Kabila turned on those who'd brought him to power. The former guerrilla leader tapped into resentment of his "outsider" regime in Kinshasa by initiating a pogrom against Rwandan Tutsis — the very army that had transformed him from a minor regional insurgent into the president. Rwanda had installed Kabila precisely because Mobutu had provided shelter to the Hutu genocidaires who had killed a million of their Tutsi countrymen in 1994, and Kabila had failed to deliver on promises to stop the Hutu gunmen operating from bases inside the Congo. When he turned on the Rwandans in his capital and made common cause with the Hutu militants, Rwanda launched a lightning operation to overthrow him. But where the defeat of Mobutu had relied in part on the intervention of Angolan forces over Congo's western border, the renewed Rwandan invasion took the Angolans by surprise, and they raced in, together with Zimbabwe and Namibia, to shore up Kabila. Uganda once again fought alongside the Rwandans, although those two clashed over just which army would control territory "liberated" from Kabila's government forces, and found themselves fighting each other.

Local tradition suggests it's far from certain that Kabila's removal will end the war and bring stability, because in the absence of democratic institutions in the war-torn country, politics is conducted with Kalashnikovs. Still, few would see his assassination as a blow to peace.