That murky little war in Zaire entered a new phase last week. For more than a month, President Mobutu Sese Seko has been begging for outside help to stem an invasion of Zaire's southern Shaba region by Angola-based Katangese rebels (TIME, April 18). All of a sudden, aid for Mobutu's regime was pouring in. Morocco sent 1,500 troops and promised 1,500 more to bolster Zaire's seemingly ineffectual 30,000-man army. France airlifted the Moroccans' equipment, along with a handful of French instructors, to Zaire. China contributed supplies, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat sent a military fact-finding mission. From Sudan, which shares a border with Zaire, President Jaafar Numeiry promised aid. Even Ugandan Dictator Idi Amin Dada talked about dispatching 30 truckloads of paratroopers, though none arrived.
The invaders were a ragtag army of 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers; most of them, apparently, once fought in the forces of Katangese Leader Moise Tshombe and fled to neighboring Angola after Tshombe's secessionist movement was defeated in the mid-1960s. What made the invasion ominous, to Mobutu's allies, was that the Katangese invaders had obviously been trained and armed by the Angolans and their guests, the Cubans, with the support of the Soviet Union. At little cost or risk to themselves, the Cubans and the Soviets seemed to be using the Katangese rebels to try to overthrow Mobutu, an unpopular pro-Western leader who has at least managed to hold his sprawling, tribally divided nation together for nine years.
Arbitrary Borders. Initially, Mobutu's Western supporters shied away from getting bogged down in another Congolese war. Belgium, France and the U.S. sent token military supplies last month—and hoped the threat would just go away. It did not. The Katangese occupied much of the copper-rich Shaba area without opposition. Mobutu's big break came a fortnight ago when Morocco's King Hassan II, whose army is still fighting leftist guerrillas in the former colony of Spanish Sahara, decided that the time had come to bail out a friend. Egypt's President Sadat was also sympathetic because he is fearful of Soviet ambitions, particularly in the Sudan, which lies between Zaire and Egypt.
Many other African leaders, even if not directly worried about Soviet ambitions, are sensitive to any tampering with ancient colonial boundaries, since their own frontiers are often equally arbitrary and insecure. As for the Chinese, they automatically supported Mobutu because he was under attack by Soviet-backed forces.
In announcing its airlift last week, the French government, significantly, called Zaire "a victim of armed subversive activities originating from abroad." In a TV speech, President Valery Giscard d'Estaing said flatly that no French troops would fight in Zaire, but emphasized that France had not wanted its African friends "to feel abandoned when their security is threatened." Answering protests that his support for Mobutu was reckless, Giscard declared that it was absurd to speculate that his action could lead to "another French Viet Nam."