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"Kolwezi was a devastated ghost town, eerily vacant and lifeless; its wide boulevards and veranda lanes were silent. Comfortable African bungalow homes were deserted or shattered. Mainstreet shops, along with the bank and the small, pleasant hotel, had been rampaged through, looted, burned, their windows broken. A thick, sickening smell hovered over the town. The scene was hauntingly like a horror film where all signs of life had suddenly been seized and stopped. There were bodies on every street, some beside the cars where they had been ambushed and shot. African women had been gunned down as they crossed the tree-shaded intersections. Bodies of dead Zaïrian soldiers whose trucks had careened and smashed off the road were left in positions of disarray.
"We heard horrifying stories of torture as well as death. Men were rounded up and taken to rebel centers in the bank or nearby schools for long periods of interrogation by the Katangese. Without explanation, some were released. Others were taken away and never seen again. One man denied to rebels who appeared at his house that he had any money. His jaw was smashed with a rifle butt and all his teeth were knocked out. Not until Kolwezi was liberated did he receive any treatment. Another man had tried vainly to close his front door on the rebels. When his hand was caught in the jamb, the rebels simply cut off his fingers. He also remained for days without treatment.
"The most horrifying scene took place in one small room of a residence where 34 men, women and children (all Europeans) had been executed by machine-gun fire. Almost every white-owned house in the town was subjected to looting of jewelry, money, clothing and almost anything else that could be dropped into huge 'collection' baskets the rebels carried. In the home where the mass atrocity was committed, six-and seven-year-old children were sent by the rebels to remove watches and rings from the victims. One housewife, still in a state of shock, reported seeing the body of a woman neighbor eaten by packs of roaming dogs."
The fighting in Shaba demonstrated the vulnerability of Zaïre, a huge, mineral-rich land of more than 200 tribes and four major language groups that the dictatorial Mobutu—he grandly refers to himself as le Guide—has kept yoked together largely by force. Shaba is essential to Zaïre's survival: its copper mines provide the bulk of the country's annual revenues of $1.3 billion. However, the Lunda tribesmen of Shaba have long resented the indifference shown them by the central government in Kinshasa. In 1960, United Nations forces were dispatched to the area to put down an abortive independence movement led by the late Katangese leader Moïse Tshombe, whose memory is still revered by many of the Angola-based rebels. Before they were repulsed by Zaïrian and Moroccan troops last year, the Katangese guerrillas, whose slogan is "Vanquish or die," warned the 3,000 or so Westerners working in the province that they would return. Last week the tigers lived up to that vow.