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Kabila's intentions, however, were difficult to measure. As his forces closed in on Kinshasa last week, he placed a call to the U.S.'s United Nations ambassador, Bill Richardson. In April, Richardson had spent a week in Lubumbashi and Kinshasa, trying to work out a deal between the two adversaries. Richardson told TIME that last week he had urged Kabila to reassure the world. "You need to issue a public statement about your intentions," the ambassador told him. "You need to calm fears. You need to say that you want democratic elections." But the rebel leader only laughed and said, "You have a lot of advice."
Some of the credit for Kabila's "soft landing" in Kinshasa may be owed to the persistent intervention of President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, who together with Richardson spent weeks trying to broker a deal that would avoid major bloodshed. It was partly at Mandela's urging that Mobutu relinquished his dictatorship. But early last week the South African leader's effort appeared to have collapsed, after Kabila failed to appear for a meeting with Mandela and Mobutu aboard a South African naval vessel docked off the port of Pointe Noire. Mandela, who had been host aboard the same boat of a May 4 conclave between the two men, then angrily returned home, telling Kabila that if he wanted to meet he would have to travel to Cape Town. Within hours Kabila was there--a sign both of respect for the South African leader and of his desire for international credibility.
Although he spent several hours talking to Mandela, it is still not certain that Kabila has accepted the South African's proposal: a 10-point plan that would put the rebel leader at the head of a coalition of opposition groups and guarantee elections within a year. What Mandela and the U.N. and U.S. negotiators had in mind was for Kabila to accept power from parliament speaker Laurent Monsengwo, Archbishop of Kisangani, who was installed in office for that purpose.
But in his first hours of power, Kabila ignored Monsengwo and his government. Though under pressure from many quarters, including his African backers, to establish a broad-based regime, Kabila has declared that the only legal political party is his own Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo.
Kabila's ascension to the leadership of Zaire, a nation of 45 million people the size of Western Europe and rich in diamonds, gold, cobalt and copper, came with stunning speed. Mobutu's ouster was the culmination of a seven-month military campaign that began as an uprising among Tutsi tribesmen in southeastern Zaire after they were ordered expelled from the country. With backing from the anti-Mobutu governments of Uganda, Rwanda and Angola, Kabila took control of and expanded the rebel movement, sweeping east to west across the vast Central African nation almost without opposition until he was camped on the doorstep of Kinshasa. Pushed before him in the jungle were hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees from Rwanda, many of whom are believed by aid workers to have died violently at the hands of Kabila's Tutsi supporters.