Abduction in the Air

The most troublesome enemy of Congo President Joseph Mobutu is Moise Tshombe, 47, the wily pro-Western politician who ran copper-rich Katanga as a secessionist state in the early 1960s, later served for 15 months as the Con o's Premier, and still commands wide support in the country. After Mobutu seized power in a bloodless army-backed coup 21 months ago, he forced Tshombe into permanent exile, later had him sentenced to death in absentia for high treason. Mobutu sees the hand of Tshombe in every disturbance in the Congo, is convinced that he is plotting a comeback.

Last week Tshombe sat in a shuttered police cell in Algiers, having been kidnaped on a private airplane over the Mediterranean and flown into Algeria. The Congolese government immediately asked Algeria to extradite him so that the sentence of execution could be carried out. Even in jail, however, Tshombe haunted Mobutu. Outraged by his abduction, Tshombe's followers in the eastern part of the Congo rose in revolt, seized two important towns and raised fears that the country might be plunged into another bloody civil war.

At Gunpoint. Tshombe's kidnaping was a bizarre episode. He had flown from Madrid, where he lives in exile, to Palma on the island of Majorca for a few days' rest, accompanied by two security agents assigned by the Franco government to protect him. Next day a sleek executive Hawker Siddeley 125 touched down in Palma on a flight from Geneva. On board were four passengers, including two whom Tshombe already knew. One was a Frenchman named Francis Bodenan, whom he had become acquainted with a few weeks earlier, the other a Belgian named Marcel Hambursin. The remaining passengers were a convicted Belgian swindler, Charles Sigal, and his wife Yvonne. Using the name of a fictitious firm for a cover, the four had chartered the plane from a London air-taxi company. They were real estate developers, they explained, and wanted to examine some sites in the Mediterranean on which to build new hotels.

By prearrangement, Tshombe, who sometimes dabbles in real estate, and his two guards climbed aboard in Palma for a 15-minute flight to the nearby isle of Iviza. There the group lunched at El Prenso restaurant on shrimp and broiled sea bass, looked over a possible building site on the coast, and then emplaned, supposedly for the return flight to Palma. The jet had barely completed the climb out from Iviza when Pilot David Taylor, 32, radioed to the Palma air-control center: "I am being forced at gunpoint by passengers to change route to Algeria." Less than an hour later, the plane put down at a military base outside Algiers. The passengers and pilots were immediately taken into custody by Algiers security.

"Black Judas." Who did it? An official Algerian government report fingered Bodenan, 42, who served ten years in a French prison on a murder conviction. According to the Algerian investigators, Bodenan drew a silencer-equipped automatic pistol, shot at (but apparently did not hit) the first passenger who moved, and singlehanded took over the plane. So far, there is no evidence the others were in on the plot. The motive was most likely money: anyone who succeeded in delivering Tshombe to Mobutu could count on becoming very rich.

Whether by design or accident, the timing of the snatch heightened the drama. It came on the seventh anniversary of the Congo's independence from Belgium. Rumors raced through Kinshasa that the Algerians were going to present Tshombe to them as an anniversary gift, and Mobutu sent a plane to Algiers to pick him up. But the Algerian regime of Colonel Houari Boumediene could not decide what to do.

According to international practice, Algeria should not surrender Tshombe to Mobutu inasmuch as he was convicted on political, not criminal, charges. Yet Boumediene is eager to improve his image in Black Africa, whose leaders almost all revile Tshombe as a "Black Judas" for protecting Belgian financial interests in the Congo and using white mercenaries to keep himself in power. The official Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid proposed establishing an "African Nuernberg" to try Tshombe.

"International Mafia." Sensing the urgency of the situation, Tshombe's followers in the east Congo apparently hoped to strike down Mobutu before he could get his hands on Tshombe. In Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville, the French colonel who commands a 200-man white mercenary force that normally supports Mobutu suddenly switched sides and seized the city. Within hours, 200 additional mercenaries landed in Kisangani, probably from airports in Portuguese Angola. In the Congo border city of Bukuva, a force of European residents under the command of a rich Belgian planter named Joseph Schramm led remnants of Tshombe's old Katanga constabulary in attacks on the local army garrison.

Reacting with hysteria, Mobutu ordered a full-scale mobilization of Congolese men and women between the ages of 18 and 25, slapped a dusk-to-dawn curfew on all Europeans in the Congo, and appealed to the U.N. Security Council for protection against an "international Mafia" that he said aimed at his overthrow. At week's end, between bursts of martial music, the Kinshasa radio claimed that forces loyal to Mobutu had recaptured Kisangani and Bukuva. Europeans fleeing from Bukuva into neighboring Rwanda told of looting and grisly retaliations against the remaining whites by Mobutu's troops. A planeload of bruised and battered mercenaries landed in Rhodesia.

If Mobutu succeeds in getting Tshombe, he will then have to find a new scapegoat for the Congo's troubles. Despite his talk about economic reform, he has so far failed to rein in the Congo's debilitating inflation or spur industrial growth. What he has done, however, is to abolish all opposition political parties, disband Parliament, and have a new constitution written to legitimatize his one-man rule. His general explanation for his policies: the Congolese need discipline.

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