ZAIRE'S NEW ORDER

By Bruce W. Nelan

The endgame in Zaire arrived sooner than anyone expected. President Mobutu Sese Seko, the country's corrupt "Supreme Guide" for 32 years, finally ran out of moves. When he grudgingly flew off last Friday for a possible meeting with rebel leader Laurent Desire Kabila, Mobutu could choose only his manner of exit: to resign, as his neighbors and former friends were urging, or be thrown out at gunpoint, as Kabila's advancing troops intended to do in short order. Since last October the rebels of Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces have surged across two-thirds of the vast nation, while Mobutu's untrained and underpaid soldiers ran away from town after town or laid down their weapons and cheered the new regime. International diplomats stepped in last week to avert a final clash as the rebels' relentless offensive, apparently unopposed, neared the capital of Kinshasa.

Mobutu has to be as surprised as everyone else. He was out of the country for cancer treatment last fall when thousands of Zairean Tutsi living in the southeast rebelled in the face of a tribal pogrom supported by Mobutu's army. Led by Kabila, who has been involved in uprisings in Zaire for 30 years, well-armed fighters not only halted the pogrom but swiftly overwhelmed the government forces in the region. Kabila's Tutsi-led forces kept right on winning, and are now poised to take over the whole country.

Their arrival in Kinshasa could bring a final round of bloodshed, but the emergence of Kabila and a new generation of leaders in neighboring countries offers a fresh start for the long-suffering region. As a revolutionary, Kabila has yet to prove his devotion to democracy or ethnic even-handedness, but world leaders are encouraged by his role as a protege of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a onetime leftist guerrilla who has embraced capitalism, led his country to a newfound prosperity and turned friendly toward the U.S.

The Clinton Administration dispatched U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson last week to push Mobutu into a face-to-face meeting with Kabila to arrange a "soft landing," allowing the President to retire on grounds of ill health. Richardson carried a letter along those lines from Clinton. The special envoy was also trying to persuade Kabila that he should accept a cease-fire, commit himself to early elections and open the way for aid agencies to help feed and evacuate tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled the fighting only to starve in the Zairean jungle. Both men disliked the terms and played coy over formal negotiations.

The biggest cloud over Kabila's emergence is the conduct of his troops, some of whom have systematically blocked access to suffering refugees. International aid agencies also accused his troops of participating in the slaughter that took place two weeks ago at Hutu camps where 80,000 refugees were huddled in rebel-held territory. More than 1 million Hutu fled into Zaire from Rwanda in 1994 after genocidal tribal warfare there, and an unknown number have been running ever farther west to escape Kabila's advancing Tutsi-led fighters. In recent weeks they have become the hapless victims of many attackers: Mobutu's retreating troops; Kabila's rebels; local Zaireans resentful of the aid the refugees were receiving; and the death-dealing ravages of malnutrition, cholera and dysentery.

Last month Zairean villagers attacked the refugee camps with machetes and stole all the supplies they could find. They were backed up by rebels who reportedly fired into the throngs with automatic rifles. Last week, to refute the charges of atrocities, Kabila's soldiers began delivering a few thousand refugees, many sick and mangled, from the jungle camps to Kisangani, where they could be airlifted home.

The plight of the refugees has raised disturbing questions about Kabila's intentions. Is he in control of his forces and therefore ordering revenge attacks on the Hutu, or is he a weak leader unable to prevent them? Says State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns: "We will hold Kabila responsible for the conduct of his own soldiers." Uganda's Museveni has been telling Kabila he was "spoiling" his reputation by treating the refugees so cruelly.

The U.S. also wonders whether Kabila will choose to rule by himself or open up Zairean politics to other parties. "I cannot tell you that we think he is a democrat," says Burns. Museveni was not pleased when Kabila visited him last month and said he was about to announce the names of those who would serve in his new government. "I asked him, 'What's the hurry?'" says Museveni. "We cannot run Zaire for him, but we can try to help him avoid mistakes." He fears Kabila wants to dominate the country until elections are held--who knows when--and warns that this is "unwise."

Kabila refers to Museveni as a "good friend" and speaks to him by satellite phone at least twice a week. "I love him," says Kabila. "We have always talked about the future of Africa and this problem of being a continent of beggars. We look to Rwanda, Uganda, Angola--and many more countries--to be a United States of Africa." The notion sounds fantastically far-fetched. Africa's modern history has been written in the blood of tribalism: wars of secession, violent coups, gruesome vendettas.

If national borders have bred such strife, what is the likelihood of erecting, let alone maintaining, a much larger tent? The idea might well remain a mirage, and Kabila may not be up to the challenge. But if anyone is ready, it is Uganda's Museveni, an ex-Marxist who has spearheaded one of the most remarkable economic and social comebacks in the world. Not only has Museveni reinvigorated a country that was once a synonym for horror, but he is also exerting profound influence across the breadth of sub-Saharan Africa. Old friends, proteges and disciples have either gained power or, as in Kabila's case, are in the process of winning it, from the Great Lakes region north to Sudan and west to the mouth of the Congo.

All the turmoil attending Zaire's galloping insurgency against Mobutu has obscured the wider change. With Museveni as its godfather, this realignment of Africa's old order tends to be Anglophone in its international voice, pro-American in its diplomacy and attuned to Adam Smith in its economics. Says Barnett Rubin, an official at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: "The Zaire rebellion has become a trans-Africa struggle. It's very messy, but the prospects for better governance lie with these newer forces."

Besides "building more indigenous institutions," Rubin notes, "all of these heads of state have ties to each other. That's a brotherhood we haven't seen before." Museveni's old college chum from the University of Dar-es-Salaam, John Garang, heads the revolt in southern Sudan against the Islamist regime. One of Museveni's disciples, the Tutsi military commander Paul Kagame, is already in power in Rwanda, having swept into Kigali in 1994 to end the genocidal orgy by Hutu militias that killed some 800,000 Tutsi civilians and Hutu moderates. Kagame, who is Rwanda's Vice President and Defense Minister but really runs the show, figures as the backer of Kabila's insurrection in Zaire. Now, according to U.S. sources, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Angola and Zambia are supporting Kabila's effort.

"What's going on in the Great Lakes region is a good thing," declares a U.S. ambassador in the region. "It's Africans trying to take control of their own destiny. They are getting countries they can work with, ridding themselves of the last vestiges of colonialism." His views are not shared by all American policymakers. "In Washington," he says, "they're worried about Zaire's collapsing. It's already collapsed. I don't buy the chaos theory."

The words could almost have come from Museveni himself, a dynamo who is not shy about his achievements but who considers himself, above all else, a "realist." His adoption of market economics has helped turn Uganda into a star performer from the basket case it became during the nightmare years of Idi Amin Dada and his successor, Milton Obote. The country's current 7% annual growth rate makes this former jewel of British East Africa a respectable performer even by comparison with today's "tigers" of East Asia. Museveni has forsworn the socialism he once embraced, while he wins admiration for social initiatives like his decision to declare war on Uganda's dire plague of AIDS.

What stirs some doubts about Museveni is his refusal to countenance electioneering by rival parties. He justifies this rule as the wish of the people, who he says were whipsawed for too long by parties that waged tribal clashes under political names. What he continues to preach in Uganda and export among his disciples abroad is his idea that Africa's real struggle ought not to be tribe versus tribe but peasants without blankets versus despots in palaces.

Washington is of two minds about the Ugandan's ways. A U.S. official says, "We don't like Museveni's tendency to meddle regionally, but the meddling he's done in Sudan we've helped fund." A better reading of Museveni's clout would be what he calls networking. "It's not meticulous planning going on here," a Western diplomat argues. "It's just these men taking advantage of the situation."

In Rwanda's case, the situation was blood-curdling mass murder. Kagame grew up as a Rwandan exile in a Tutsi-friendly southern Ugandan tribe that happens to be made up of Museveni's own people. The two men fought together in the bush in the early 1980s, when Museveni was trying to oust Obote. Kagame was training in the U.S. in 1990 when he received the call to return home as head of the Uganda-based Tutsi guerrilla movement.

Last October Kagame staged a cross-border incursion, joining Zairean Tutsi rebels to rout murderous Hutu militias that had fled across the frontier with the civilian refugees. When Mobutu's army vanished in the face of this onslaught, a full-scale Zairean rebellion suddenly seemed possible. Museveni told his Rwandan friend to tap Laurent Kabila as the leader of a broader movement, and today Kabila, with key help from Kagame, is ready to take Zaire.

Meanwhile, Museveni delights in his new friendship with America, which long shunned him. "For the first time, Americans are working with African patriots," he says. "Before, the U.S. called us leftists. What did it mean? We were just fighting for independence." With Nelson Mandela's South Africa as an additional beacon, Museveni's highlands sphere is creating a new sense of possibility from the Nile to the Cape. The new leaders might yet evolve into oppressive Big Men themselves. But for now, a part of the world that once was known as the Dark Continent is hoping to find itself.

--Reported by Peter Graff and Marguerite Michaels/Kampala and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by PETER GRAFF AND MARGUERITE MICHAELS/KAMPALA AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON