Zairian Military … and the „absolute gangsters“ of Equateur



More puzzle pieces:

The state of the Zairian Military in the late 90’s, as describes by Gerard Prunier in “Africa’s World Wars”.

…”In theory all this (the total Zairian fighting power) added up to around eighty thousand men; in practice there were at the most around fifty thousand, with probably less than half at anything like fighting capacity. The officer corps was not only ridiculously large (fifty generals and over six hundred colonels), but it was also split by rivalries between officers trained in Belgium, in the Unites States, or in France, who forms their own factions in addition to the tribal divisions.
Most of the top ranks were natives from the Equateur Province; almost all the professionally inclined officers belonging to other areas had been purges or even killed over the years. The winners of the negative selection process were absolute gangsters; their corruption was such that when the managing directors of a number of public companies were changes by decree in 1991, the top officers besieges the offices with armed men and tanks to try to impose their own candidates for the jobs. But by then Mobutu was so weakened that he threatened to resign instead of shooting them. Such was the army that the AFDL (Alliance des Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation)  was going to have to “fight”. In fact, the AFDL mostly saw it running away.”

The gangster of Equateur. The role models of success for the young in this region? Hopefully not. But the longer we are in the DR Congo the more often we here about the 'extreme' situation in this particular region. Surely it does not help that Mobuto himself comes from here, and in fact went to school in Mbandka! Shacking off history and being able to envision a brighter future - the key and challenge for change anywhere - especially here. 


AFDL: the umbrella rebel organization created in October 1996 in eastern Zaire under Rwandese tutelage to spearhead the fight against Modubut’s regime.

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