Zaire: Prop Mobutu

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Mobutu's government was claiming last weekend to be recapturing the territory taken in the preceding month by the guerrilla army of the Congolese National Liberation Front in the mineral-rich province of Shaba (formerly Katanga).

If the Zaire army has gained any ground it must be largely thanks to the influx of help from his imperialist friends.

French aeroplanes flew in 1,500 Moroccan troops and France is providing the services of crucial military technicians including paratroop instructors and engineers and possible pilots for Mobutu's 15 Mirage fighters.

This has been backed by British Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen, and by NATO.

Help has also been offered by Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda (Amin visited Mobutu last week), the United States, possibly South Africa, and certainly China.

The Chinese spokesman at the UN last week accused the Soviet Union of organising the invasion of Zaire by mercenaries.

The speed with which Mobutu's friends have rallied round testifies to the great economic importance of Zaire to imperialism (as a source f copper, diamonds, tin, zing, iranium and cobalt of which it has 65% of the capitalist world's supplies).

CA British Foreign Secretary David Owen's eight-day, whistle-stop tour of southern Africa resembled Kissinger's flying diplomacy in more ways than one.

It now transpires that the plans he put to the racist Smith regime in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) for a 'constitutional conference' were worked out in close consultation with the Carter administration, and they provide for the full involvement of the US government in all future negotiations on the future of From being the errand boy of American imperialism in Africa, the British Foreign Office has now been demoted to being its bag-carrier.

Owen's plan is for a conference which will write a constitution directly, agreement on the points reached in bilateral talks between the British-American side andrespectively -Smith and his "moderate African leaders such as Nomo and Mugabe, who still saim a following among the guerrilla forces.

The US gorernment calculates that through such a conference It also points to the prevailing opinion about the fragility of Mobutu's pro-imperialist regime.

The concentration of its 40,000 strong army in Shaba however will endanger Mobutu's control in the rest of the country.

Antoine Gizenga, former deputy TIM The Zaire conflict has k ighlighted the role played in Afric 1 by the French government.

President Giscard and his Minister of Cooperation, Robert Galley, went to Dakar (Senegal) at the weekend to preside over the fourth Franco-African summit conference since 1973, at which nineteen African countries are represented and where proposals for an 'anticommunist military alliance' will be discussed.

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CIA COBALT COPPER