AMY GOODMAN: This past weekend, the rebels of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire captured the Zairean capital Kinshasa and drove the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko from power. Rebel leader Laurent Kabila, who was on Democracy Now! last week, assumed the post of president and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo, its original name following independence from Belgium in 1960.

For the last 32 years, Mobutu Sese Seko distinguished himself not only as a murderous tyrant but as a foe of liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and throughout southern Africa. And while newspaper headlines across the world proclaim the demise of an African tyrant, the 66-year-old Mobutu should have been more accurately described as an American tyrant, for Mobutu was repeatedly propped up by the United States and its Western European allies.

Joining us to talk about Mobutu and his relationship with the United States is Sean Kelly. He’s the author of America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire, published by American University Press. Sean Kelly was an American diplomat in Africa before joining the Voice of America as an African correspondent for 20 years.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

SEAN KELLY: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it’s very good to have you, and certainly especially on today. You’ve got a long subtitle to your book, America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire: How the United States Put Mobutu in Power, Protected Him from His Enemies, Helped Him Become One of the Richest Men in the World, and Lived to Regret It. Let’s go back in time, since we do have time — this isn’t exactly soundbite radio — and go back to when the Congo was established, even before, how it was established, and what role the U.S. played, and then how Mobutu came to power.

SEAN KELLY: Well, you can go all the way back to King Leopold, who, in — before the turn of the century, involved a prominent American who was also — who had been born in Britain but who had acquired American citizenship, Henry Morton Stanley, who was credited with having, more or less, discovered the Congo, as they said in those days. He traced the river from its origins, practically, in Central Africa all the way through the Congo, what became known as the Congo, and out through the Atlantic. He walked or paddled the length of it. And then — and he did that for King Leopold of the Belgians, and then began literally putting the king’s flag up along the banks of the Congo all the way to what became known in those days as the Inner Station, which is referred to at some length in Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness, and ultimately was named in honor of Stanley, Stanleyville, and is now called Kisangani, having been named so by Mobutu. So, there has been an American involvement, directly or indirectly, in the history of the Congo and Zaire, and now, as it is calling itself, the Congo once again, from literally the very beginning.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, can you talk about, under Belgium, exactly what Leopold did and why he was so interested in this area, that became his own private country, as opposed to Belgium’s country?

SEAN KELLY: Well, Leopold was a far-looking fellow. He had in mind an empire, and he tried to, but he didn’t have a country to match the empire that he had in mind, because the Belgians had absolutely no maritime tradition. They were a very small country even by European standards. And Leopold was fascinated with Africa, although he never went there. And he sent Stanley out to create the state for him. And it became his private state. It wasn’t Belgian at all. It belonged — for a considerable period of time, it was called the Congo Free State, and it was the personal property of King Leopold. And he set about trying to make it pay for itself by selling off ivory and rubber and whatever he could extract from the territory, usually somewhat painfully, as far as the local population was concerned, and finally became so embarrassing, what he was doing and the way he was carrying out his rule, that the Belgians moved to take it over themselves and try and make it a bit more respectable as a colony. This all sort of occurred during the great scramble for Africa in the latter part of the last century.

AMY GOODMAN: Sean Kelly, let me interrupt. You said the word “painfully.” Explain exactly what you mean by that, particularly the cutting off of hands.

SEAN KELLY: Well, the army that Leopold created in the Congo, which was called the Force Publique, was a combination police force and military force. And it went about to support the grand scheme of the king, which was to establish as much territory as he possibly could, and then try and pull as much money out of it as possible. Rubber became a big item in those days economically. There were a lot of bicycle tires being made and automobile tires, and the Congo produced rubber. And so, King Leopold’s representatives in the Congo would set up quotas for their people in the field to fill in terms of the amount of rubber that had to be brought in, and the amount of elephant tusks and gold, if they could find it. And frequently, in order to meet these quotas, they would go out and virtually use slave labor. And if people didn’t work hard enough or didn’t behave properly, they were foully mistreated, to the extent of having ears cut off and other bodily appendages.

And it really became so disgraceful, even in those times of empire, that it created a scandal. And the consequence of it was that Belgium was put in so much disgrace because of the behavior of its representatives in that part of the world. Even Mark Twain wrote about this sort of thing at the time, and it was a scandal that reached even to the United States in terms of the way the news spread. And so, that resulted in a changeover and a taking away of the territory from the king and making it into what became known as the Belgian Congo, a proper colonial entity.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk now about the rise of the first prime minister and how the Congo became independent in 1960. Let’s talk about Patrice Lumumba.

SEAN KELLY: Patrice Lumumba was a politician who emerged in the late 1950s as the Congo is moving towards independence, along with a number of other African countries. Belgium, very reluctantly — as late as 1955, a study was published in Belgium which contemplated independence for the Congo in 30 years. But the whole process accelerated considerably. In 1958, 1959, Belgium was sort of pushed into granting independence, pushed by its fellow colonizing powers in Europe, France, Britain. And at the same time, there was a war going on in Africa in Algeria, that was costing the French a lot. And Belgium didn’t feel it could afford a Algerian-type war in the Congo. And so, very much in an accelerated fashion, Belgium moved in 1958, 1959, to grant independence to the Congo, somewhat unexpectedly.

And one of the key figures in the Congo that emerged during that time, the really one figure who attempted to form a political party with a nationalist base — that is, a party that appealed to all the people of the Congo — was Patrice Lumumba. All of the other political parties that were represented, for instance, in the election that took place in early 1960 — May, I think it was — all of the other Congolese political parties were ethnic in origin. Patrice Lumumba’s MNC party, the National Revolutionary Movement of the Congo, was the only one that reached out and tried to pull everybody into one tent.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, Patrice Lumumba, as well as — and this may surprise some people — at that time, Mobutu was a — well, not a major player, a bit player, but also, as you point out in your book, it is believed he was not only working for Patrice Lumumba in Belgium, but was working for the Belgian government as a spy.

SEAN KELLY: Yes, the Belgians had sent Mobutu, who had been a soldier in the Belgian colonial army, been there for six years, rose to the highest possible rank for a Congolese in those days, which was sergeant major. He got out of the army. The army gave him the equivalent of a secondary school education, got him through high school. And he got out, and he wanted to be a journalist. And the Belgians gave him a scholarship to go to Brussels and study journalism. And while he was there, he was recruited by Patrice Lumumba to be the political party — Lumumba’s political party representative in Brussels.

At the same time, he was recruited by the Belgian Sûreté, the intelligence arm of the police, to serve as an informer. The Belgians had very little information. It was indicative of how poorly they ran their colony. They had very little information on the emerging African leaders. They simply didn’t know them, didn’t know about them, didn’t know which way they were headed politically. So they hired Mobutu and several other people in whom they reposed some confidence to report on the Congolese, to, in fact, report on their own friends and colleagues. And those reports were assembled by the Belgian police and apparently made available to the American Embassy in Brussels, which was keeping track, in a somewhat distant fashion, of what was going on in the Congo, and came across the desk of the CIA representative, the station chief in Brussels. And it was at that point that Mobutu’s first association with the CIA developed. And in 1960, when the American ambassador in Brussels flew to the Congo with his staff to sort of see what was going on there, he took the CIA representative along. And it was at that point that they began making the initial contact with the people there.

Mobutu was brought back in time for independence, which was in June, June 30th of 1960, given a high position in the government. He was sort of a junior minister, minister of state in the Defense Department. But he was very close to Patrice Lumumba in those days. And Lumumba relied upon him, because of his background in the military, to keep Lumumba informed of what was going on in the military and to serve as one of the first — he was given the rank of colonel. And shortly after independence, a widespread rebellion occurred in the military, and Mobutu was brought in to help put it down.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was the role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the separation of Katanga, the Congo’s richest and southernmost province, which declared itself independent from the rest of the country, leading Patrice Lumumba to come to the United States and then to go to the United Nations?

SEAN KELLY: Well, what you had at this time, two things going on. You had the mutiny in the army. The army had no officers, no Congolese officers. All of the officers were Belgian. That was the Belgian notion of independence, was that there would be a national army that was officered by Belgian officers, and everybody else would be Congolese. The soldiers rose up in revolt against the officers. At the same time, in the southern part of the country, in the richest part of the country, then called Katanga, now called Shaba, there was a secessionist movement, and, in effect, the country broke up.

So, Lumumba, with very little preparation for his position as prime minister of a newly independent country, had these two things going on simultaneously. He put Mobutu in charge of trying to make some sense out of the military situation. And it was at that point that Mobutu began developing a constituency in the military. And at the same time, he tried to get the United Nations involved. Well, first he tried to get the United States involved in sending troops to put down the secessionist movement in the south. The United States turned him down. He tried to get the Soviets involved. He then accepted the idea of the U.N. coming in.

The key role of the Central Intelligence Agency in those days was —

AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to interrupt you, Sean Kelly, to get to the key role of the CIA, but we do have to take a break. We’re speaking with Sean Kelly, who is a longtime Voice of America correspondent in Africa and who’s written the book America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire. We’ll be back in 60 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the Exception to the Rulers. I’m Amy Goodman. And we’re talking about America’s Tyrant. And that also is the title of a book written by Sean Kelly, The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire: How the United States Put Mobutu in Power, Protected Him from His Enemies, Helped Him Become One of the Richest Men in the World, and Lived to Regret It. We only have a few minutes more before we’re going to move on to Malcolm X’s last speech, that he gave in Detroit a week before he was assassinated, and prophetically talked about the Congo at the time. But, Sean Kelly, you were just getting into the CIA’s main role in Zaire.

SEAN KELLY: The main role of the CIA in Zaire at that particular time — and we’re speaking of 1960, ’61 — the way in which the CIA really involved itself was, first of all, to provide the funds for the payment of the army to buy the loyalty of the army to Mobutu, so that there would be some control that he would have. Soldiers had not been paid for months. It made it possible from Mobutu to bring the revolt in the military, the mutiny, under control, because he was able to pay the officers, the new Congolese officers, and the troops with CIA money.

At the same time, the CIA took it that it had a mandate from President Eisenhower, who was president at the time, to overthrow the government of Patrice Lumumba. And by that, they meant they could eliminate him, as they said in those days. They meant they could — they thought they could kill him, that it was perfectly all right. He was an elected prime minister of a newly independent country, but we wanted him out of the way. And so, assassins were hired. Poisons were sent to the Congo. And the CIA station chief tried to assassinate the prime minister of the country, was simply unable to do so, couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t pull it off, decided it was just simpler all the way around to help turn the prime minister over to his enemies. And that was what happened. And Patrice Lumumba was killed by his enemies through a process really made possible by the CIA.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk, Sean Kelly, about how Mobutu, for the next — well, for 32 years, though he didn’t really fully come to power until 1965 — how he was protected by the United States. When there were armed rebellions against him, he was — the United States was always there for him. Why?

SEAN KELLY: Well, we found him useful politically in the ongoing confrontation with the Soviet Union and with China and various other countries that we considered to be adversaries at the time. And as a consequence, we used Mobutu to help put down any rebellions in the Congo that came along that appeared to be supported by those people we considered to be our adversaries. We helped Mobutu create an army, an instant air force, for which we provided Cuban pilots, Bay of Pigs veterans, for the most part. We brought in South Africans, Rhodesians, all sorts of people who simply had their own scores to settle with Africans. And finally, when that didn’t work out, we simply flew in Belgian paratroopers to put down the rebellion. And in later years, whenever there appeared to be any political threat, when Mobutu thought that something internal or even external was going on, he’d pass word, say he needed help. Either we’d tip him off to the threat, or we’d help him out putting it down militarily.

AMY GOODMAN: Sean Kelly, talking about this period of time, you mention the role of Mobutu in Angola and the key role that Zaire played in helping the U.S. support Savimbi.

SEAN KELLY: Yes. I think this might be one of the really, truly bad things that went on in that long period of association with the Congo. We encouraged Mobutu to invade his neighbor, Angola, and we provided the means for him to do so militarily. We encouraged the South Africans to come in at the same time and help out, as well. And we set up a situation in 1975 in Angola, by doing this, which was done through the CIA, that brought about enmity on the part of the Angolans towards Zaire and Mobutu personally, that was revealed later in two attempted invasions, in 1976 and 1977 in Shaba, and in this final rebel thrust that has been taking place for the last seven months, the Angolans apparently played a very important role on both sides.

AMY GOODMAN: Sean Kelly, we’re just about to go into the speech of Malcolm X that he gave just before he was killed, where he talks about Tshombe. He talks about what was going on just after he declared independence — just after Patrice Lumumba declared independence. Can you just set the scene here, also talking about Cuban mercenaries?

SEAN KELLY: Well, the problem was that Tshombe was widely seen as a stooge for Belgian and, for that matter, American imperialist power. And when he became prime minister of the Congo in 1964, he was widely disliked throughout Africa and is seen in the United States as the person involved in the killing of Lumumba, earlier on, and as somebody we should not be associating with. It was Tshombe who allowed Cuban mercenaries to be brought in as pilots, and even ground forces in the Congo in 1964. And it was, of course, in the midst of the civil rights struggle in the United States. And it just seemed that we were doing all of the wrong things in this African setting, and it had considerable reverberations here.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we’re seeing a lot of articles coming out in this post-Mobutu age, though he’s not quite gone yet, though it looks like he has left the Congo. And it seems as if newspapers are discovering for the first time, or somehow the Clinton administration letting Mobutu go allowed the opening of the floodgates on information that has been known about Mobutu for the entire time he’s in power, including how wealthy he is, estimated around $4 billion.

SEAN KELLY: Yes, it’s a very cynical attitude that’s going around. It’s a story of — perhaps it’s not an — I hope it’s not an accurate attitude on the part of government people here in Washington, where, “Well, of course, we supported Mobutu all of those years, and then, my goodness, we discovered he was a crook.” And, of course, we knew all along he was a crook. It was obvious what was taking place in the Congo, but we just felt that that was the place to put the money. And we did. And we encouraged him to behave that way. And we kept him in power.

And now, after — when he was no longer as useful to us as he had been during the Cold War, we just sort of turned our backs on him and hoped he’d go away. He was an embarrassment. We sent people to Kinshasa in 1991 and — to try and get him to turn over power to an elected authority and to ease up on civil rights, human rights violations. And he didn’t pay much attention to us, and — but he wasn’t getting help from us.

And so, there was a tendency towards a rebellion that was beginning to take place. His army rioted. He couldn’t quite get away with what he had in the past. He went into isolation in Gbadolite, in the palace that he built, “the Versailles in the jungle,” The New York Times calls it. He was unable to govern the whole country, but he had really not made much of an effort to govern, particularly the eastern part of the country, which is where the rebellion broke out seven months ago. And what has transpired over the past seven months has really been as a result of his own doing. He failed to fulfill the requirements of a national leader. He failed to develop the country to — he allowed the infrastructure to deteriorate totally. And now it’s being taken over.

And finally, the United States, in the form of, largely, Bill Richardson, the Clinton administration-appointed ambassador to the U.N., who has settled all sorts of international problems in recent years, was sent to try and settle this one. And he carried a letter with him from Clinton saying, in effect, “Mobutu, step aside. The game’s over. It’s the only thing left for you to do.” And Mobutu took it seriously and wrote him a reply and said he was going to do so, and everything else has moved in that direction. Mobutu has tried to hang on to as much dignity as he could, after making sure that he got his money out and his family and all of that. Now he pitches up in Togo.

AMY GOODMAN: Sean Kelly, I want to thank you very much for joining us. And as you point out, the game is up, because the U.S. finally decided to withdraw support, because it was inevitable he could not hang on to power anymore, and the U.S. knew where the power was. Also interesting, a piece in Newsday today by Timothy Phelps says that the mining companies that are now making deals with Laurent Kabila, who is now the president of what he calls the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and will hold a news conference anytime now, we expect. Newsday points out that American Mineral Fields, which was one of the corporations that will do business with Laurent Kabila, is based in Arkansas and has ties to President Clinton. Well, I want to thank you very much for joining us, Sean Kelly, author of a very interesting book called America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire. The book is published by the American University Press.