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CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY Directorate of6
INTELLIGENCE MEMORANDUM*
Tho Congo's Joseph Mobutu: Past, Pragent, and Future
1. President Mobutu has twice startledof Congolese affairs recently. For tho lasti i. or so he has boen carryingunningwith tho Belgians, with whom he previously had been closely identified. Then onay he ordered the summary execution of four run-of-the-millwho had been caught in in inept plot against him. Mobutu hasower ln Congolese politics since the first months of independence, but until he Installed himself as president last November hemainly behind the scenes and doalt directly with the Congo's problems only intermittently. Since then he has been Immersed in those problems, andtheir pressure questions of power and control havo come to dominai
making a
credible state out of the Congo. The moans he has choHon to this end, however,
are" turning him towart im ana are likely to produce frequent rocky periods In his relations vith the West.
2. Mobutulend of soldier andin the Congo. His authority has alwaysultimately on the loyalty of thehigher ranking officers and on his controlunits in the Leopoldville area.
by the Office of Current Intelligence.
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the game of ngolese politics with distinction for over five years, and he genuinely respects the small cadre of civilian Congoleseany of whom can be found among his close advisers. He thus has served bothridge between civilians and the military andightning rod, channeling military unhapplnesa and protecting the civilians from its consoquences. His mediating role may ln fact be one of the main reasons the army did not earlieropenly in politics.
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4. When ho assumed the presidency, Mobutu faced the practically insoluble task ofhis control over an anarchic aroa one third the size of tho United States. This remains hisconcern. In the political field, considering the conditions with which he started and keeping ln mind the questionable meaningfulness in the Congolese context of any talk of lines of authority, he is having some success. By fiat he has cut the number of provinces fromreating ln the process some provinces of doubtful homogeneity and stability. He has then largely ignored provinces which sees to have fairly stable governmentsongo Central along the lower Congo River) or which are Intrinsically unimportant. Elsewhere he has Intervenedby giving powerilitary leader he feels he can trust, as in perennially troublesome Stanleyville or in Leopoldville itself; by dictating the composition of provincial cablnots, as in ex-Premier Tshombe's Sud-Katanga stronghold; orombination of these methods, as in deeply divided Sud-Klvu. Those methods
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have given Mobutu moreoice in provincialthan any previous government has had. It is not thatresence is felt either widely orthe contrary, Mobutu'smay not extend beyond the provincial cabinets, and even there it may be more obstructive than This, however,reater degree of administrative control than any other Leopoldville figure has ever attained.
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5. Mobutu's harsh treatment of the four plotters against the government must be viewed in this same A!cl<IIYrs
potential threat to Mobutu's position, and theof these four was clearly designed to discourage other would-be plotters, military as well as civilian. In this context there is little doubt that thistoo, willt leasthile.
6. Actions such as this have importantfor the future. Mobutu is likely to be more and more inclined toward summary handling of political problems, and he probably will frequently orderwhich do not sit well in some quarters in the Congo and abroad. These will be justified assacrifices in the Congo's progress toward national integration. At the same time, Mobutu and the top leaders in the army are likely to become increasingly interdependent. Mobutu's own success in neutralizing the politicians has rendered superfluous his role as mediator with the civilians. What is leftimple division of power along the military chain of At present and for some time to come, he and his lieutenants will need each other, since neither can challenge the other without sapping his own strength. As long as the officers remain unwilling to test their power against Mobutu's, the disruptive opportunities for opponents of the regime will be severely limited. The military establishment itself, however, will probably become an ever-growing factor in the Congo's politicalin the wake of the recent plot, in which were demonstrated both the criticality for Mobutu of the support of his officers and the apparent decision of those officers to stick with him.
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Mobutu is also trying to consolidate his control in the economic sphere. Here the object of his attention is not the Congo's administrative and political chaos but the continued pre-eminence of foreign, particularly Belgian, whose extent Mobutu says he did not realize until he became president
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8. He ls trying to apply the same direct methods in this sphere which have had some success in politics; his decrees ordering that all important foreign communications and trade be channeled through Leopoldville, the sharp increase in Union Mlnlere's taxes, the delegation he sent to Brussels apparently with orders to renegotiate most of the Interlocked Congolese-Belgian debt and Investmentthese areiece with hisdictation__of the Sud-Katanga provincial cabinet'-composition.
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10. It le easy to exaggerate the extent offrustrations. He is an astute politician, and much of his anti-Belgian posturing is clearly for effect, both to burnish his "nationalist" image in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, and to put maximum pressure on the Belgians.
withwith any other outside power which he feels is encroaching on hisbe difficult for some time to come.
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Original document.
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