Surprise pull-out by French upsets Zaire President

Press, 27 May 1978, Page 8

Surprise pull-out by French upsets Zaire President

NZPA-Reuter Paris French soldiers were pulling out of Zaire for good yesterday after their successful week-long mission to rescue foreigners from the Shaba province bloodbath.

While President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire complained at a press conference in Paris on Thursday that he had not been informed of the withdrawal, Paris Government sources said French troops would never again intervene there, come what may.

Defence sources said French paratroopers and foreign legionnaires were leaving the copper mining town of Kolwezi yesterday for home after a FrenchBelgian action which rescued more than 1000 whites there.

Up to 200 foreigners were reported slaughtered in fighting around Kolwezi between Angolan-based insurgents and Zaire Government troops backed by their European allies. The announcement of the French pull-out was made as diplomatic sources in the Zaire capital of Kinshasa reported that between 150 and 300 rebels were hiding in the bush around Kolwezi, ready to move back into the town once foreign troops had departed. To fill the military vacuum in the mineral-rich Shaba province, source of 60 per cent of Zaire’s foreign earnings, France has backed the creation of a panAfrican intervention force, Government sources said. The setting up of such an army would enable France, which also has troops in Mauritania and Chad, to shed its image as “gendarme of Africa,” the sources said. They added that President Valery Giscard d’Estaing had told President Mobutu on Monday at a FrancoAfrican summit that France would not come to Kinshasa’s rescue again. President Mobutu, obviously upset at the withdrawal of the French troops, nevertheless praised France at his press conference as the only Western nation to come to Zaire’s aid. President Jimmy Carter’s assertion that Cuba played a vital role in the invasion appeared to be borne out by the report by informed sources here that French

troops had captured Spanishlanguage documents from the rebels. President Mobutu has consistently accused Cuba and the Soviet Union, with Algeria and the Libyan Jamahiriyah, of backing the rebel uprising, code-named Operation Dove. He told reporters on Thursday that the rebels had hoped to seize control of Shaba’s copper, cobalt, and tin mines, thus ruining Zaire’s already precarious economy. The Soviet Union had recently bought an unusually large amount of cobalt on the international market, he said. The French Defence Ministry said the paratroops, who dropped last Friday into the mining town had started to pull back to the Shaba provincial capital of Lumbumbashi before leaving the country.

However, some French officials saw the French involvement as a worthwhile move against a background of concern that the Soviet Union — acting principally through Cuban soldiers and advisers — has been gaining influence in black Africa. Informed sources said the Foreign Legion had captured rebel documents in Kolwezi written in Spanish — a pointer to possible Cuban links with the Shaba rebels — and the documents were being flown to Paris for analysis. The Defence Ministry said ) about 1000 rebels had been: killed in Kolwezi, but informed sources estimated the toll at 2000. About a; third were killed in battles j for control of the town, and I the rest died at the hands of J townspeople, the sources' said. They reported that many

rebels tried to escape by changing into civilian clothes when French forces landed, but were later found murdered. According to the French Defence Ministry, 100 Moroccan soldiers had arrived in Kolwezi to reinforce Zairean troops left behind to garrison the town. But travellers who left Kolwezi on Wednesday said they had seen no sign of Moroccan troops or ,an immediate French evacuation by air. The travellers said the French legionnaires held sway over an area about 10km around Kolwezi. But they had not completely driven off rebels hiding out in the dense bush where they had covered a retreat into Zambia and Angola by hundreds more insurgents of the Congo National Liberation Front (F.N.L.C.). I Diplomatic sources said I the French withdrawal would increase apprehension among white residents in remote Zaire towns that could be the target of future rebel attacks. The legionnaires had been expected to stay on in the Kolwezi area until a proposed pan-African force took over from them. The Moroccans were described as the vanguard of the African force. But Kolwezi’s future without the French presence appeared highly uncertain, the sources said. Military sources said the legionnaires had neither the equipment nor the men to mount the kind of major offensive that would be needed to wipe out rebels remaining in the bush and prevent them from regrouping. A spokesman for the F.N.L.C. said on Thursday that the only white hostages held by the Zaire rebel 'group are seven French military advisors. He said rebels who took :over the Zaire mining town of Kolwezi on May 12 had taken no prisoners among [the civilian population. ! That would have been contrary to F.N.L.C. principles, the spokesman said.