ABSTRACT
On April 24, 1990, President Mobutu announced that Zaire was entering a new era. The new era was to be one of multi-party government, replacing the single-party system that had been in place for twenty-three years. This chapter examines the nature of Mobutu regime, as well as the relationship between that regime and outside forces, particularly the international financial institutions and the governments of Belgium, France, and the United States. In reality, the Mobutu regime was kleptocratic and used the state to extract resources from the civil society and from the international environment. The Zairian League for Human Rights is based on an imported model and has benefited from support from the United States. Zaire clearly belongs to a francophone African political subsystem, in that events happening in other French-speaking states are much more likely to be imitated than are those in anglophone Africa.
