Behind the Headlines, What Can Israel Do for Zaire? Africa is Watching

Less than a few hundred yards from the Israeli Embassy, over which the blue and white flog has now proudly flown for a week, the Kinshasa “jungle” begins — a huge concentration of miserable hovels, often without electricity or running water, in which three million people live or, more precisely struggle to survive.

The real jungle, with its dangers and hardships, is no longer in the bush where fruit grows on trees and the bush people manage to harvest a small but life-sustaining crop of manioc. The jungle, where starvation, sickness and insecurity reign is right in the capital where life, often short, is a permanent and merciless struggle for survival.

Kinshasa, however, will be carefully watched by all other African countries to find out if Israeli assistance can really help them: whether Israel can really “deliver” what they expect and whether renewing diplomatic ties with Israel is worth braving the wrath of the Arab states and giving up Arab, and especially Saudi, financial aid.

ISRAEL’S PRESTIGE IS HIGH

In Senegal, Saudi Arabia provides, through grants and loans, a third of the national budget. In Zaire, President Sese Seko Mobutu, by renewing ties with Israel, gave up a straight Saudi grant of $500 million spread over 10 years, plus a variety of other forms of Arab assistance. This is high in Israeli terms. It is astronomical in Zaire or in the Central African Republic, where salaries often remain unpaid for months for lack of money; where roads are practically non-existent, the telephone does not work and hospitals are rare and poorly equipped. The poverty, the lack of technical know how, and the magnitude of the problems — social, economic, financial and regional-stagger the imagination.

Israel’s prestige in African eyes is great. African leaders, and even the middle classes, credit Israel with working economic, social and diplomatic miracles. Israeli soldiers are believed to be “bullet proof.” Many Africans say its doctors can cure with the wave of a magic wand. Israel is the talisman of Africa, the good sorcerer on whose side it might pay to be.

Israeli negotiators, who began secret contacts with Mobutu several years ago, have never made promises which they felt they could not keep. Foreign Ministry Director General David Kimche, who first visited Kinshasa in May, 1981, a year before the Israeli flag was raised over the Embassy building here, never made promises or gave commitments on which he felt Israel could not deliver. According to Zaire officials, he stressed repeatedly that Israel is a poor country itself with no money to spare. It can barely cover its own needs.

But he made it just as clear, that Israel con and will only do “its very best to help Zaire. There could easily be, however, a major divergence between what Israel considers its “best and what the Zaire may expect of Israel.

President Mobutu is a brave man with vision who loves and admires Israel. He took his higher military training in Israel where he won his paratroop wings. Today at 51, his power is absolute and secure. The well known Indian writer and journalist, V. S. Noipul, who con not be suspected of racism or excessive admiration wrote “The Congo (Zaire) used to be a Belgian colony.” Now it is an African kingdom and Mobutu is its King.” He is an absolute monarch, as few kings in the past ever dreamed of being, who makes his own decisions, often on intuition.

HOW ISRAEL CAN HELP

Now that Mobutu has completed his first task, erasing some of the regional and tribal differences and animosities and unifying the huge country which covers an area larger than all of Western Europe, his main ambition is to bring it out of conditions of dire poverty and human misery.

Israel and Zaire have signed a number of official agreements providing for Israeli aid. Zairi officials in close contact with Mobutu say that his real expectations are higher. He feels Israel can help even indirectly by using its influence with the United States. Zaire needs American aid and support. Its southern border is with Marxist Angola. In the northeast is troublesome Chad. Mobutu also realizes that only the U.S. can supply the financial and economic assistance which can make on impact, even slight, on his run-down economy.

Zaire economists mention the figure of $1 billion per year as a minimum which could be usefully employed. Smaller sums would probably be wasted as they would be used to cover immediate, urgent needs.

Earlier this month, Congress after much haggling and pleading, finally approved a paltry $4 million per year in total aid to Zaire. In his May 14th speech in which, he announced the renewal of diplomatic ties with Israel, Mobutu launched a vitriolic attack on the U.S. and practically broke off all talks. Relations between Kinshasa and Washington are at their lowest ebb.

Mobutu believes that Israel can rapidly and dramatically change this situation and that the Israeli lobby and the American Jewish community con obtain from Congress and the White House what his own men, and he himself, have failed to get.

American Jews are obviously grateful for what Mobutu has done and will probably try to help. His needs and expectations are, however, on such a scale that he risks being disappointed. American diplomats in Kinshasa told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week that according to State Department evaluations, Congress in the best of cases will only approve a minimal part of what Zaire wants.

AGRICULTURAL PROBLEMS

Israel is seen as a source of agricultural help to enable Zaire’s population of 30 million produce most of its food needs. The 15 million who live in the bush manage to survive with a small plot of land, wild fruit and an occasional fish or an unlucky monkey whose meat is considered a delicacy. The problems are in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi (formerly Elizabethville) with their teeming hungry masses and millions of unemployed or under employed people.

A serious food crisis in the cities could bring about a mass uprising. Major food riots could threaten Mobutu’s undisputed rule. For the last four years, Israeli experts have run a state farm at N’Sele, 30 kilometers from Kinshasa. The Israelis and a handful of Belgian Jews who run the administrative side, have managed to produce 60,000 eggs and 6,000 chickens per day, milk, vegetables and 600 tons of meat per month. The former rundown and money-losing domain has become a prosperous and even profitable enterprise which today supplies part, though a small part, of Kinshasa’s needs.

Two similar agricultural stations, one in the extreme south the other near Lubumbashi, have been started with the help of Israeli technicians. Mobutu feels that Israel could supply him with the key to his agricultural problems.

But the issue here is of such staggering proportions that many, including some Israeli experts, doubt that what they can do would be more than a drop in the ocean.

Local agriculture, with the exception of a few foreign, mainly Belgian-run domains, is so primitive that Israeli methods may yield no results. Zaire has no real agricultural policy and no system of transportation to bring products to town. Here again its problems are immense and linked to social and tribal changes and the construction of a network of roads and railways.

MILITARY TRAINING

Israel is looked upon to help train and equip Zaire’s military forces. Mobutu, like most African Presidents, lives in constant fear of being overthrown or possibly assassinated. The main threat is always the army. Mobutu himself was Chief of Staff when he took over the country’s rule.

The 60,000-strong Zaire army has in the past shown itself to be weak and inefficient when faced with an emergency. As recently as the Sheba invasion, French paratroopers, had to step in to put down the revolt and save the Europeans living in the city of Kolwesi after more than 100 were murdered.

A number of foreign advisers, French, Belgians, Chinese and even North Koreans, are currently training Mobutu’s forces. The President wants experts from as many different countries as possible so as not to give any one foreign nation the upper hand over the army and thus over the country and himself.

He wants Israel to help train at least one paratroop brigade which could serve as the regime’s main trouble shooting force and also as an unofficial Presidential guard.

The Zairi soldiers, all volunteers, are badly paid. A private earns $20 dollars per month Their equipment is generally run down. Their morale is low. Israel has, however, sufficient experience and prestige to give Mobutu and Zaire a small but highly efficient force. In this respect there is no doubt that Israel can supply Mobutu with everything he wants.

RESENTMENT OF ARABS

The Zaire President, who in his long talks with Kimche never went into details or made specific concrete requests, also harbors a semi-secret hope that Israel’s presence “will change everything.” During the toughest days last week, when Arab states broke off diplomatic relations or cut off their aid, Mobutu did not waver. On the contrary, the harder the Arab pressure, the stiffer his determination. As the days went by, his resentment grew against Arab interference in his country’s affairs.

In a public declaration last week he reminded Africa — all of Africa not just his country — that the Arabs had traditionally been the slave traders who despised and hunted Africans. For him, the Arabs were “men with turbans and whips” who had run Africa for generations. But Mobutu’s anti-Arab passions will eventually die down. Zaire’s problems remain. Many of them — the tribal structure, the endemic corruption, the size of the country, the lack of basic infrastructure, the poverty, will take years if not generations to cure.

The rest of the African states, or at least most of them, will be watching meanwhile to see if Israel is indeed the magic talisman that can cure age-old ills in a few months or years.