Besieged Congo leader fights image as despot

Few individuals command attention like Laurent Kabila, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. His sheer physical size dominates the 28th-floor suite in the UN Plaza Hotel like a Tennessee Titan lineman. But his cherubic smiles evoke a feeling closer to Mister Rogers.

This soft-spoken man with warm, engaging eyes stands at the center of a maelstrom. Three of his neighboring governments support rebel groups that are trying to overthrow him. Fighting in his country has engulfed Africa's Great Lakes region and has erupted into "Africa's first world war," as US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright calls it.

During last week's gathering of seven African presidents at the United Nations, all eyes focused on this enigmatic man. Invited to the UN by US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the usually elusive Mr. Kabila embarked on a campaign to dispel his reputation as a strongman and to persuade the world body to intervene in his war-torn country.

"There was such a lot of media misinterpretations of our own position, says President Kabila. "We came to ask those people who invaded Congo and are still in Congolese soil to get out," he adds, referring to troops from Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi.

But as the curtain falls today on a month of Africa at the Security Council, the UN still seems reluctant to pour significant resources into a country that has housed troops from eight neighboring countries this past year. And Kabila's debut on the international stage only reinforced his image as a man of many contradictions.

A former communist who trained with Che Guevara, Kabila now easily hobnobbs with industrialists, like diamond merchant Maurice Templesman, at the posh Metropolitan Club on Tuesday night. And at the Security Council open meeting, he denounced Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi -the very governments that helped bring him to power but have turned against him.

Emblematic of his self-contradictions, Kabila spent three decades trying to overthrow the brutal regime of Mobutu Sese Seko. Achieving this in 1997, he appointed himself president and changed the name of the country from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of Congo. But today, the DRC is neither democratic nor a republic.

"The DRC state has already ceased to exist in the sense that there's no government that controls the national territory," says Marina Ottaway, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "The reality is that Congo is divided into four parts."

Just three years ago, he emerged from obscurity and received cheers at home and around the world for overthrowing Mr. Mobutu. But the cheers have turned into protests as human rights activists wonder if Kabila is an improvement over his predecessor. He obstructed a UN inquiry into the massacre of refugees, allegedly by his forces. He then proceeded to ban political parties and jail journalists, at times inflicting cruel and harsh punishments, according to an Amnesty International report issued earlier this month.

Such strongarm tactics appear to contradict his demeanor in New York. Though coached by his publicists in the art of dealing with the international press, Kabila seems more than offended by the criticisms against him: He looks away, and becomes very quiet. Then he speaks very slowly and deliberately.

"Those former Mobutus - the ones we overthrew - they went into civil society [pretending] to be journalists, as you call them, but they are politicians," Kabila says. "We are the most tolerant regime. But in our country journalists have to face the law if they break the law" by making slanderous statements.

While Kabila has reason to believe that former government officials want to see him leave office, political analysts say his fear of losing power clouds his thinking.

"Kabila is Rip Van Wrinkle," says William Zartman at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. "He came out of 30 years of experience as a rebel" and does not understand modern democratic institutions.

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