Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga [a] (/ m ə ˈ b uː t uː ˈ s ɛ s eɪ ˈ s ɛ k oʊ / ⓘ mə-BOO-too SESS-ay SEK-oh; born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu; 14 October 1930 – 7 September 1997), often shortened to Mobutu Sese Seko or Mobutu and also known by his initials MSS, was a Congolese politician and military officer who was the first and only president of Zaire from 1971 to 1997.
Under the new multiparty system, Mobutu said that he would be above political parties, and accordingly he resigned as the president of the MPR on the same date, although he again accepted the post of party president a year later, on 21 April 1991. [11] The party had no real ideology other than support for Mobutu.
Mobutu increasingly placed his supporters in the remaining positions of importance. [120] In 1967, to demonstrate his legitimacy, he created a party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR), which until 1990, was the nation's only legal political party under Mobutu's new constitution. [ 120 ]
Mobutu Sese Seko and U.S. President George H. W. Bush in Washington, D.C., 1989.. For the most part, Zaire enjoyed warm relations with the United States. The United States was the third largest donor of aid to Zaire (after Belgium and France), and Mobutu befriended several U.S. presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.
Originally Mobutu designed the constitution of Zaire to have a figurehead opposition party but later claimed that the constitution only recommended but did not demand this and thus a one-party state was created and all other political parties were banned afterwards in 1966. [2]
Mobutu Sese Seko, pictured in 1976. The Constitution of Zaire (French: Constitution du Zaïre), was promulgated on 15 August 1974, revised on 15 February 1978, and amended on 5 July 1990. It provided a renewed legal basis for the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko who had emerged as the country's dictator after the Congo Crisis in 1965.
Two former company executives with inside knowledge of Barrick Gold's operations in West Africa are helping to drive Mali's demands for a payment of around $200 million from the Canadian miner ...
Mobutu remained a beneficiary of U.S. support throughout the Cold War despite the corruption and profligacy that were evident near the end of the Agency's covert operations. He was a reliable anticommunist ally of Washington's until his overthrow in 1997. [50] Over the years, Mobutu proved to be an important geopolitical friend of the United ...