Despite daily reports that rebel leader Laurent Kabila and his soldiers were closing in, Mobutu had clung stubbornly to office. Washington is eager for Kabila to shed his Marxist past and permit free elections. But doubts remain about whether Kabila will be able to hold his loose rebel alliance together after taking Kinshasa and whether he will be able to satisfy the competing interests of countries like Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola that contributed soldiers to his movement.
Opium grown in the south and domestically made methamphetamines are the major problems.
Together, their embalmed bodies lay in the red granite mausoleum on Moscow's Red Square, remains of modern day pharaohs to be honored forever. That, anyway, was the plan. But like everything else Soviet, it didn't work out that way. Nikita Khrushchev removed Stalin's body in the late 1950s in the first wave of Soviet reform. Now liberals want Lenin removed and buried in the ground as well, to finish with Communist hero worship once and for all.