Front national de liberation du Congo

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Location of Zaire (red) and Angola (light green)

The left-wing Front national de liberation du Congo (FNLC) was a rebel movement in Zaire .

It was founded in 1967 by Brigadier Nathaniel Mbumba from members of the gendarmerie of the Katanga province who had fled to Angola and had the armed arm Armée nationale pour la liberation du Congo . The fighters of the FLNC had initially fought on the Portuguese side in the Angolan War of Independence against the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA). It was one of the first rebel groups to fight the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko . She is said to have received support from the party of the later President Laurent-Désiré Kabilas , the Parti de la révolution populaire . It was based in northeast Angola. In March 1977, in the first Shaba invasion from Angola , they attacked the resource-rich Shaba province (now again Katanga ) in the south of the country. The Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko found himself unable to repel the invasion with his own army. That is why he asked foreign powers for help and was able to fend off the FNLC with the help of Moroccan troops and the French Foreign Legion . A second attack in May 1978, encouraged by reprisals by Zairean government troops, which led to the flight of 50,000 to 70,000 residents of Shaba to Angola, was repulsed by soldiers of the Foreign Legion and Belgium. It remained unclear to what extent the FLNC was supported by states of the Eastern Bloc.

It was assumed that Cuba, the Soviet Union or the GDR supported the rebel group. The East German government is said to have been concerned about a lease agreement between Zaire and the West German rocket company OTRAG , which made around 100,000 km² available for test purposes. In May 1977 the government of Zaire expelled the GDR diplomats from the country because of the alleged support of the FNLC.

As a result, the FNLC stayed in Angola and took part in the army's campaign against the rebel group UNITA in 1983 as part of the civil war . In 1984 the Angolan government moved the FLNC to northwest Angola, from where they no longer posed a threat to Shaba Province as a concession to the Zaire government.

literature

  • Ch. Didier Gondola: The History of Congo. Greenwood Press, Westport 2002, p. 150.
  • Congo Liberation Front: Zaire experiences popular uprising. Strongly condemned military support from Western countries. New Germany, April 15, 1977, p. 7.
  • Zaire - a second Angola? Der Spiegel, April 18, 1977, No. 17, pp. 126-132.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stephen L. Weigert: Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961–2002 , Basingstoke 2011, p. 66.
  2. ^ Jeanne M. Haskin: The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship , New York 2005, p. 59.
  3. ↑ Leigh Ingram-Seal: Katangan Gendarmes ( Memento from October 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Jeanne M. Haskin: The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship , New York 2005, p. 41.
  5. ↑ Stephen L. Weigert: Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961-2002 , Basingstoke 2011, p. 70.
  6. ↑ Another account by Haskins, which dates the second invasion to 1979 and specifies its place of origin in Zambia, cf. Jeanne M. Haskin: The Tragic State of the Congo: From Decolonization to Dictatorship , New York 2005, p. 41.
  7. ↑ Stephen L. Weigert: Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961-2002 , Basingstoke 2011, p. 71.
  8. ↑ Gareth M. Winrow: The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa , Cambridge 2009, pp 150th
  9. ↑ Stephen L. Weigert: Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961-2002 , Basingstoke 2011, p. 74.
  10. ↑ Stephen L. Weigert: Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961-2002 , Basingstoke 2011, p. 85.