Etienne Scholasse, European Communities · CC BY 4.0

Laurent-Désiré Kabila

November 27, 1939 – January 16, 2001

Congolese rebel leader who overthrew Mobutu in 1997 and was President of the DR Congo until he was assassinated in 2001.

Who else was alive Wikipedia

Biography

Laurent-Désiré Kabila was born in 1939 in Katanga in the Belgian Congo, to a Luba father and a Lunda mother. After independence he organized Luba resistance to the Katanga secession, sat in the North Katanga provincial assembly from 1962, and was forced out in 1963 over alleged communist sympathies. As a follower of the Lumumbist leader Prosper Mwamba Ilunga he helped organize the eastern revolts that became the Simba rebellion.

In 1965 he worked for several months with Che Guevara and his Cuban volunteers, who judged him a capable leader but not a serious revolutionary. After the revolt collapsed he smuggled gold and timber on Lake Tanganyika, and in 1967 he founded the People's Revolutionary Party and a Chinese-backed Marxist enclave in the Fizi-Baraka hills of South Kivu, which lasted until 1986.

In October 1996 Rwanda brought him in as spokesman and co-founder of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), the rebel front of its invasion of Zaire. As AFDL leader he advanced across the country, and when Mobutu Sese Seko fled in May 1997 he declared himself president and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In 1998 he ordered foreign troops out, and his former Rwandan and Ugandan allies backed rebels against him in the Second Congo War. On 16 January 2001 one of his bodyguards shot him in his Kinshasa office, and his son Joseph succeeded him.