Some in Congo Long for the Order Of Late Dictator

Mobutu's Son on Ballot in Today's Election

Mobutu Nzanga, left, a candidate for president of Congo, is trying to evoke the era of his late father, Mobutu Sese Seko, using the torch-in-fist symbol of the country then known as Zaire. (By Craig Timberg -- The Washington Post)

KINSHASA, Congo, July 29 -- There is something familiar in the stern dark eyes of one of the men who wants to be Congo's next president. Put him in a pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses and a leopard-skin hat, and he would look a lot like the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

The candidacy of his son, Nzanga Mobutu, 36, in Sunday's presidential election is among the persistent echoes of an earlier era in this troubled country, a time when its borders were secure, its prestige high and its name not Congo, but Zaire.

On the eve of the first multiparty balloting here since 1960, nostalgia was running high for a man who, though corrupt and brutal, kept united a country that has experienced little but mayhem since he was driven from power in 1997.

Though his son, who has spent most of his life outside the country, is not regarded as among the front-runners in the election, many Congolese say they crave a return to the elder Mobutu's proud, nationalist style. At campaign rallies, Nzanga Mobutu said, men sometimes wear replicas of his father's trademark leopard-skin hat.

"Under President Mobutu, people lived in peace," Nzanga Mobutu said during an interview at a family mansion overlooking the Congo River. "People lived in security."

On Thursday, the crowd roared its approval when, at a rally for another opposition candidate, Jean-Pierre Bemba, a man waved a green Zairian flag, complete with the onetime national symbol of a fist clutching a flaming torch. Another man held a wooden sign bearing Bemba's image with the elder Mobutu's above it.

"He made unity in the country," Guillaume Badibanga, 30, who had the wooden sign, said of Mobutu. "Bemba is trying to do the same thing."

The election is for a president, national parliament and provincial parliaments. President Joseph Kabila, 35, is regarded by many analysts as the front-runner but is unpopular in Kinshasa, the capital, and some other areas. Should none of the 32 candidates win a clear majority Sunday, the two top vote-getters will have to stand in a second round, likely in October or November.

The government of Kabila, whose father, Laurent Kabila, drove the elder Mobutu from this central African country and renamed it Congo, has successfully scrubbed the capital of remembrances of a man regarded by many as the father of their nation.

The city has no monuments, statues or billboards bearing Mobutu's image. There is no museum or library in his honor. Even his body is in exile, buried in a cemetery in Morocco, the country to which Mobutu fled in his final months before dying of cancer.

His spectacular fall was cheered by many Congolese who had grown weary of his corrupt, repressive and, near the end, weak leadership. Yet now many voters and analysts say that Mobutu -- if he could somehow be restored both to life and to the vigor of his early years in the 1960s and '70s -- would win in a landslide.

"Absolutely," said Alexis Mutanda, editor of the Kinshasa-based newspaper La Tempete des Tropiques, waving his hands for emphasis. "If Mr. Mobutu were here today on the ballot against Mr. Kabila, I'm sure that he would win."