Rebels Win Hearts Just By Being Nice Stability, Trust Emerging Again In Zaire’s Third-Largest City

Three camouflaged rebel soldiers approached Marie Lifaefi at her weathered wooden stall in the city market and asked her to fill a bottle with the palm oil she sells.

Then an extraordinary thing happened.

The soldiers paid her. And went away.

Unlike the former Zairean soldiers who preyed on people in this sweltering river port, the Zairean rebels who took control on March 15 have won the allegiance of the population with a simple tactic: courtesy.

“There’s a difference with the soldiers of liberation,” said Lifaefi, 40, stirring the grainy orange cooking oil in a dented metal tub. “They don’t demand money. They don’t disturb people. They respect people.”

Since the rebels chased the Zairean army and Serbian mercenaries from Kisangani, they have begun to establish themselves as the civil authorities in Zaire’s third-largest city.

They have moved quickly to set themselves apart from the sleazy functionaries who ran the city on behalf of President Mobutu Sese Seko, the cancer-ridden dictator whose 32-year rule is threatened by the rapid rebel advance.

A week after their triumph, the rebels held local elections - nothing formal, just a gathering where new leaders were installed by acclamation. Longtime Mobutu opponents were suddenly thrust into power.

The rebels cut out ghost jobs and clamped down on corruption, while retaining any government workers who did not flee into the woods with the army. Several officials were fired for taking bribes, intimidating the remaining work force into line.

“Now the important thing is for everybody to stay clean,” said Jean Yagi Sitholo, a gynecologist who was elected governor. A blanket pardon was granted to members of the old regime.

The rebels have promised to return the University of Kisangani to the Catholic church, which ran the institution before it was seized by Mobutu’s government 26 years ago and run into the ground.

The rebels’ primary accomplishment has been to establish a sense of stability by ousting Mobutu’s unpaid and undisciplined security forces, whose way of life centered on shaking down the people they ostensibly were to protect.

For the first time that most can remember, people no longer live in fear of losing their money and their possessions to thugs acting with the authority of the state.

Constant Musanja, 20, one of the legion of bicycle taxi drivers who charge about 25 cents for passengers to ride on the cushioned rear luggage rack, said the old security forces used to steal his bicycle and make him pay a fine to get it back.

“The wish of the people of Kisangani is for Mr. (rebel leader Laurent) Kabila to take all of Zaire,” he said.