obutu Sese Seko, Zaire's longtime dictator and the last of a generation of Cold War rulers who grew fabulously rich by providing a bulwark against communism, died in exile Sunday in Rabat, Morocco, after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 66.

Having held Zaire together for 31 years, Mobutu was chased from power in May after a seven-month rebellion led by a lifelong opponent, Laurent Desire Kabila. Throughout his rule, Mobutu swore that he would never be known as a former president, but only as the late president. In another characteristic boast, he often said that before him there was no Zaire, and that his country would not survive him either.

If Kabila's army of footsoldiers put a lie to Mobutu's first claim, history ironically proved the second boast true. Hours after Mobutu's own mutinous army fired on the cargo plane that he had used to flee the country from his opulent palace in his native village, Gbadolite, the victorious rebel leader proclaimed himself president. In his first official act, Kabila renamed the country the Congo, restoring the name used by Belgian colonists and changed by Mobutu in 1971.

Mobutu's panicked flight into exile was merely the beginning of a humiliating end for a man whose almost constant presence at the front and center of the African political stage had turned him into one of the world's most vainglorious leaders. France, Mobutu's close ally until the bitter end refused to give him asylum. Similarly, Togo, a West African state ruled by another longtime dictator, Gnassingbe Eyadema, asked Mobutu and his large entourage of family and aides to leave the country just days after the exiled leader landed there.

Finally, Morocco, another ally, took Mobutu in. For most of his four months there, the longtime dictator's failing health kept him confined to hospitals.

After seizing power in a 1965 coup, Mobutu formed one of the continent's archetypal one-party states, tolerating no dissent and encouraging a strong personality cult. The chosen symbols of his power became a trademark leopard-skin cap and wooden walking stick, carved with the figure of an eagle at the top.

Under the banner of an ideology dubbed "authenticity," and later simply known as Mobutuism, he sought to legitimize his rule by reawakening pride in values supposedly unique to Africans, all the while enhancing his own power as the country's undisputed chief.

He built his political longevity on three pillars: violence, cunning, and the use of state funds to buy off enemies. His systematic looting of the national treasury and major industries gave birth to the term "kleptocracy" to describe a reign of official corruption that reputedly made him one world's wealthiest heads of state.

Bernard Kouchner, a minister in the government of former France President Francois Mitterrand, referring to Mobutu's wealth, estimated by some to be as great as $5 billion, once described the African leader as "a walking bank vault with a leopard-skin cap."

Mobutu's rapid rise from obscurity, beginning at the outset of his country's chaotic independence from Belgium, was also due in no small part to the help of Washington and other Western powers who saw in him a valuable ally against instability and Communist encroachment in Central Africa.

Playing this strategic card to the hilt, Mobutu allowed his huge country, which borders nine other African nations, to be used as a staging ground for supporting Western client states and anti-Communist guerrilla movements throughout the region, most notably next door in oil-rich Angola.

By the same token, Mobutu was able repeatedly to call on his Western allies to help put down the rebellions that have almost continuously marked his country's history after independence.

Mobutu's aid in the effort to contain Soviet influence in Africa, and his country's status as a repository of immense mineral wealth earned the Zairian leader direct contacts -- unmatched by any other leader of black Africa -- with every American president from Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush.

Only late in the Bush administration did Washington officially begin to shun Mobutu, denying him visas to visit the United States, and encouraging him to organize free national elections.

Mobutu had managed to outlast a stern generation of famously wealthy, rightist dictators who ruled over much of the developing world throughout the Cold War, from the Duvaliers of Haiti to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

But by the 1990s, with much of Africa and the rest of the world swept up in a new spirit of democratic politics, Mobutu's traditional Western backers had begun to see him as an embarrassing dinosaur.

From Lowly Informer to All-Powerful Warrior

uring his long public life, Mobutu rose from being a lowly colonial police informer, journalist and army sergeant to become chief of staff of his country's armed forces, military dictator and ultimately president.

He changed his name from Joseph Desire Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga, which, according to most translations means "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.

According to an alternate translation, the name meant: the rooster that watches over all the hens.

Likewise, the name Congo was changed to Zaire, an old Portuguese corruption of a local name for the country's greatest river. Similarly, as all European-derived place names were replaced with African names, the capital, Leopoldville, was renamed Kinshasa.

For over two decades, Mobutu's drive for "authenticity" meant that Zairians were forbidden from using Christian names, bleaching their skin and straightening their hair, or even playing most kinds of foreign music on the radio.

Rather than employing the terms Mr. or Mrs., Zairians were enjoined to address each other as "Citizen." And in the place of the Western business suit, Mobutu imposed his own creation, a two-piece outfit of pants and a tunic, patterned after the so-called Mao suits worn in China.

These clothes, designed to be worn with a foulard at the neck, were dubbed "abacost," a contraction of "a bas le costume," or down with the suit.

Initially, Mobutu's ideology also contained a strong component of economic nationalism, and in 1973, the government began taking over foreign-owned industries and plantations, particularly Belgian ones.

The distribution of these assets among the president's closest domestic allies instantly created a class of nouveaux riches, but within two years had nearly brought the once prosperous economy to a crash, forcing Mobutu to reverse direction.

For Mobutu, by far the most important aspect of his ideology was its attempt to legitimize his absolute rule by reference to supposedly traditional African political values.

According to Mobutu and his regime's enforcers, Africa's ancestral culture was incompatible with Western-style democracy, and called instead for an all-powerful and unifying chief whose wealth and prestige were the best gauges by which the governed could measure their own fortunes.

For a time, as long as Mobutu was heavily courted by Western powers, and prices for Zaire's immense supplies of copper, cobalt and diamonds remained high, this strategy seemed to succeed brilliantly, leading several African presidents to copy features of his style of rule.

But the Zairian leader was the most extreme, amassing one of the world's largest private fortunes, a process that continued even after his country's economy had begun a prolonged nose dive.

Mobutu, who collected luxurious mansions around the world, enjoyed traveling on extended vacations and going on lavish shopping trips to destinations like Disneyworld or Paris with large numbers of relatives and courtiers in specially chartered Boeing 747 and Concorde jets. At home, he converted his northern village of Gbadolite into a gaudy, white marble retreat that was often called the "Versailles of the Jungle," but in fact was modeled after the Belgian monarchy's Laeken Palace.

Over time, this extravagance earned the country's self-styled "redeemer" unflattering comparisons with King Leopold II of Belgium, whose wanton exploitation of the Congo -- not as a colony, but as his own private royal property -- became a subject of Joseph Conrad's 1902 novel, "The Heart of Darkness."

Independence Fever Heats Big Ambitions

obutu was born on Oct. 14, 1930, in the northern town of Lisala in what was then the Belgian Congo. Born out of wedlock to a traditional chief of the Ngbaka ethnic group and Mama Marie Madeleine Yemo, Mobutu was adopted in his infancy by Alberic Gbemani, a cook for local Belgian missionaries who had married his mother.

The young Mobutu was tutored in French and other subjects by Belgian missionaries who later helped him secure a place in missionary schools in Leopoldville and Coquilhatville, now known as Lisala.

In 1950, Mobutu, who was then 20, joined the colonial army, known as the Force Publique, working as a journalist and rising in the space of six years to the rank of sergeant, which for an African of that era was a considerable achievement.

Leaving active duty in 1956, Mobutu went to work as a columnist for the Leopoldville newspaper, L'Avenir, drawing him close to the embryonic pre-independence political scene of the capital. In 1959, he was sent by the colonial administration to Brussels for fellowships at the Institute of Journalism and the Institute of Social Studies.

During his stay in Belgium, Mobutu was able to attend the Brussels Roundtable Conference on Congo Independence and is widely believed to have funneled information to Belgian intelligence on behind-the-scenes discussions between Congolese participants.

Mobutu returned to Leopoldville just in time for the pro-independence riots that swept the capital and dramatically accelerated Belgium's timetable for handing over power to its African subjects. Suddenly, a transition that had been measured in decades, and which seemed mostly theoretical to many Belgians, was prepared in the space of a few months.

At independence in 1960, Mobutu was called on by the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, to serve as his army chief of staff. Lumumba, a left-leaning, fiery African nationalist had shocked the Belgian delegation, led by King Baudouin, in his independence day speech by bluntly decrying the brutality and humiliation suffered by Africans at the hands of Europeans.

The speech's biggest surprise, however, was Lumumba's announcement of the revocation of the Belgian officer corps that commanded the Force Publique, a 25,000-member corps that had hitherto included no African officers.

The measure would prove fateful in many ways, almost immediately thrusting the country into a period of turbulence and repeated secession attempts, abetted by an embittered Brussels. It also placed Mobutu near the center of a political stage that he would dominate for nearly four decades.

Mobutu's political savvy seemed to recommend him for the job of chief of staff of the armed forces, but it would not be long before the new military chief would betray the man who had appointed him.

Strongman's Coup Gets Wink From Washington

n Sept. 14, 1960, Mobutu, by then a colonel, "suspended" the country's political institutions, effectively, if temporarily, seizing power.

The move came as the Congo was in the throes of a civil war with the copper-rich province of Katanga, now called Shaba, seeking to break away from the newborn country, and with Lumumba and the president, Joseph Kasavubu, locked in an irreconcilable power struggle.

U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, died in a mysterious airplane crash in 1961 as he attempted to fly into Katanga to settle the crisis.

Mobutu is widely believed to have been strongly encouraged by Washington, acting through the Central Intelligence Agency in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration. His action prevented Lumumba from making good on an invitation to the Soviet Union to help put down the Katangese secession.

Continuing its support once Mobutu took over, Washington is known to have repeatedly supplied him with cash to pay his soldiers, and an American-piloted jet for travel around the country.

To avoid arrest or assassination, Lumumba sought refuge at the U.N. mission in Leopoldville, which for over two months was surrounded by Mobutu's soldiers. Lumumba escaped from the capital on Nov. 27, 1960, in a bid to reach his loyalists in the northeastern city of Stanleyville, now Kisangani, but was quickly captured.

The deposed prime minister was tortured by Mobutu's agents before being flown to Katanga to be handed over to secessionist leader, Moise Tshombe, Lumumba's sworn enemy. Lumumba was killed in mysterious circumstances, and his body was never found.

Mobutu formally restored power to civilian authorities in 1961, but continued working closely with the CIA in its efforts to help put down rebellions in eastern, central and southern regions of the country.

On Nov. 24, 1965, Mobutu, now a lieutenant general, seized power again, but this time, with no intention of relinquishing it. The coup, one of the first military takeovers in Africa, came after U.S. financed mercenaries and other covert assistance had largely succeeded in suppressing the regional rebellions.

The pretext for the coup was renewed squabbling between President Kasavubu and the country's prime minister, Tshombe. Like Lumumba before him, Tshombe, who went into exile after Mobutu's coup, was killed under mysterious circumstances while being detained in an Algerian jail.

Bankrupting a Country in Pursuit of Grandeur

ack in control, Mobutu abolished party politics and for the next several years worked gradually at establishing his own uncontested authority.

A year after his coup, Mobutu founded the Popular Movement of the Revolution, or MPR, the country's sole party whose membership was to become obligatory for all Zairians. By 1971, when he organized his first national elections, Mobutu's group had, in effect, become a state within a state.

Mobutu ran unopposed in the presidential election, in which a green ballot paper symbolizing "progress" was to be used by voters supporting the incumbent. A red ballot paper, symbolizing "chaos" was, in theory, intended for those who did not wish to see Mobutu elected. After the voting, the government announced that only 157 voters had opposed the president.

With his carefully engineered election, Mobutu had reached the height of his powers and now virtually ruled as an absolute monarch. Under the latest version of a constitution that he had repeatedly tinkered with, the president was declared "the embodiment of the nation," and his decisions were placed "outside the scope of the various articles of the constitution that limit, to a certain degree, the powers of the president."

Seated comfortably in power, Mobutu introduced his "authenticity" policy, adopted the tile of marshal, and launched a series of major projects intended to transform Zaire into an economic powerhouse in Central Africa. Instead, Mobutu's policies, from the nationalization of foreign businesses to the pursuit of huge prestige projects, nearly bankrupted the country.

The largest of the projects, the Inga Dam, which alone was slated to produce one-third of the world's hydroelectric energy, and the construction of an 1,100-mile high tension power grid to the copper-producing Shaba region, proved to be disastrous.

The launching of bids for these grandiose public works projects caused Mobutu to be courted anew by Western capitals and their countries' largest construction firms and banks. But the debt crisis brought on by costly borrowing and the collapse of world copper prices ultimately thwarted those projects.

Other bold strokes by Mobutu would also backfire, contributing to the slow, but irrevocable decline in his power.

In 1975, Mobutu again consolidated his links with Washington by cooperating with the CIA in the launching of an assault on the Angolan capital, Luanda. The incursion of the Zairian army was aimed at helping a pro-Western guerrilla force, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, seize the capital on the eve on independence from Portugal.

Instead, Cuban support enabled a rival group, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, to halt the march and rout the troops from Mobutu's most prestigious military unit, the Kamanyola Brigade, sent to assist the attack.

Mobutu's clear taking of sides in the Angolan conflict would return to haunt him less than two years later, when Zairian opponents were allowed to use Angolan territory to attack the copper-rich Shaba province.

As Powers Dimmed, a Death Foretold

obutu spent most of the 1980s wrestling with increasingly intractable economic problems brought on by the country's heavy debt, and exacerbated by the fall in copper prices and the regime's own constant theft of national resources.

Zaire entered into a period of steep national decline. For years, Mobutu's only answers to the country's problems seemed to be continual reshuffling of government ministers and printing of virtually worthless new money to pay salaries.

By the end of the decade, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of communism in most of the world, Mobutu had been stripped of any residual strategic importance. In 1990, when a democratization movement swept much of Africa, Mobutu responded at home by ordering a massacre of students at the University of Lubumbashi, in the country's far south.

As word of the killings spread abroad, Belgium, Zaire's largest source of foreign aid, cut off assistance, demanding democratic reforms. Soon, the United States and France also joined in.

In April 1990, Mobutu announced the opening of the country to multiparty politics, and conceded to the organization of a "national conference," which sought to limit his powers sharply, eventually imposing a prime minister chosen from the opposition, Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba, and calling for national elections.

Mobutu responded to the dwindling of his powers and his growing unpopularity by taking up residence on a luxury yacht, the Kamanyola, moored on the Zaire River, under heavy guard, at the edge of Kinshasa.

Later, he left the capital altogether, moving to his palace in Gbadolite, nearly 1,000 miles to the north, forcing members of the government in Kinshasa to shuttle back and forth to conduct business with him.

After appearing willing to bow to the decisions of the national conference, however, Mobutu did everything he could to frustrate the body, including printing huge amounts of money to buy off the votes of its participants, and ordering attacks by army hit squads on his opponents.

In September 1991, after heavy rioting in the capital, he bowed to opposition demands that he name Tshisekedi, his longest-standing opponent, as prime minister. Mobutu dismissed Tshisekdi only 12 days later, after the new prime minister attempted to establish his government's control over the Central Bank.

Rioting again erupted in the capital in January 1993, when Mobutu's introduction of new bank notes to cope with triple digit inflation angered soldiers. The renewed rioting, in which the French ambassador to Zaire was killed in his office, again sharply raised international pressure on Mobutu to carry out democratic reforms.

Mobutu's dwindling powers received a boost in 1994 when neighboring Rwanda exploded in a genocidal civil war that led to the massacre of over half a million people, mostly from the Tutsi minority, and sent over a million Hutu refugees streaming into Zaire.

The Zairian leader's granting of permission to France to intervene in the Rwandan crisis eased Mobutu's international isolation, as did his country's taking in large numbers of refugees.

But Mobutu's perceived support for exiled Hutu militia members, who mounted repeated attacks on Rwanda from Zaire, ultimately proved costly.

In October 1996, a newly formed Zairian militia, backed by Rwanda, routed government forces in a string of eastern Zairian cities, creating the most serious threat to Zaire's cohesion in years, at a time when Mobutu was already gravely ill with cancer and under treatment in Switzerland.

Returning belatedly to face a crisis that was swallowing up his country, Mobutu included the complaint in virtually every public statement that he had been "stabbed in the back" by his neighbors.

But for the swelling coalition of countries that brought Mobutu down and placed Kabila in power, the tables were merely being turned on a man who had spent his career playing kingmaker.

