Gabon: Autocrat Insurance

Once again French paratroopers came to Léon Mba’s rescue. Steel-helmeted paras sent in quickly by Charles de Gaulle had saved the Gabonese President’s skin only two months ago, when his 400-man army pulled a predawn coup and replaced him briefly with Op position Leader Jean-Hilaire Aubame (TIME, Feb. 28). In putting down that rising, the French troopers killed 27 Gabonese soldiers, then spirited Aubame off to an island just outside the port capital of Libreville, decided to stay on in the former French colony to keep an eye on things. Back in power, Mba and his advisers felt it best to allow opposition candidates on the ballot in last week’s long-delayed election; it had been Mba’s systematic stifling of the opposition that had triggered the revolt.

This time around, Mba took out autocrat insurance. His bullyboys kidnaped an estimated 1,000 opposition supporters, dumped them hundreds of miles deep in the bush on election day. Even at that, anti-Mba candidates captured 53% of the popular vote. But thanks to convenient gerrymander and the 1,500 French settler votes that went almost unanimously to Mba in Libreville, his Bloc Démocratique Gabonais Party won 31 of the National Assembly’s 47 seats. Immediately, a call for a general strike went up, and angry youths began gathering in Libreville’s shady, bungalow-lined streets. But truckloads of paratroopers and Gabonese gendarmes roared out to take station at key points in the city. With that, the opposition threat subsided — for the time being.