Zairean political exiles

[1] At the start of his time in office, Mobutu set some examples to his political adversaries, showing that the contestation of his reign could have deadly consequences.

The final Prime Minister of the First Republic, Évariste Kimba, was sacked by Mobutu during the 1965 coup d'état, and replaced by Colonel Léonard Mulamba.

[3] The thirteen parliamentarians grouped together with other allies such as Lihau to form an illegal second political party, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress.

He was sentenced to death in absentia for trying to bring down the new regime and 'alienation of the economic independence' of Congo because he signed the Spaak/Tshombe accords with Belgium when he was the Congolese Prime Minister.

After the first Shaba War, he fell out of grace with Mobutu and was sentenced to death, tortured, pardoned, and made Foreign Affars Minister again in 1979.

Cléophas Kamitatu, one of the leaders of the Parti Solidaire Africain during the First Republic, went into exile to France in 1970, where he wrote La grande mystification du Congo-Kinshasa: Les crimes de Mobutu.

Next to a left-wing activist network in France, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadruddin Aga Khan intervened at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in favour of Kamitatu's stay.