the hostages. In total, around 70 hostages and 1,000 Congolese civilians were killed but the vast majority were evacuated. The Belgian troops were only under orders to liberate the hostages, rather than push the Simbas out of the city, but the attack nevertheless "broke the back of the eastern insurrection, which never recovered." The Simba leadership went into exile in disarray and severe disagreement; Gbenye was shot in the shoulder by his general after dismissing him. Meanwhile, the Belgian paratroopers and the civilians returned to their country. In the aftermath of the intervention, Belgium itself was publicly accused of neocolonialism. As a result of the intervention, Tshombe lost the support of Kasa-Vubu and Mobutu and was dismissed from his post as prime minister in October 1965. Soon after Dragon Rouge, ANC and mercenary troops captured Stanleyville, putting an end to the Simba rebellion. The Simba rebels executed 20,000 Congolese and 392 Western hostages, including 268 Belgians, during the rebellion. Tens of thousands of people were killed in total during the suppression of the Simbas. Pockets of Simba resistance continued to hold out in the eastern Congo, most notably in South Kivu, where Laurent-Désiré Kabila led a Maoist cross-border insurgency which lasted until the 1980s. Second Mobutu coup d'état In the scheduled March 1965 elections, Tshombe's Convention Nationale Congolaise (CONACO) won a large majority of the seats, but a large part of his party soon defected to form the new Front Démocratique Congolais (FDC), making the overall result unclear as CONACO controlled the Chamber of Deputies while the FDC controlled the Senate. Kasa-Vubu, attempting to use the situation to block Tshombe, appointed an anti-Tshombe leader, Évariste Kimba of the FDC, to be prime minister-designate in November 1965, but the largely pro-Tshombe Parliament refused to ratify the appointment. Instead of seeking a compromise candidate, Kasa-Vubu again unilaterally declared Kimba to be Prime Minister, which was again rejected, creating a political deadlock. With the government in near-paralysis, Mobutu seized power in a bloodless coup, ostensibly to stop the impasse, on 25 November 1965. Under the auspices of a régime d'exception (the equivalent of a state of emergency), Mobutu assumed sweeping, almost absolute, power for five years, after which, he claimed, democracy would be restored. Mobutu's coup, which promised both economic and political stability, was supported by the United States and other Western governments, and his rule initially met widespread popularity. He increasingly took