The dictator spent millions of dollars to erect an enormous airport, three palaces, a conference center and a Coca-Cola plant in Gbadolite, his ancestral home. It was the last place he stayed in Congo before he fled to Morocco in 1997.

Gbadolite became a monument to surreal excess during Mobutu's time as leader of Zaire, the name he chose for Congo. He fashioned a mini-capital here, complete with scaled-down replicas of government offices.

His three palaces were dressed in jade and marble, surrounded by ponds and swimming pools and fountains and luxuriant gardens. While the rest of his country suffered, Mobutu built a model farm here and flew in sheep, cattle and plants from South America and Europe.

Now the forest is rapidly reclaiming the town once called the "Versailles of the Jungle." Mobutu's palaces have fallen into ruins, looted by two successive rebel armies. Several Soviet-era jet fighters and helicopter gunships lie in pieces at an airport built to accommodate the Concorde.

Gbadolite's offices, banks and shops are largely empty. So are the streets, though the town has some of the finest roadways in Congo.

The monuments that Mobutu built are a wreck. The VIP salon at the airport is a shambles. The soft-drink plant and brewery are idle. In a town whose population once was 35,000, a fraction of that number now ambles through a town in which there is only one general store.

Unlike the rest of Congo, Gbadolite still likes Mobutu. Its main street is still called Boulevard Mobutu Sese Seko. A few folks wear shirts extolling the old dictator, though such a garment would merit jail time 700 miles away in the capital, Kinshasa.

"Mobutu was good," said Itebo Amani, 23, who was trying to sell a sick chimpanzee with purple-painted fingernails. "We had 32 years of peace. We didn't know about war."

Now a new Big Man has taken up residence in Gbadolite: Jean Pierre Bemba, the chairman of the Congolese Liberation Movement, the strongest of three rebel groups trying to oust Mobutu's successor, President Laurent Kabila.

Bemba, 38, arrived in Gbadolite in July 1999 after troops from Chad who were supporting Kabila pulled out.

A businessman whose family had close ties to Mobutu, Bemba bristles at suggestions that he and many of his supporters are former Mobutuists who want a return to the old ways. He said his army, supported by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, was fighting to end the corruption, tribalism and nepotism that characterized Mobutu's and Kabila's regimes.

"Don't think of Mobutuists as people who shook the hand of Mobutu," said Bemba, who ran a cellular-telephone business in Kinshasa in Mobutu's time and had an air-freight business based in Uganda.

Kabila's army arrived in May 1997, like some sort of occupation force, suspicious about the loyalty of the locals. Few people in Gbadolite had any regrets when Bemba's forces replaced government troops, although the prevailing public sentiment is that people just want him to finish the war so they can get on with life.

"We want the war over quickly," said Alphonsine Demomo, 38, who stood in the hot sun holding a jug of palm oil. "We're suffering."

Suffering is a new experience in Gbadolite, which was blessed with Mobutu's munificence at the expense of the rest of the country during his three decades of rule.

Mobutu started developing Gbadolite in the 1970s as a secondary capital. He built scaled-down replicas of the Kinshasa government ministries, but civil servants balked at relocating from the capital's excitement to such an isolated outpost.

Every major bank in Zaire had a branch in Gbadolite to accommodate Mobutu's frequent withdrawals. The buildings are now used as guest houses for supporters and businesspeople who travel to seek Bemba's favors.

Gbadolite still has a steady electrical supply, thanks to a hydroelectric dam that Mobutu built on the Ubangi River over the objections of the World Bank. In 1987, he extended the runway at Gbadolite's airport to accommodate the supersonic Concorde, which he chartered sometimes to fly to Europe. Mobutu also stole funds supplied by the U.S. government, his primary ally during the 1980s when he allowed the American intelligence agencies to use his country as a base for supporting anticommunist rebels in Angola. So some of Gbadolite's excesses represent the work of U.S. tax dollars.

Now there are few vehicles in Gbadolite, except for several trucks owned by the rebels. Although some pedestrians stroll by, carrying fruits or goods for market balanced on their heads, the streets seem underpopulated.

Mobutu's three palaces are now occupied by goats and a few bored soldiers who have filled the walls with graffiti. Most of the fixtures from his palaces were looted and sold off in the markets in Bangui in the Central African Republic, 130 miles away.

The large palace in Gbadolite, a three-story marble-clad building where Mobutu held most public functions but preferred not to live, was unfinished. Most of the upper floors are still bare concrete, except for one room taken over by rebel radio.

At Kawele, seven miles outside Gbadolite, Mobutu built two palaces within a walled compound. One is a village of Chinese pagodas, with tall roofs of jade and orange glazed tile that surround ponds now filled with thick layers of green algae. It was built by the Chinese and used primarily as a residence for Mobutu's family and guests.

The other palace, Mobutu's former private residence, is a gaudy modern mansion built of real and faux marble veneer. Four concrete lions guard the entrance, and a massive marble table remains in the dining room - too heavy for looters.

"It's a fantastic house," said Jose Etula, 23, a rebel soldier from Gbadolite. "If his children came back now and saw it, they would cry."

Mobutu's two swimming pools and the fountain in the front of the house are now empty of water and filling quickly with vegetation. The gardens have become overgrown with so much hibiscus, creeping vines and bush that the house seems more like an archaeological site than a place that was abandoned three years ago.

Mobutu's bedroom was 625 square feet - the soldiers guarding the place believe his bed was mounted on a rising platform in the center, though none of the fixtures remain. The president's dressing room and bathroom each were the size of a bedroom in a comfortable suburban home. The bathroom had two jacuzzis - one circular and one rectangular.

Mobutu addressed crowds of visitors from a balcony overlooking a large veranda, now covered with shards of broken glass.

Although most Congolese live in huts of sticks and grass, Etula is not appalled at the excess before him. He subscribes to the view held by many Congolese, that the Big Man deserved a house befitting his status.