Zaire, whose dictator has been absent with illness for two months, has been set adrift by expanding ethnic conflict and a potentially immense refugee crisis. Ethnic Tutsis, who have lived for generations in this Central African nation, have rebelled and easily taken eastern territory from the disheveled Zairean Army with the likely help of neighboring, Tutsi-led Rwanda.
At least half-a-million refugees, mostly ethnic Hutus who fled conflict with Tutsis in their home countries of Rwanda and Burundi in , are roaming eastern Zaire's Kivu region with practically no humanitarian aid. They fled as the rebels took the area around their camps, including Goma, the hub of international aid operations. The rebels' success has opened the prospect that this former colony once called the Belgian Congo might fall apart - or if its Army regroups, engage in an unprecedented regional African war with Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda.
The condition of President Mobutu Sese Seko, recovering in a Swiss clinic, has reportedly worsened, deepening a crisis in Zaire's leadership. Under great pressure is Prime Minister Leon Kengo wa Dondo, a technocrat popular with the West, but not always with his master Mobutu and other powerful politicians.
Many analysts believe his political career may now be nearing an end. Diplomats say that for a region where ethnic strife between Hutus and Tutsis has claimed , lives in Burundi since and up to 1 million in Rwanda's genocide, xenophobia and war talk in Kinshasa does not bode well for repaired relations with the Tutsi-dominated governments of those two neighbors.
Youths in red headbands wrecked Tutsi property and drove many of Kinshasa's once-respected Rwandan citizens into hiding or to flee to neighboring Congo the past few days. An unusually united Parliament on Thursday stoked more nationalist passions by demanding Tutsis' expulsion from the government. He vowed to attack Rwanda, but with Zaire's armed forces in corrupt disarray, analysts speculated that he could inflict greater damage instead on Mr.
Kengo's beleaguered rule. The sidewalks next to major military bases became thriving markets for looted goods. Most press accounts described these horrendous riots as the work of "mutinous" troops. But whether the pillage was aimed at toppling Mobutu remains a mystery; no soldier was ever prosecuted or disciplined.
Tshisekedi is from Kasai. He lasted six days. The problem, like almost all problems in Zaire, boiled down to money. Tshisekedi, with the backing of Western governments, sought control over Zaire's Central Bank. This Mobutu could not abide. Control of the printing and distribution of money is a vital tool of Mobutu's; it is not only the means by which he enriches himself but also his means for supporting his friends and co-opting his enemies.
When Tshisekedi arrived at his office on October 19, , he found the doors were locked. A replacement moved in three days later. Something needed to be done to break up the opposition alliance. Whenever Zaireans describe Mobutu's legendary "musical chairs" system of government—the perennial shuffling of his friends and enemies in and out of favor, in and out of money—the first case in point is Nguza Karl-i-Bond. Nguza was Mobutu's Foreign Minister in the early s.
In he was accused of treason and sentenced to death. He is said to have been tortured. But a year later he was freed, and a year after that he became Prime Minister. Two years after that he fled to exile in Belgium, where he wrote a book exposing Mobutu's corruption. He later testified before a congressional subcommittee in Washington about Mobutu's ill-gotten riches. Then, incredibly, he returned to Mobutu's fold, and in was sent back to Washington as Zaire's ambassador. Two years later he was the Foreign Minister again.
Gabriel Kyungu, one of his principal allies, appeared more credible than Nguza as an oppositionist. Along with Tshisekedi, Kyungu had produced a scathing public critique of Mobutu's regime in The two were imprisoned and tortured. Kyungu was one of the first public figures to decry the massacre of students at the university, and he drew crowds with populist speeches in which he derided Mobutu as an hibou , an owl, traditionally associated with black magic.
The violence against the Kasai in Shaba began soon thereafter. Immediately after Governor Kyungu assumed office, he launched a campaign known as Debout Katanga! Bemoaning the misery of the Katangan population, Kyungu repeatedly blamed the Kasaians.
He called them bilulu Swahili for "insects". Their presence is an insult. They are arrogant and don't hide it. It is not possible for the tribes to live side by side. Mostly unemployed, illiterate thugs from rural villages, the JUFERI provided a violent accompaniment to Kyungu's menacing radio broadcasts. Attacks on Kasaian homes in rural towns and villages began in late Witnesses said the JUFERI were sometimes supplied with gasoline to set houses afire and with beer and marijuana to stoke their aggression.
Some Kasaians fought back. The proverbial cycle of violence was set in motion. Meanwhile, on February 16, , hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets of Kinshasa, a thousand miles away, in support of the national conference on democracy, which Nguza had ordered closed.
Mobutu's troops opened fire on the marchers; according to the human rights monitoring group Africa Watch, more than thirty were killed. Mobutu deftly blamed Nguza and soon afterward allowed the national conference to resume. In August the conference nominated Tshisekedi to be Prime Minister again. Kasaians in Shaba celebrated. Some threw stones at the governor's residence. Most Kasaians fled to the train station or to the homes of relatives in town.
Those I spoke with had no doubt about who was ultimately responsible for their predicament. He needs someone who is malleable. He uses others, like Kyungu—a pawn of Mobutu.
Kasaians were quick to remind me that not all Katangese approve of what is happening: "It's a false problem," I was told repeatedly; "it's a manipulation by the politicians. In fact the majority of Kasaians in Shaba have suffered as much as most Katangese under a regime that has plundered the province's resources for the benefit of a few.
But Katangan leaders have made a pact with the devil, calculating that, as one put it, "we have to ally ourselves with the finishing dictatorship in order to resist the permanent dictatorship of the Kasai. Before, he attacked the Katangese using the Kasai, who were among his closest collaborators. Now he realizes that there were radical political oppositionists among the Kasai. He uses old enmities to destabilize his new enemies.
Now he uses Katangese to destabilize the Kasai. A judge interrupted to clarify: "It was not exactly his goal to dominate the Katangese. Mobutu put Kasaians at the head of many enterprises.
But this was so that he could enjoy the riches of the province with the help of the Kasai. Now he says it wasn't he who was the cause of the Katangese's unhappiness—it was the Kasai.
If you look at the situation more closely, both Kasaians and Katangese are in indescribable misery. Those who benefited are Mobutu and his acolytes. It's just that most of his acolytes were Kasaians, especially here in Katanga. This is a region that he has pillaged a lot. Soldiers and the police, who might be expected to intervene if Mobutu ordered them to do so, appear in accounts of the violence only intermittently, most often as criminals engaged in thefts and assaults that provoke reprisals, which merely reinforce the cycle of violence.
Lawlessness in general, and lawless soldiers in particular, have been a chronic problem in Zaire ever since independence, when the entire army dissolved in mutiny within a week. Armed shakedowns are commonplace. On a single night in Kolwezi, while driving to and from a restaurant in town, my companions and I were held up at gunpoint five times by soldiers who emerged like apparitions in our headlights, pointed their rifles menacingly at the windshield, and then gruffly accepted yet another proffer of five or ten million zaires—just under a dollar at that week's rate.
Anschaire Moji A Kapasu, told me that the authorities had done "everything possible" to stop the violence. I asked if anyone had been arrested and prosecuted. He looked at me with a blank expression, as if the idea had never occurred to him. C'est difficile. On the edge of downtown Kolwozi, past the teeming train station, lies the Gecamines mining installation, a vast, rocky landscape of open pits and coppery waste dumps.
In better days this facility produced up to 80 percent of Zaire's copper and cobalt. Belgians built the mines early in the century, and Belgian spies, financiers, and mercenaries known as les Affreux —"the Dreadful Ones"—backed Moise Tshombe's ill-fated secession movement in , hoping to maintain de facto Belgian control over the lucrative mining industry. Mobutu nationalized the mines in At its high point, in the mids, Gecamines produced , tons of copper a year with 35, employees, earned three quarters of Zaire's foreign exchange, and educated , children in company run schools.
Today Gecamines is eerily subdued. In the two weeks before my visit roughly 7, Kasaian workers—half the work force and most of the skilled employees—had been chased from their jobs at these mines. In all, 40, to 50, Kasaians in Kolwezi have been rendered homeless. The mines still function, I was told, but expatriate company officials doubt that this will last. The production of copper had already declined to , tons or less in the previous year, because of rampant corruption and mismanagement.
A mine collapsed a few years ago owing to negligence. Most of the skilled expatriates fled after the pillage. The company is bankrupt. A week before my visit ten trucks lined up along the wall surrounding the plant. Three hundred thieves pushed a hundred tons of copper up to the wall and loaded it into the trucks, and off they drove to the Zambian border and down to South Africa. There is an ongoing traffic in stolen copper, cobalt, electrical wires and pylons, tires, water pumps, and gasoline.
Gecamines is being looted down to the ground. Soldiers, the police, workers, company guards, expatriate Greeks, Lebanese, and South Africans—all are collaborating to ransack Zaire's biggest economic asset. According to company officials, legal authorities, diplomats, and townspeople alike, at the center of the racket is Governor Kyungu. It is an old story in Zaire. We ask ourselves this question. If you compare Kyungu when he was in opposition, he was a poor man.
Now he is very rich. The corruption in Zaire is legendary. The "kleptocracy" has its roots in the nineteenth century Congo Free State: Belgium's King Leopold II used profits from the export of the country's extensive natural resources to build a personal fortune—profits extracted under conditions of forced labor that included killing workers and chopping off hands if quotas were not met. Stories about his bank accounts in Switzerland and his villas, ranches palaces, and yachts throughout Europe are legion, as are wide-eyed descriptions of his home at Gbadolite, in northern Zaire, his birthplace; "Versailles in the jungle," it is called.
Born in poverty, the son of a domestic cook and a hotel maid, Mobutu is reported to have obtained his first few million dollars in the early s from the CIA and the U. He was the army chief of staff at the time. Mobutu has steadily augmented his wealth ever since by blurring the distinction between public and private funds, dipping often into the national treasury.
Not least among his many lucrative sources of "leakage," as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund call illegal diversions of money, has been Gecamines. Sometimes overlooked in accounts of Mobutu's wealth is the critical role that money plays as a political tool. Even as Mobutu has accumulated great riches, he has had to spend huge sums to reward his allies and buy off his opponents.
For survival they have to engage in politics. To earn a living, they have to be on the side of the man in power. Herman Cohen, who was the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Bush Administration, and who first met Mobutu almost thirty years ago, agreed when we spoke that Zaire's central government is "basically a clan a family of cousins acting like the Mafia in Sicily, making these illegal deals, siphoning the money off cobalt and copper revenues.
He has to keep the family afloat. In effect he has about three thousand to four thousand dependents, including women and children. It's essentially his own tribe. The attitude is, 'We've got to all hang together. If we don't, we're dead. Among the most important of these dependents are, of course, soldiers.
0コメント