Word: mobutu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mobutu, no doubt, would dearly love to demolish such boastfulness. But at the moment he is preoccupied by an enemy even more formidable than the rebel legions. For the past seven months the Zairian President has been undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. In December he rose from his sickbed at his villa on the French Riviera, declaring that he was returning to Zaire to "take things in hand." Supporters greeted him with euphoria but swiftly discerned that Mobutu was incapable of dealing with problems he needed to solve. He shunned the opposition and said nothing about appointing a successor...
...this seems rather shocking for a man who was once regarded as Africa's most durable dictator. The son of a hotel maid, Mobutu rose to head Zaire's army upon independence in 1960, then seized power five years later. In the decades since, he has kept his balance by continually shunting friends and enemies in and out of favor. A favorite technique for keeping underlings in line has been to switch without warning from generosity to savagery. He has been known to have a man arrested, tortured and forced to drink his own urine before awarding him a prestigious...
Over the years, Mobutu also devoted considerable energy to enriching his own coffers, dipping into the national treasury as if it were a kind of personal cash machine. No one knows how much he is worth; his visible assets include mansions in Switzerland and Spain, several homes in Belgium, a town house in Paris, a villa near Monte Carlo and a horse ranch in Portugal. But while the President and other members of his kleptocracy profited handsomely, Mobutu's leadership laid waste the economy. In 1994 Zaire's per capita GNP was $125 (70% lower than...
...diamonds, plus substantial reserves of zinc, copper, manganese and gold. But ever since the prices of metals began dropping in the 1970s, Zaire's economic progress has been frozen. Stagnation turned into catastrophe in the late 1980s, when the cold war ended and the Western powers that had bankrolled Mobutu as a bulwark against communism informed him that his credit had run dry. In response, the President distanced himself from day-to-day governance, and Zaire's threadbare cohesion started to pull apart. The worst unraveling took place in North and South Kivu provinces, sparking a crisis that bequeathed...
Kagame realized, however, that the rebels could not fight Mobutu alone. This opinion was shared by Kagame's close personal friend, President Museveni in neighboring Uganda, an implacable foe of Mobutu's. So Museveni put Kagame in touch with his old friend and fellow bush fighter, Kabila. The two men cut a deal: in exchange for being given command over the 2,000 Zairian Tutsi soldiers, Kabila agreed to conduct a broadly based revolution aimed at toppling Mobutu from power...