Word: mobutu
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...Italian city of Turin rather than Swiss front-runner Sion. So they?re bargaining with their only chip ?- the secrecy of their banks. In the last few years, the world?s most discreet bankers have blown the whistle on former prime minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire. The Swiss are only too glad to add Milosevic to that distinguished list ?- but considering their credibility these days, it would help if they actually found some of the money...
Almost immediately his allies turned against him. The first was Major General Paul Kagame, Rwanda's Vice President and Minister of Defense. It was Kagame, with Uganda's and Burundi's support, who had chosen Kabila to replace Mobutu. In exchange, Kagame made one demand: he wanted Rwandan officers to retrain the Congolese army, as a way to help stop cross-border attacks by Congo-based Hutu warriors on Rwanda's Tutsi population...
...Kabila's rule rotted, Kagame lost patience. Kabila, who belongs to the Luba tribe, had begun to look like another Mobutu: paranoid and willing to use ethnic violence to maintain his rule. The idea terrified the Rwandans, who encouraged a faction of the Congolese army to oust Kabila. In response, Kabila recruited thousands of Rwandan Hutu fighters. By last September, the country was in an all-out civil war. Says a U.S. official: "The threat of more genocide is what is behind this...
...gold last year than any other nation in the region--trade he swears was legitimate. Congo's civil war has destroyed what was once a promising personal alliance between Kabila and Museveni, men who seemed to embody a new kind of progressive African leadership. "Museveni is a nigger like Mobutu," Kabila says of his onetime ally. "He's an exploiter." Says Museveni: "Kabila was always weak, but I didn't know he would also be so treacherous...
...that jockeying for political and economic advantage that has splintered the central-African alliance. Oil-rich Angola, under the leadership of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, has supported Kabila since they began fighting together to unseat Mobutu at the end of 1996. Namibia, in support of Angola, has sent a small force to support Kabila. Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe, has sent 10,000 soldiers to Kabila's assistance. In return, Kabila has promised Zimbabwe a slice of Congo's economic pie: lucrative contracts with Congo's mining conglomerate and the protection of investments by Mugabe cronies...