Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
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The old Congo Free State blue flag with the yellow star was brought back and preparations were made for the march on Kinshasa. Troops started to move on the Kamina-Kananga axis to join up with columns coming down from Mbuji-Mayi and with new Angolan reinforcements coming up through Tshikapa.142 By now even the “official” U.S. forces were a bit worried about what was happening. On February 13 a joint meeting of the U.S. State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, the Deputy Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council had taken place in Washington to decide on a more coherent strategy. There were more meetings on March 24 and 29 and April 2 with NSC African Affairs Director Charlie Snyder, National Intelligence Agency African Affairs Director William Foltz, Security Adviser Shawn MacCormack, DIA member William Thom, and Ambassador Simpson. There was a lurking fear that things had gotten out of hand and that the war could globalize from the Central African Republic to Zambia and from Angola to the Sudan.143 The consensus was that somehow Kabila was getting out of control and that he should be brought back into line. His declaration that any foreign forces on Congolese soil would be considered “enemy” did not sound nice, with U.S. forces poised in Brazzaville for an eventual evacuation. Ambassador Simpson hurried back to Kinshasa to try to convince the Mobutist generals to avoid a disastrous last stand. The United States feared a bloodbath that would have been immediately used by the French as proof of Washington’s evil intentions. In a secret memo to the French government retired general Jeannou Lacaze had darkly warned, “A great battle is about to happen [in Kinshasa] because as the FAZ are retreating they get more compact and able to resist… . Contrary to what has happened in Kisangani or Lubumbashi they will not hesitate to oppose a strong resistance to the rebel forces.”144 This was a nightmare scenario for Washington, and President Clinton sent his UN ambassador, Bill Richardson, to Kinshasa, where he met President Mobutu on April 28. The game plan was to try to convince the old dictator to step down without too much of a fuss. Mobutu was sick and cranky and asked for guarantees for himself, his friends, his family, and his money. Richardson made all kinds of vague promises and then flew down to Lubumbashi to meet Kabila. He managed to get him to agree to a meeting with Mobutu. Nelson Mandela was also active behind the scenes, trying to find a neutral place for the fateful conference. After discarding Brazzaville (the Alliance refused because Lissouba was considered to be a UNITA crony and therefore distrusted by Luanda), Libreville (same refusal, because Bongo was seen as too pro-French), Lome (same thing), and Lusaka (this time it was Mobutu who felt he might not come out of it alive), the South African president found a creative solution: he would go himself to Pointe Noire and guarantee Mobutu’s physical security for a conference aboard the South African navy ship Outeniqua. The conference finally took place on May 3–4, but without any result; during the conference the Alliance announced that its forces had taken Kikwit, practically without fighting. Mobutu, sicker than before, simply went back to Kinshasa.
But there was still one battle to be fought before everything would be over: Jonas Savimbi realized that Zaire was lost and that he had to intervene one last time. In an interview published in 1999 he said this:
In Zaire we had hospitals, equipment and personnel. We had to get everything out. So we fought Kabila at Kenge, 70 km from Kinshasa. We stopped his progress for about a week, enough to remove everything. Then we left. There was nothing else to do anyway. Mobutu was sick and tired and power was slipping out of his hands. His army had no more will to fight… . I picked up the phone and I called Madeleine Albright, who was so keen on us leaving the way open for Kabila so that he could overthrow Mobutu. I told her: “Mrs Secretary of State, we are just taking care of our business. We stopped Kabila at Kenge but we will not prevent him from taking power.” She was quite happy.145
After the battle of Kenge it was just a matter of days before everything would be over. Mobutu went to Libreville on May 8 for one last nostalgic meeting with the Françafrique old guard: Bongo, Patassé, Lissouba, and Equatorial Guinea President Obiang Nguema. They had no miracle solution, but they advised on one last trick: a third man. According to this plan Mobutu could try to recall the old CNS hero Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo. On May 11 the HCR/PT offered him the position of prime minister. The poor man was in Brussels and had not even been consulted. He gave a dilatory answer, and that was the end of it. On May 16 Mobutu fled Kinshasa; his top officers did the same. Baramoto and his friend the “Grand Admiral” Mavua Mudima (who never had a fleet to command but was a keen businessman) flew to South Africa in Baramoto’s private jet. General Nzimbi, who a few days earlier had vowed to die fighting, simply took a small canoe across the river to Brazzaville. Many others tossed away their uniforms and tried to melt into the civilian crowds. The next day the victorious Alliance troops entered the capital without a fight. The last victim of the war was General Mahele, who had conducted his own parallel negotiations with the rebels, thus earning himself the enmity of the last Mobutists. He was shot at Camp Tshatshi by Mobutu’s son Kongolo who then fled to Brazzaville.
The mining contracts: myths and realities.
“With the full backing of the Clinton administration . . . AMF and its partners stood ready to expand their plans… . But something would first have to be done about Zaire’s pro-French leader, Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu continued to favour French, Belgian and South African companies over those from the United States and Canada. A safe platform was needed from which an attack could be launched on Mobutu and his French and Belgian mining benefactors. That platform would be one of the poorest and most densely-populated tinderboxes in Africa: Rwanda.”146
This extreme form of neo-Leninist conspiracy theory, although not shared by most analysts who wrote about the fall of the Mobutu regime, was nevertheless often used as a kind of prudent noncommittal background by journalists. But when American Mineral Fields International (AMFI) signed what was described as a “one billion dollar contract” with Laurent-Désiré Kabila on April 16, 1997, many were a bit shaken. Because all close observers who had been to the field during the war knew about the poorly hidden U.S. cloak-and-dagger involvement and because Washington kept obstinately denying it, that big contract suddenly started to look like the proverbial smoking gun.
And yet, in spite of the obvious U.S. interest in seeing Mobutu go, every single one of the premises on which this interpretation rested was false.
Let us first deal with some of the general assumptions underpinning this line of reasoning, Madsen’s being only an explicit version of what others only hinted at. “Zaire’s pro-French leader, Marshal Mobutu”: here is a judgment with at least one fragment of truth in it. By 1991 or 1992 at the latest Mobutu knew that his time with Washington was up; because he was clever and well aware of the pathological anti-American feelings of a large majority of the French,147 he played that card for all it was worth. I remember the head of the Africa Elysée cell at the time, Bruno Delaye, fuming (and this while the Rwandese genocide was not yet completely over), “It is out of the question to let the Anglophones decide the destiny of French-speaking countries in Africa.” The same gentleman told me a bit later, “Mobutu has to be put back firmly in the saddle so that he will be part and parcel of any future solution.” But did this mean that French mining interests in Zaire benefited as a result of that circumstantial diplomacy? Not so, simply because there were hardly any such interests.148 Two years later, when the war started, the only French mining investment in Zaire was not even purely French, it was a share of the Belgian Union Minière, which exploited copper and cobalt in Shaba-Katanga. The one other French investment in the country, the Société Minière du Kivu (SOMINKI), which had belonged to the Empain-Schneider group, had been sold in early 1996 to a Cluff Mining–Banro consortium.149 So if it is correct to say that Mobutu, more by force than by choice, had to side with Paris against Washington, this did not at all mean that such an alliance brought economic benefits to the French.150
Second wrong assumption
: Mobutu was anti-U.S. (and anti-Canadian). This does not make any sense either. Mobutu had been put in power and kept there with U.S. help. He was quite desperate at having lost that trump card with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and if Washington’s support could have been bought back simply by dishing out a few mining contracts, he would have been only too glad to oblige. But contrary to many conspiracy theorists’ allegations, the Americans were not very interested in Zairian mining riches. When Canadian companies came in, they were welcomed. And when one big U.S. company (Barrick Gold) finally showed up in mid-1996 it had no problem buying out the Kilomoto complex from Cluff-Banro.
There was no French dominance and no reluctance on Mobutu’s part to see the Americans come in. In fact, neither the French nor the Americans had large mining interests in Zaire. Mining interests in Zaire were extremely diversified, and if any countries had more weight than others it was still the two old actors from the colonial days, South Africa and Belgium.151
Finally, a third bit of debunking: if Rwanda was indeed “poor, denselypopulated and a tinderbox,” it was in no shape or form a “platform” for the Americans. Regardless of the opinion one has of President Kagame’s leadership it is absolutely necessary to recognize that he is nobody’s puppet, that his decisions are not dictated by any foreign power. This is always the problem of conspiracy theories applied to Africa: they purport to denounce the evil visited upon Africans by ill-meaning foreigners and they end up with Africans looking like perfect dolts, manipulated here, pushed there, used for this, deceived into that. In thirty-seven years of studying Africa I have seen more whites manipulated by blacks than the other way around. But lingering postcolonial racism makes it hard for the victims to admit to themselves that they have been taken for a ride; the implicit notion that all things being equal the white fellow is smarter than the black one is still the unspoken assumption of a large number of white diplomats, international civil servants, and businesspeople. Conspiracy theorists do not represent an exception: their evil whites are more cleverly evil than their evil blacks, an assumption I seriously doubt. General Kagame was no more a puppet of the Americans than President Mobutu was a puppet of the French. As to his reasons for invading Zaire, we have already seen several that were quite local, and those others I discuss later on have had little to do with Washington’s game plan, which in Kigali has always been considered more of a resource to be tapped than an obligation to be obeyed.
Zaire might have been a “geological scandal,” but it was not the center of the mining world. Actually, as with most other things in the country, its share of the mining world market has kept going down, more sharply so since the beginning of the 1990s. By the late 1990s it represented only 0.7 percent of the value of minerals produced in the world.152
A brief synopsis of the Zairian mining world and of how it was affected by the 1996–1997 war would go roughly like this. The old mining dinosaurs (Union Minière, Gècamine) were still surviving in Shaba by digging up some copper and scrounging the cobalt left over in the old copper tailings. Between 1988 and 1996 copper production fell from 506,000 tons to 38,000 and cobalt from 10,140 tons to 5,300. The technical condition of the production apparatus was a disaster. In Mbuji-Mayi MIBA was the biggest diamond producer in the country, but not by much: it produced between six and nine million carats (valued at between $55 million and $90 million, depending on market price fluctuations) out of a total of fifteen to seventeen million carats. The various diamond purchasing comptoirs, some of them run by major companies like De Beers and others by individuals, were making an estimated $300 million to $400 million a year, and contraband diamonds directly sold by diggers on the black market represented approximately another $100 million. Which meant that MIBA, with all its paraphernalia of taxes, predation by the government, and theft by employees was simply the biggest comptoir but not the biggest commercial system on the market.153 In addition, SOMINKI was surviving in Kivu with a much reduced production of gold (10 to 20 kilograms a month), Australia’s Anvil Mining operated a small zinc mine near Lubumbashi, and China’s State Mining Company had signed an agreement with Kinshasa to exploit two copper and cobalt mines at Ruashi and Etoile but had not yet put them into production. In that troubled and sick landscape there were very few new investment plans taking shape as the 1990s drew to a close.154 Apart from the already mentioned purchase of the Kilomoto branch of SOMINKI by Barrick Gold in August 1996 there were only two significant investment projects in the mid-1990s. The first one was the Fungurume cobalt mining project in Shaba, which was developed as a joint venture (Tenke Mining) between Gécamines and a mining newcomer, the Swede Adolf Lundin. Over $1 billion in planned investments was announced but not actually disbursed. The other one was for two projected joint ventures between U.S.-based AMFI and South Africa’s Anglo-American, one for a zinc minecum-smelter at Kipushi and the other for mining cobalt in Kolwezi. AMFI and Anglo-American quarreled, broke up their joint venture project, and dropped everything in October 1996.155 But it was the same Kolwezi project that eventually resurfaced in April 1997 as the miracle “one billion dollar contract” with Kabila, this time as a purely AMFI deal. And it was on that old-new contract that the whole U.S. mining conspiracy theory was built, largely because AMFI’s director, Jean-Raymond Boulle, based his company in Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s hometown.
But who was Jean-Raymond Boulle, and what was his company? Boulle was born in 1950 in Mauritius. He is a French-speaking British citizen and a tax resident of Monaco. In the early 1970s he worked for De Beers as a diamond purchaser, first in Sierra Leone and then in Zaire. He did well, and by the late 1970s he was working directly for CSO in London, at the top of the organizational chart. But he did not like being a small man in a big pond and he resigned in 1981, preferring to work as a freelance diamond buyer in his familiar African hunting grounds. By 1989 he had enough confidence to launch his own company in partnership with Robert Friedland, a Chicago-born former hippy who had spent a good many years traveling between Indian ashrams and Oregon new-age farms. Together they created Diamond Field Resources, which set up shop in Hope, Arkansas, because the two business associates wanted to mine the Crater of Diamonds deposit in an Arkansas state park. It was in the process of setting up that operation (which met with fairly stiff opposition from conservationists) that Boulle first met Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas. Crater of Diamonds proved to be a somewhat disappointing project, but in 1994 Boulle had an unexpected stroke of luck: while exploring for diamonds in Newfoundland he discovered what was then the world’s largest deposit of zinc at Voisey’s Bay. He drove a hard bargain and got Falconbridge and Inco, the two largest Canadian mining concerns, in a bidding battle for the deposit. It was sold for $4.3 billion, but then Boulle had to contest several lawsuits (with the Inuit natives, with some of his financial backers, with his partner Friedland) before managing to get his share. When he finally did, he had over $1 billion net cash in his pocket. With this money he created a new company, American Mineral Fields International, in partnership with his brothers Franco and Bertrand, whom he sent as agents to Russia and Guinea, respectively. As chief executive of his own company he could now go back to Africa. His May 1996 announcement of the Kipushi-Kolwezi joint ventures agreement with the giant Anglo-American must have felt like a triumph for the former AAC employee.156 Breaking it must have felt even better, and signing the April 16 contract with Kabila was the crowning achievement of his career so far.
So adherents of the U.S.-mining-conspiracy-behind-the-fall-of-Mobutu theory would have us believe that a French-speaking Mauritian British passport holder, freelance diamond prospector, and chance billionaire who never operated in the United States before the mid-1980s was the man chosen by dark and powerful American interests to take over Zaire through a war of conquest sponsored by the president of the United States himself because he happened to be from Arkansas where Boulle had once had some (minor) mining projects. This does not make sense. It makes even less sense if one tots up a few
additional facts: (a) Boulle eventually moved out of the Arkansas backwaters and set up shop in London; (b) his “miracle $1 billion contract” was attacked in an international court of law after the war by none other than his old employer Anglo-American, who argued, through Gecamines, that the contract was in breach of some of their own previous contracts signed with Mobutu for the same area; and (c) after almost two years of litigation Boulle resold his rights to AAC in an out-of-court settlement, making a very large amount of money and getting a 20 percent share of the future company, which will certainly one day mine the cobalt at Kolwezi. It was obvious from the start that Boulle was playing a well-known game for smaller independent mining companies: Go find a big deal (which you do not have enough money to bring into production), make a lot of publicity, hold on to it for a while, then sell to one of the majors, who will have either the money to exploit it or else enough financial strategic depth to be able to wait for ten or twenty years until the conditions are ripe. As for the U.S. “conspiracy,” it was nowhere in sight during this game between an international independent and his former South African bosses.