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Between 1997 and 1999, official Ugandan exports of diamonds grew tenfold, from $198,000 to $1.8 million. Rwanda’s official exports leaped from $16,000 to $1.7 million between 1998 and 2000, even though neither country has diamonds of its own.
They knew that AK-47s had enough power to go through a brick wall and still kill: “You really need two brick walls to protect yourself.”23
After battles, the Rwandans would always make sure to gather their dead and bury them, whereas the Ugandans often left their soldiers on the streets, leaving the impression that hundreds of Ugandans had died and almost no Rwandans.
On the wall there was a faded picture of Jesus in a wooden frame with a saying in Swahili: “A drunken wife arouses anger. Her shame cannot be hidden.”
Just after the Rwandan attack on Kinshasa in August 1998, 88 percent of people polled in Kinshasa said they had a favorable impression of their president, a leap of 50 percent from a year before.
In Kinshasa, families of soldiers on the front line were routinely evicted from their houses so new recruits could be lured by offers of free lodging.
The notion that the war was fueled by international mining capital eager to get its hands on the Congo’s wealth does not hold water; the war slowed down privatization of the sector by a decade, as insecurity and administrative chaos prevented large corporations from investing.
Rautenbach, like other clever businessmen, preempted much of his profits going to Harare through some accounting technicalities. He would sell the ore to one of his offshore holding companies at production price, reducing any profits that could have been taxed by the Congolese state or shared with his Zimbabwean backers to almost zero.
In the Senga Senga diamond mine, the Zimbabwean-appointed managers tried to run the elaborate mining equipment on diesel, which they imported over thousands of kilometers, instead of investing in repairing the nearby hydroelectric plant.
“Everything changed in 2000, when the coltan price soared,” Pierre Olivier remembered. It was a fluke. That year, the information technology bubble coincided with heightened demand for cell phones and the Christmas release of a Sony PlayStation console. Demand for tantalum, the processed form of coltan, had been rising steadily for years, but now the markets got caught up in a buying frenzy.
As most Congolese do not have domestic bank accounts, their investments went overseas or were put into local real estate, fueling a construction boom.
According to a World Bank study, if you paid all of your taxes in the Congo—a full thirty-two different payments—you would be dishing out 230 percent of your profits.53 In other words, you can only survive by cutting corners.
Joseph was young, shy, and practically unknown on the political scene, but this could be a good thing. “The logic was: The weaker the person we chose, the less he was likely to be contested, as they thought they could influence him,” one of the people who attended the meeting told me.3
Within a year of his nomination, Joseph would rid himself of almost everybody who had put him in power. He also launched a peace process, setting the gears in motion to bring an end to the war and paving the way for elections.
Most agree that Joseph is the son of Laurent Kabila. The deep attachment between the two attests to this: Mzee doted on Joseph while in office and elevated him from a simple soldier to the commander of his army.
second, plausible version is provided by members of Joseph Kabila’s entourage. They say that Joseph’s mother was a Rwandan Tutsi called Marcelline Mukambuguje, who was one of the many Rwandans who joined Kabila in his maquis in the hope of using Zaire as a rear base to overthrow the Hutu-dominated dictatorship in Rwanda.
In Dar es Salaam, Joseph and Janet enrolled in the French school under fake names, pretending to be from a western Tanzanian tribe in order to escape the attention of Zairian intelligence agents active there—Laurent Kabila’s deputy was scooped up by such spies and taken to Kinshasa, after which he wasn’t heard from again.
Connections are everything. Il a un bon carnet d’adresses—“He has a good address book”—is high praise from entrepreneurs in the capital.
In the case of the Rwandan refugee crisis, for example, it would have been best to send in an international military force to demilitarize the refugee camps and separate the soldiers from the civilians. That would have required hundreds of millions of dollars, and a risky intervention soon after the UN fiasco in Somalia.
