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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780367318987 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2019 |
| Pages: | 406 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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Chapter One
Sell the Silver
Steal the Gold
Mobutu and Zaire
A stone pedestal at the junction of a private driveway leading to the Villa del Mar commemorates Sir Winston Churchill as a citoyen d'honneur (honorary citizen) of Cap Martin. Off Avenue Churchill a shaded cul-de-sac leads to what was still on the day I visited, in May 1997, the French Riviera residence of Mobutu Sese Seko, which to my eyes seemed a monument of a different sort. Iron gates, and a sign warning unwanted visitors that guard dogs might be snarling on the other side of the wall, hid the villa, estimated to be worth $4.3 million. The Villa del Mar is the largest of a cluster of luxury homes dominating a small hill leading down to the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap Martin. A nearby real estate agent ran through the prices of mansions and villas in the surrounding streets, while in a shop opposite the couple that ran a newspaper shop and grocery store talked of how Mobutu's children used to come buy sweets and toys with large-denomination notes. A copy of the International Herald Tribune lay on the counter, with an account of the advance by rebel forces across the savannah and forest of the collapsing Zairian state dominating the front page. A world lying thousands of miles away, the inhabitants of which, every summer until only a few years beforehand, had arrived in a convoy of sleek cars in these streets, was reduced from being the geopolitical drama of the dynamic days of the 1960s, to a black-and-whitesouvenir photograph of a time that was rapidly passing into history. The closed shutters of the magnificent villa overlooking the sea would soon have a new owner, perhaps proud of, though possibly disturbed by, the cachet that for some the previous ownership by an eccentric African leader might add.
Villa del Mar was one of twenty villas, mansions, and ranches amassed by Mobutu in Belgium, Côte d'Ivoire, Switzerland, Morocco, and elsewhere, whose combined value by the time of his downfall amounted to around $37 million. In addition to the numerous homes, Mobutu owned a hotel and a coffee plantation in Brazil. The largest concentration of properties was in the wealthy suburbs of Brussels, the Belgian capital, where he owned a total of nine buildings ranging from office blocks to châteaux, mansions, and parklands in the residential districts of Uccle and Rhode St. Genèse. In Paris, a few meters from the Arc de Triomphe, was a vast first-floor apartment at 20 Avenue Foch, while an alternative holiday home to the Villa del Mar was the $2.3 million, 12-bedroom Casa Agricola Solear estate at Areias de Porches, in the Portuguese Algarve, where Mobutu stored his 14,000-bottle wine cellar. Across the border in Spain were hotels in Marbella and a luxury home in the Madrid suburb of Las Lomas at Boadilla del Monte, valued at $1.38 million when it was bought in 1983 in the name of his sister-in-law.
I watched from Europe as a country whose length and breadth I had traveled, collapsed. As it fell apart, and the name Zaire came to be expunged from the map of the world, the resurgence of interest in Mobutu's fortune, the tales of vulgar excess and tasteless grandeur, which emerged as his demise approached, reduced the truly horrifying impact of his three decades in power to a level of banality with which his former allies among the democracies of the West could feel comfortable. Few fingers have been pointed meaningfully and seriously at Mobutu's allies, even at the grotesque waste of foreign financial assistance or at the scale of theft, which would have been impossible without the complicity of Western bankers, business people, politicians, and security services.
I was able to complete the search for much of his visible fortune in three days as the clouds were gathering over his rule. From the suburbs of Brussels, I wandered the boulevards of Paris, then took a quick flight down to Nice and a drive along the coast road to the mansion at Roquebrune. A further swing through Madrid and a few hours on to the Algarve would have encompassed much of the real estate empire. Further afield, Morocco, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and Brazil would have taken a little longer. But most of it was there for the viewing, with nothing hidden. The entire world knew something of what Mobutu had, and long after questions started to be asked as to how he obtained it, the allies of the Zairian leader were still being fêted at his country homes.
His bank accounts, meanwhile, have remained largely hidden from view. Prior to his fall, the only attempt by Western governments to identify these accounts was made in 1992, when the United States, France, and Belgium examined holdings in their own countries. France and the United States abandoned plans to freeze his assets, on the grounds that they amounted to very little, while Belgium claimed it would have lacked sufficient legal instruments if it had pursued the seizure of his personal liquid financial assets, which were reckoned by U.S. officials to have peaked at around $4 billion. In a 1982 International Monetary Fund report, the banks identified as having dealt with Mobutu and his financial front men included Banque Bruxelles Lambert, Paribas, Crédit Commerciale, Midland Bank, and Union Bank of Switzerland. In April 1997, Switzerland's Federal Banking Commission asked twelve leading Swiss banks whether they held accounts in Mobutu's name, to which they all replied that they did not.
The refusal of the Swiss banking system to accept that its share of the responsibility for the predicament of many African economies is as shameful as its role in the laundering of funds stolen by Nazi Germany from the Jews of Europe. It is a chapter in Africa's history that has yet to be opened, despite some efforts made as a result of enormous pressure in recent years. With the Cold War over, Switzerland is one of the isolated pieces in Africa's jigsaw of tyranny remaining to be turned fully face up. But its role was only a part of that jigsaw, as years of active support for Mobutu led Western governments and business people on an endless dance, which for twenty of his thirty years in power was marked by the silencing of critics, the sidelining of doubters, and the ridiculing of dissenting voices—often as much in the West as in Zaire itself, as Western governments sought to flatter the man who exercised power in Central Africa.
Picking the Plums
For much of its history, Zaire was as much symbol as reality. Even before the invention of Zaire, during the short life of the independent Congo, and even prior to the rushed Belgian departure, the country typified, symbolized, and conjured up images of Africa to the outside world, in a manner which has done much to form the continent's reputation beyond its shores. Central to the image in the formative years of the 1960s and 1970s was Mobutu, army chief of staff of the Congo at independence in 1960. Mobutu's emergence as a key political figure in the newly independent Congo in 1960, as well as the role he played during the turbulence of the 1960-1965 period, was the result of a plethora of factors at whose heart lay a combination of diplomatic failures, political blunders, greed, egomania, and ignorance, from which all of Central Africa has suffered ever since. Although there is little point in debating what might have happened had Mobutu never existed, the fact of the external support that assured his survival, rise, and domination necessarily raises the question of whether the experience gleaned from supporting such a character has been adequately understood.
"The U.S. stepped in at independence because the place was a plum financially," said John Stockwell, former CIA chief of base in Lubumbashi in 1967, and later chief of the CIA Angola task force, which equipped, advised, and paid Jonas Savimbi's forces in Angola. Stockwell's claim tells only half the story, however. Within a week of Congolese independence, on 30 June 1960, the army had mutinied, and the new government of President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was completely unable to restore calm. Madeleine Kalb gives a clear picture of the way the situation looked in her remarkable study of U.S. policy during the period, The Congo Cables:
[U.S. ambassador Clare] Timberlake believed that anarchy in the Congo would have repercussions far beyond the immediate crisis: it would play directly into the hands of the Soviets by providing an opportunity for radical forces to take over and undermine Western interests in this rich and strategic part of Africa. At the same time he realized that the only action capable of preventing anarchy—intervention by Belgian troops—would also play into Soviet hands: it would antagonize the new Congolese government and give the Soviets an excellent opportunity to stress their anti-imperialist solidarity with the new African states.
The United States sought to engineer an intervention by Belgian troops under the banner of the United Nations, as a means of deflecting the accusation that Belgian action was reminiscent of the colonial practices that had come to an end a week earlier, after seventy-five years of Belgian rule. The chaos that reigned in the immediate aftermath of Congolese independence can barely be said to have had a political direction. All sides were caught in a maze of emotion, anger, resentment, and suspicion. The variety of political programs that existed within the fragile Kasavubu government made it largely powerless. It represented a variety of aspirations, rather than a defined program with the political and administrative tools to implement it. The response of the European states was influenced by a mixture of fear for the security of their own nationals and concern for the protection of their vested interests. It was small wonder that this self-interest further enflamed the already intense suspicion of the Europeans among many—though certainly not all—of those around Kasavubu and Lumumba.
The role of foreigners in the immediate post-independence history of Congo was pivotal, and it was as significant in determining the direction the country took in the 1960-1965 period as the actions of Congolese politicians themselves. The continued Belgian military presence in Congo after independence, with attendant demands by Kasavubu and Lumumba that they leave, was a vital factor. The government not only appeared to have little control over its own army, but also could not even force the departure of the foot soldiers of the former colonial power. Its credibility in tatters, the Lumumba government severed diplomatic ties with Belgium, and appealed to the Soviet Union to consider intervening. Such an appeal inevitably played into Belgian hands, lightening the task of the Congolese government's critics in Belgium, who were attempting to portray it as pro-Soviet. Both the USSR and the United States, meanwhile, were keen to play the Congo crisis out on the floor of the United Nations and then among the ranks of the UN force, which began arriving in Congo on 15 July 1960.
With the arrival of the UN force, the complexity of the crisis worsened. Lumumba, the outspoken prime minister, was deemed procommunist at every turn. For Lumumba, the major impediment to the assertion of political independence was the continued presence of representatives of Belgian authority, namely Belgian troops. On 17 July, the UN received an ultimatum from Kasavubu and Lumumba, stating that unless Belgian troops left the country, the government would formally ask the Soviet Union to intervene. The move alienated Lumumba—who was being seen as the power behind Kasavubu's throne—from those within the UN who sought to play a middle role between the superpowers and the former colonizers. As Kalb puts it, it also "increased the pressure on Premier Khrushchev and probably forced him to become more deeply involved in defending Lumumba's interests than he had originally intended." Kalb also asserts that the ultimatum drove a wedge between the United States and Lumumba. Within two days the United States was considering ways of overthrowing Lumumba:
Only prudent, therefore, we plan on basis that Lumumba government threatens our vital interests in Congo and Africa generally. A principal objective of our political and diplomatic action must therefore be to destroy Lumumba government as now constituted, but at the same time we must find or develop another horse to back which would be acceptable in rest of Africa and defensible against Soviet political attack.
Essential to any understanding of what kind of a threat Lumumba really represented is an understanding of the real intentions of the Soviet Union, which were far less threatening than the CIA in particular was determined to portray them as being. Kalb's account of the variety of reactions by U.S. policymakers reveals the extent to which reactions to Lumumba and the reality of Congo on its own terms was seen entirely through the prism of superpower rivalry. Lumumba's emergence on the political scene was increasingly viewed as the result of deliberate manipulation by the Soviet Union of the chaos in the Congo. To attribute such success to Moscow's strategists in itself betrayed the extent to which the United States had failed correctly to read the influence and capacity of its superpower enemy.
Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, in their authoritative history of Mobutu's first three decades in power, have also spoken of "the limited understanding on the part of both Soviets and Americans of the determinants of [Congolese] internal politics." Defenders of U.S. support for Mobutu in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration sought to reignite the Cold War and called in the credit it felt was its due from allies like Mobutu, drew upon some of the most spurious and groundless arguments to justify this renewed involvement. In a 1984 verbal exchange between William Colby, CIA director in the mid-1970s, and John Stockwell, Colby asserted:
The question we faced in the Congo was whether that count, which had just gained independence from Belgium, would be run by some toadies of the old Belgian mining companies or by men aided by Che Guevara and supported by the Soviet Union. The CIA found a midpoint between those extremes—it helped Joseph Mobutu, then a nationalist member of the Congolese forces, become the third alternative.
Colby's argument is neat but disingenuous. Rarely if ever during the 1960-1965 period did the United States equate the threat of the continued domination of the Congo by Belgian business interests (which had led to Belgium supporting the secession of Katanga in 1960) with the threat to U.S. global influence posed by the Soviet Union. His analysis also presupposes that the United States had good reason to take a principled stand against these two alternatives, and then sought the third way by supporting Mobutu. Again, this is disingenuous. True, it is still debated whether the CIA actually offered assistance to the Belgian-backed secessionists in Katanga in 1960, even though no one disputes that Ambassador Timberlake paid an official visit to the breakaway province on at least one occasion. Whatever the true U.S. position regarding Katanga and the Belgians, however, what remained of much greater importance was the gulf between the reality of Lumumba and the impression he gave. As the American academic and expert on the former Zaire Michael Schatzberg makes clear, Lumumba did not in reality represent the threat the United States portrayed him as being:
With the clarity of hindsight ..., Lumumba was probably no more than a populist and nationalist politician, albeit with increasingly radical tendencies. It is doubtful that Soviet ideology or academic Marxism influenced him.... We should also remember that Lumumba appealed to the West for assistance in terminating the Katanga secession and in removing Belgian troops from his country before requesting Soviet aid. Indeed, Lumumba's travels in search of assistance took him to the United States, but never to the Soviet Union.... But these initiatives did not, and perhaps could not, alter official Washington's strong prevailing perception of Lumumba as a tool of Soviet interests. If Lumumba was, in fact, sending signals to Washington, they were drowned out by international static.
For Lumumba, the pressing need was to assert independence and turn a real corner away from colonial rule, in the face of apparently insurmountable domestic political problems that were not of his making but the result of the mixture of internal aspirations and external pressures imposing themselves on the "plum" of his vast country. Kalb, in her account of how U.S. policymakers were reading the crisis, is largely blind to Mobutu's personal ambitions, and treats him as Colby depicts him. The CIA's backing of the Katanga secession and the ambiguity of the U.S. position when responding to Lumumba's calls for the West to help his fragile government reassert control over the country were key elements in forcing him to turn to Moscow. But Moscow did not step in, except by initially backing the UN and ultimately finding itself isolated from most African states at the UN Security Council. The presence of Soviet advisers in Kinshasa, providing their advice to Lumumba as the United States and other Western powers dithered over how to react to the crisis in 1960, is simply insufficient evidence of a Soviet intention to launch a military operation to reclaim Katanga, bolster Lumumba, and create another Fidel Castro in the heart of Africa.
Although it took fifteen years, as well as the revelations of John Stockwell and others, to be exposed, the real force behind U.S. policy was not the balancing of political options claimed by former CIA director William Colby. Instead, it was the covert activities of the CIA itself, which followed its own agenda, dominated by the intrigues, naïveté, and conspiratorial mentality of the shadowy world of spies and agents. At the moment of independence for a country like Congo, the potential for U.S. policymakers in the Republican administration of President Eisenhower to possess a genuine understanding of what the country was going through was admittedly slim. Hardly surprising then that U.S. policy reflected instead the simple perspective of the CIA. Simplification appeared a particular skill of the CIA, as revealed when Lawrence Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congolese capital Leopoldville (later renamed Kinshasa) cabled headquarters on 18 August 1960: "Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic Communist takeover Government.... Whether or not Lumumba actually Commie or just playing Commie game to assist his solidifying power, anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and there may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba."
Scaremongers such as Devlin, who later profited from his relations with Mobutu by becoming a businessman through his connections to the future Zaire's diamond industry, did not appear to feel it was necessary to ascertain unequivocally whether Lumumba was a "Commie" or not, and it was in this atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice that U.S. policy took shape.
By addressing what it regarded as the need for a solution to the Congo's domestic crisis with a strategy—the Eisenhower-approved assassination of Lumumba—in fact intended purely to confront alleged Soviet expansionism, the United States assisted in creating the conditions which were to prevail in the country for the next thirty years. In 1960, however, it was not the case that instability in the Congo provided an atmosphere necessarily conducive to Soviet expansionism, even if the USSR had intended it. Lumumba sought assistance from all sides, and received little, as Stephen Weissman says:
Lumumba's appeal for Soviet military aid to counter a much larger Western intervention in Katanga may have been unrealistic given the U.S.'s violent reaction; but it was not the result of Soviet-exploited "personal instability" since it arose from his group's basic political formula of militant nationalism. Nor were his actions guided by "pro-Soviet" advisers as the Americans charged. For example, two of his most trusted counselors, Press Secretary Michel and Ghanaian ambassador Din, opposed Lumumba's decision to accept Soviet aid. The Prime Minister's most influential colleagues were other [Congolese] nationalists. Even after the arrival of Soviet military equipment and technicians Lumumba manifested his independence by inviting Western technical assistance, recalling Belgian judges and teachers, and meeting with African diplomats who hoped to achieve a compromise between the impatient Prime Minister and the cautious UN Secretariat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN by Mark Huband. Copyright © 2001 by Westview Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.