The UFERI mayor of Kolwozi, P. Anschaire Moji A Kapasu, told me that the
authorities had done "everything possible" to stop the violence. I asked if
anyone had been arrested and prosecuted. He looked at me with a blank
expression, as if the idea had never occurred to him. "It's difficult in the
mass of people to know who struck who," he said. "You would have to arrest the
whole population. C'est difficile."
On the edge of downtown Kolwozi, past the teeming train station, lies the
Gecamines mining installation, a vast, rocky landscape of open pits and coppery
waste dumps. In better days this facility produced up to 80 percent of Zaire's
copper and cobalt. Belgians built the mines early in the century, and Belgian
spies, financiers, and mercenaries known as les Affreux—"the Dreadful
Ones"—backed Moise Tshombe's ill-fated secession movement in 1960, hoping to
maintain de facto Belgian control over the lucrative mining industry. Mobutu
nationalized the mines in 1967. At its high point, in the mid-1980s, Gecamines
produced 480,000 tons of copper a year with 35,000 employees, earned three
quarters of Zaire's foreign exchange, and educated 100,000 children in company
run schools.
Today Gecamines is eerily subdued. A half dozen tense young JUFERI members in
jeans and sport shirts guard the entrance against Kasaians. In the two weeks
before my visit roughly 7,000 Kasaian workers—half the work force and most of
the skilled employees—had been chased from their jobs at these mines. In all,
40,000 to 50,000 Kasaians in Kolwezi have been rendered homeless. The mines
still function, I was told, but expatriate company officials doubt that this
will last. The production of copper had already declined to 150,000 tons or
less in the previous year, because of rampant corruption and mismanagement. A
mine collapsed a few years ago owing to negligence. Most of the skilled
expatriates fled after the 1991 pillage. The company is bankrupt.
A week before my visit ten trucks lined up along the wall surrounding the
plant. Three hundred thieves pushed a hundred tons of copper up to the wall and
loaded it into the trucks, and off they drove to the Zambian border and down to
South Africa. There is an ongoing traffic in stolen copper, cobalt, electrical
wires and pylons, tires, water pumps, and gasoline. Gecamines is being looted
down to the ground. Soldiers, the police, workers, company guards, expatriate
Greeks, Lebanese, and South Africans—all are collaborating to ransack Zaire's
biggest economic asset.
According to company officials, legal authorities, diplomats, and townspeople
alike, at the center of the racket is Governor Kyungu. He is said to be getting
a $10,000 kickback for each export license granted to truck goods across the
border. It is an old story in Zaire. "Who's using who?" a clergyman asked. "Is
Mobutu using Kyungu, or is Kyungu using Mobutu? We ask ourselves this question.
If you compare Kyungu when he was in opposition, he was a poor man. Now he is
very rich."
The corruption in Zaire is legendary. The "kleptocracy" has its roots in the
nineteenth century Congo Free State: Belgium's King Leopold II used profits
from the export of the country's extensive natural resources to build a
personal fortune—profits extracted under conditions of forced labor that
included killing workers and chopping off hands if quotas were not met.
Mobutu's ill-gotten wealth is usually estimated at around $5 billion. Stories
about his bank accounts in Switzerland and his villas, ranches palaces, and
yachts throughout Europe are legion, as are wide-eyed descriptions of his home
at Gbadolite, in northern Zaire, his birthplace; "Versailles in the jungle," it
is called.