CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Dirty Money at Work 141
Jonathan Kwitny once again summarized the situation well:
Still, despite poverty, misery and injustice, the people of Zaire can be
grateful to the people of the United States for one thing: we have kept
their country from communism. What is less widely considered, but
equally true, however, is that we have also kept it from capitalism—or at
least from anything that might remotely resemble a free market. And
therein lies a key to many of the world’s problems. The free market is
demonstrably the most bountiful economic system on earth. And it has
become the odd role of the United States of America to deny that system
to hundreds of millions of people the world wide. 179
Stricken with cancer, Mobutu’s grip on his country weakened in the
mid-1990s. Laurent Kabila, initially supported by Che Guevara in the mid-
1960s (who soon departed in disgust), fomented trouble in the east. Together
with troops from Uganda and Rwanda, Kabila’s 50,000-man army
swept across the country in seven months, taking Kinshasa on May 17,
1997. Mobutu fled, while his son, Captain Kongulu Mobutu, lingered long
enough to kill turncoats willing to negotiate surrender. Mobutu died in exile
in Morocco later in the year. The Swiss froze his bank accounts, supposedly
containing only a little more than $3 million. Zaire reverted to its former
name, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Democratic it was not. Kabila suspended political parties, had a falling
out with his Rwandan and Ugandan interlopers, saw his country lapse into
war again and, after less than four years in power, was assassinated in early
2001. Congo descended again into chaos, as competing powers set out to
grab its resources—Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, and assorted
local ministates. Several groups viciously settled scores from the genocide
that convulsed the Great Lakes region in 1994. An estimated three
million people died in eastern Congo during the four years at the turn of the
century, with perhaps another one million dying since then.
In one of the most courageous pieces of work I have ever read, a United
Nations team, with principal members drawn from Egypt, the United
States, Senegal, Belgium, and Canada, investigated the illegal exploitation
of natural resources in the Congo. 180 The panel interviewed hundreds of
people in the region and in Europe and the United States and thanked in