By IPS Correspondents
BRUSSELS, Jun 23 2008 (IPS)

A Swiss court has ordered eight million Swiss francs to be unblocked in favour of the heirs of Mobutu Sese Seko, the former dictator of Zaire. The Swiss are trying to convince the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo to send an envoy to collect the money in the name of the Congolese people, but Kinshasa doesn’t seem to care.

On a visit in Kinshasa in July 2007, Swiss president at the time Micheline Calmy-Rey invited her Congolese counterpart Joseph Kabila to send a “plenipotentiary” to Switzerland to come and get the former dictator’s stolen assets. The eight million Swiss Francs (7.6 million dollars) is what could be traced in Swiss bank accounts in 1997, after Mobutu moved the bulk of his fortune out of the country.

Mobutu was president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for 32 years (1965–1997).

When the sum in what appeared as only Mobutu’s Swiss piggybank came up at a press conference concluding Calmy-Rey’s visit, Kabila could hardly conceal his disappointment. “Unfortunately it is only eight million Swiss francs, not the tens of billions we expected.” So, does Congo’s current leader think that the game isn’t worth the candle?

“That’s what our sources in the Swiss Foreign Ministry tell us,” says André Rothenbuehler from Aktion Finanzplatz, a non-profit organisation based in Basel in Switzerland that tracks dictators’ stolen money. “Our Congolese partners, on the other hand, think that Kinshasa’s inaction is related to the presence of Mobutu’s proxies in the current government,” he told IPS.

A senior Swiss Foreign Ministry official, who asked not to be named, said he did not want to speculate on the motivations of the Congolese. “After Calmy-Rey’s request, Switzerland has spared no effort to get things moving. We offered technical juridical assistance, and we keep asking them to send a high representative. But there has been no echo whatsoever from Kinshasa.”

“We have now even arrived at the stage where we try to contact Mobutu’s heirs with a proposition to take only 60 percent of the money and leave the rest to the Congolese people. But it remains very quiet in that corner as well. They know time is on their side and that they just have to wait to get all the money.”

“A year ago we were at exactly the same point in the case of the former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvallier,” the Swiss official said. “After repeated requests Haiti decided to launch a request for legal assistance. Apparently, Haitian President René Préval wants to give a strong political signal against corruption. The same would apply to Congo if it starts up a procedure. To my knowledge, so far none of Mobutu’s foreign assets have been sent back.”

“There lies the rub,” Victor Nzuzi of the Congolese anti-debt group Nouvelles Alternatives pour le Développement told IPS. “The politicians here are not going to saw off the branch they are sitting on. Mobutu’s money is the fruit of corruption, but politics haven’t changed that much. When the government awards mining contracts to the Chinese without calling for tenders, it means commissions have been paid. Starting an investigation into Mobutu’s money in Switzerland can bring up all kinds of uneasy questions.”

Nzuzi also suspects that the Congolese leadership doesn’t want to disrupt the power-sharing deal with members of Mobutu’s clan. Mobutu’s son Nganza Mobutu is the minister for agriculture and one of the heavyweights in the government of Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga.

On Mar. 25, Nzuzi’s organisation sent a letter to Attorney-General Mushagalusha, urging him to reopen the case of Mobutu’s Swiss money. “We never received an answer,” says Nzuzi. “The legal system here leaves much to be desired. What I don’t understand is that the same Attorney-General recently asked to block the accounts of opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba.”

Bemba, who ran against Kabila in the 2006 presidential election, was arrested near Brussels May 24, 2008 on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. He is charged with two counts of crimes against humanity and four counts of war crimes.

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