Message-ID: <01BC7331.549D06A0@laptop> Date: Sat, 7 Jun 1997 10:54:21 +1200 From: Clay Wescott <mailto:cwescott@UNDP.ORG.FJ> Subject: Congo debt To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
This is my first posting to this list. The following is a message from Transparency International.Clay G. Wescott, Senior Programme Manager, UNDP, Private Mail Bag, Suva, Fiji Islands or UNDP-Fiji, P.O.Box 1608, Grand Central Station, NY, NY 10163-1608. Tel (679) 312500, Fax (679) 301718, Internet: mailto:cwescott@undp.org.fj or clay.wescott@undp.org ************************************************************************
THE MOBUTU LEGACY
Transparency International is an international NGO which is creating a global coation against corruption, both in international business transactions and at national levels.
Now that Mobutu is gone from Zaire and we have the new Congo, the questions we would like to pose are not just ones of how the new administartion will perform, and whether it will be better or worse than its predecessor - we must all hope, with the people of Zaire, that this is change for the better.
The new administration now faces a collosal debt run up by Mobutu and his cronies over the years as they stole billions. So the question is: who owes the money borrowed?
At first sight the answer is obvious: the new government and the people of the Congo. But is it?
Let us look at the creditors. These include financial institutions and interests from various sectors, national and international, who happily played along with te Mobutu regime, at least in the later years in full knowledge that the country was being plundered, and that the loans and credits being made available "for the government of Zaire" were in fact being stolen.
It is also well-documented that many of these payments were made, not because of a belief that they would be used to develop Zaire but because it suited the global interests of the creditors to maintain Mobutu in power. They were motivated by self-interest.
How is it that these self-same interests (many of whom got value for their money by perpetuating the enslavement of the people of Zaire for more than two decades) can now seek to recoup this debt from the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
Mobutu and his forty-or-more thieves had no mandate whatsoever to govern the country at all - let alone to so blatantly mismanage it. The foreign interests were implicitly or explicitly party to the thefts. In all logic, those self-same interests must now pursue their claims against Mobutu and his crew - the beneficiaries of the plunder - and not try to hang them round the necks of some of the poorest people on earth.
Transparency International believes that there is a powerful legal case to be made to the effect that the loans are tainted by illegality and therefore unenforceable as against the new regime and the people of the Congo.
What it would like to see is a conference convened quickly of all those who claim to be owed money by the Congo so that a substantial package can be worked out whereby the bulk of the debt is "forgiven" (a euphemism which the international and foreign national actors would probably wish to use to disguise the fact that it was really a question of admitting their complicity in what took place).
Failing a satisfactory agreement, the new government should be encouraged to take the question of the legality of the borrowing instruments to arbitration as provided for in those instruments, or else seek a declaration from the World Court.
There are powerful principles at work here, and the matter is even more impoprtant than simply freeing millions of impoversished people from a collosal debt burden. It lies also in establishing an important precedent of non-recoverability against the successor administration - a precedent which, when established, will undoubtedly make many pause and ponder at length before they embark on similar courses elsewhere.
All ideas about how this concept might be progressed will be welcome.