Mobutu Regime Research Articles

De la République Démocratique du Congo voulue indépendante À la République Démocratique du Congo qui commémore ses fêtes d’indépendance

From the Democratic Republic of Congo Seeking Independence to the Democratic Republic of Congo which Commemorates Its Independence Celebrations. On June 30, 1960, the independence of the Belgian Congo, once personal possession for 23 years of the Belgian King Leopold II, was proclaimed as the “Republic of the Congo”. Emery-Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) played a capital role in this emancipation which resulted in the consecration of Joseph Kasavubu as first President of the Republic of Congo and himself, Emery Patrice Lumumba, as Prime Minister. Congo has proclaimed its independence, but the new country remains plagued by violence and infighting. Belgian troops and peacekeepers from the United Nations intervene in the territory as a standoff begins between Kasavubu and Lumumba. On September 14, 1960, Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu led a first coup d’état which was followed by the arrest and assassination of Lumumba. The following years would be punctuated by rebellions and fighting interspersed with ceasefires in protest against the dictatorship established by the Mobutu regime after its second coup d’état, five years later, during a new political crisis. After thirty-two years of unchallenged reign, Mobutu was ousted from power by Mzee Laurent Désiré Kabila in May 1997 and since then, it has been difficult to speak of the real independence of the country, which became the Democratic Republic of Congo. Keywords: formal independence, real independence, Independence Day, Zaïre, Democratic Republic of Congo, colonization, decolonization, political emancipation, sovereignty.

The Responsibility to Protect: International Conservationists, Decolonization and Authoritarianism in the DR Congo, 1960–75

As colonial rule in the Congo neared its end, western conservationists grew concerned about the potential collapse of the national parks left behind by Belgium. However, despite half a decade of political turmoil following independence, the nature reserves in the central African country survived. The Second Republic under Mobutu then ushered in a new era for the parks. Lobbied by international conservationists, the autocrat authorized harsh repressive measures against ‘intruders’ and established four new national parks. This created or exacerbated conflicts that still breed violence today. Drawing on archival documents from leading conservation organizations, this article examines the evolution of the Congo's nature protection regime during the crucial 15 years following independence. Thus, it contributes to a growing body of studies critically assessing the role of nongovernmental organizations in shaping contemporary Africa. As I will demonstrate in this article, some international experts swiftly recognized decolonization as an opportunity. To promote authoritarian measures in the parks, they exploited nationalist sentiments and the Mobutu regime's quest for international recognition. Consequently, violence became further normalized as a means of conservation in the Congo.

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

The Power of Language and the Language of Power: Sociolinguistic Methods and Social Histories of Language and Political Power in Mobutu’s Congo-Zaire (1965–1997)

AbstractThis article argues for the potential of sociolinguistic methods to write post-colonial African history using a case study of the Mobutu regime’s use of Lingala as its language of power (langue du pouvoir) in order to rule Congo-Zaire. Oral history interviews conducted in DRC from 2019 to 2021, corroborated by sociolinguistic and political science analyses from the period under study, reveal how the Mobutu regime’s use of Lingala contributed to the privatization of the Zairian state, and the fracturing of Zairian society, but also the strengthening of Zairian and later Congolese national identity.

The Mulele “Rebellion,” Congolese Regimes, and the Politics of Forgetting

Between 1963 and 1968, Pierre Mulele led a rebellion in Kwilu province against the Congolese government. The uprising ended in a heavy defeat for the rebel forces. Every political regime in Congo from the late 1960s up to the present has differently dealt with the memory of this rebellion. Through fragments of stories, this article looks deeply into this history in order to understand the ways in which the politics of forgetting has been constructed since the late 1960s. During the Mobutu regime, this politics was incredibly violent. The regime distinguished itself by its ability to configure a set of strategies to enforce silence and create a public forgetting about Mulele. The result of this new form of control and surveillance was that people were doomed to fall back on themselves as fragmented “bodies” and live piecemeal between the corporeal world (the body) and the incorporeal world (the world of memory). But this new form of discipline and control also proved to be “partially” a failure, given the fact that memories of Mulele merely became private (or secret) and that the potential (re)publicizing of these remained, in particular via a ghostly avatar. The advent of Laurent Désiré Kabila in 1997, as well as the inversion of the injunction to forget Mulele after he came to power, left Mulele’s victims feeling equally and mentally “colonized” by the political memory-work of the new regime.

Histoire du politique au Congo-Kinshasa: Les concepts à l'épreuve (1) Mobutu (2)

This review article analyses two publications which deal with the history of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo/Zaire, emphasising the reign of President Mobutu Sese Seko. In comparing the two publications, originating from two decidedly different traditions, the pre- sent article concludes that, twenty years after the fall of the Mobutu regime, there is not (yet) a historiographic consensus on the character of the Mobutu regime. Jean-Pierre Langellier, com- ing from the world of journalism, emphasised in his biography of Mobutu the importance of the President’s friendship ties with the West, and the influence of the Cold War. Conversely, scholar Gauthier de Villers relativised the deterministic character of the Cold War on the regime, as well as the unconditional amical ties of Mobutu with his Western allies. Key words: Congo, DRC, Mobutu, Zaire

The “Cuba of the West”? France's Cold War in Zaïre, 1977–1978

This article discusses French support for Zaïrian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko during the Shaba crises of 1977 and 1978. During both crises, “Katangan Gendarmes” based in neighboring Angola invaded Zaire's mineral-rich Shaba Province. Direct and indirect French military interventions, including an airborne assault on the mining city of Kolwezi in 1978, helped to defeat the invaders and save Mobutu's regime. The article shows that French policymakers were drawn to Mobutu because they saw him as a bulwark against Communist expansion in Central Africa. The large Cuban military presence in Angola fueled concerns among French leaders that the Shaba invasions were a Soviet- or Cuban-inspired plot to spread instability and influence into Zaïre and beyond. These fears, which were piqued by alarming reports from French intelligence, were substantially influenced by Mobutu himself, who successfully exploited French fears to gain a de facto security umbrella that allowed him to buck broader calls for reform.

Demythologising the educational past: an attempt to assess the “power of education” in the Congo (DRC) with a nod to the history of interwar pedagogy in Catholic Flanders

This keynote consists of two parts. The first part offers some general observations from the past related to the power (and eventual powerlessness) of education. The aim is to create a framework with which the specific case, discussed in the second part, must be interpreted. Furthermore, it is emphasised that almost every pedagogical intervention which harboured the explicit aim of “forming” subjects had in itself a very normative and disciplinary nature. Yet these objectives, imposed from above, seldom functioned in the day-to-day reality as they were conceived by the opinion-makers and education agents. The educational activity’s political-ideological, fundamental principles do not allow us to directly deduce exactly what was retained by those subjected to the educational activity on the shop floor. The downside of the “power” of any education is indeed the “empowerment” of the individual. Whether one is happy for man to attain this quality or not, pedagogical interventions can give rise to emancipatory effects, even if they are intended to be primarily disciplinary. The Congo is naturally a prime case that would enable us to further explore this question. On the one hand, after independence, the pursuit of power over education was exposed in the continuity of colonial principles as well as in the struggle between the state and the church during the Mobutu regime. On the other hand, the dictatorial regime did not prevent the Congolese from becoming empowered through education; however, it appears as though a certain methodical utilitarianism was never far off.

“VY Mudimbe: from the ‘Nation’ to the ‘Global’ – ‘Who is the Master?' ”

AbstractThis article examines Valentin Yves Mudimbe's work form the early 1970s, in the neo‐colonial era, to the present day, a period marked by the advent of “Empire”, as conceived by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The investigation appraises the way in which Mudimbe's epistemological excavation of African discourses and discourses about Africa serves wider ethical and political objectives resonating with critiques of anthropology as formulated by Benoît Verhaegen and Johannes Fabian in the 1960s and 1970s. Part I focuses on Zairian nationalism (“Zairianization”) and the ambition, on the part of the Mobutu regime, to develop an authentic national culture. This examination of the birth of a Zairian “community” is developed through a comparison between Mudimbe's little‐studied Autour de la “nation” (1972) and Kangafu Kutumbagana's Discours sur l'authenticité (1973) and is argued on the basis of a number of propositions formulated by Jean‐Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community (1991). The second part of the article focuses on Mudimbe's On African Fault Lines (2013); it examines Mudimbe's attempts, in his analyses of contemporary works by Deepa Rajkumar and Geert Hofstede, to reflect on globalization and to assess the political and ethical relevance of critical tools developed in the neo‐colonial period to denounce the unequal basis of anthropology.

Human African Trypanosomiasis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Looming Emergency?

Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), also known as “sleeping sickness”, is a parasitic disease that is fatal if left untreated. The disease is transmitted by the tsetse fly and is endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, where it mainly affects impoverished rural communities. There are two forms of HAT; the West African variant caused by Trypanosoma brucei gambiense is the most common and accounts for over 90% of the current case load. The disease occurs in two stages, the haemato-lymphatic stage (stage 1) with no or few specific symptoms, followed by the meningo-encephalitic stage (stage 2), which occurs when the parasite has crossed the blood-brain barrier. This second stage is characterized by neurological signs and personality changes; damage to the hypothalamus can lead to disturbances of the normal sleep/wake cycle, hence the name “sleeping sickness” [1]. The ominous reputation of HAT is linked to a history of devastating epidemics, controlled with sometimes draconian measures, only to re-emerge again once control measures were abandoned. At the turn of the 20th century, an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people died from HAT; another major epidemic occurred in the 1920s–'30s [2]. By the mid-1960s, the disease was almost eliminated, but 30 years later incidence levels were back to where they had been in the 1920s [3]. This is illustrated by data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the worst affected country (Figure 1). After independence in 1960, the strict and costly HAT control measures put in place by the colonial authorities were relaxed and the number of HAT cases gradually increased. Operations of the national sleeping sickness control programme (Programme National de Lutte contre la Trypanosomiase Humaine Africaine, PNLTHA) continued to be funded mainly by the Belgian government. When in 1991 all Belgian bilateral aid, including the support to the PNLTHA, was suspended because of international sanctions against the Mobutu regime, the epidemiological situation soon became dramatic. Figure 1 Annual case notification of HAT in DRC, 1926–2011. In 1998, a total of 40,000 cases were reported worldwide, 66% of which (26,318 cases) in the DRC. The WHO estimates that 300,000 cases remained undetected and therefore untreated [4]. An emergency HAT control program was launched and followed up by the current program, which is largely funded through bilateral cooperation with Belgium. Active screening was resumed, reaching up to 3 million persons per year, at an annual cost of 2.8 million US$. However, in the perspective of this external funding being phased out, and with no alternative funding sources identified as of yet, the PNLTHA has been forced to gradually scale down active case finding campaigns. In 2009, T.b. gambiense HAT was still focally endemic in 24 Sub-Saharan African countries, but out of the 9,688 cases reported globally, 7,326 (76%) occurred in the DRC [5]. The provinces of Bandundu and Kasai Oriental remain heavily affected; the situation in Province Orientale is unclear, because on-going armed conflict interferes with screening campaigns, but more than 3,000 cases have been diagnosed over the last 5 years [6].

Briefing: Democratic Republic of Congo: political transition and beyond

In April 1990, president mobutu announced the end of single party rule and the opening of Zaire to democracy. Though Mobutu remained President, the announcement heralded the end of Mobutism and the beginning of a long, failed, transition. Hundreds of new parties, the vast majority of them artifices of the elite, were created; a ‘Sovereign National Conference’ that proclaimed a new constitution and electoral timetable led to nothing; and presidential and opposition blocs, each fragmented and constantly shifting, stalemated one another, causing government effectively to cease.1 In the absence of a state, and in the context of the extraterritorial extension of neighbouring civil wars, Laurent Kabila's AFDL (Alliance des forces pour la libération du Congo-Zaïre) rebellion was launched in the Fall of 1996. Initially aimed at destroying Rwandan Hutu refugee camps and establishing a buffer zone for Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi against cross-border rebel attacks, a game of objective alliances (‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’) soon merged the Great Lakes war with the Sudanese and Angolan civil wars, and a formidable regional coalition, led, nominally, by Kabila and supported by the US, emerged to topple the Mobutu regime in May 1997.

The Banyamulenge of the Democratic Republic of Congo: A cultural community in the making

In recent years the name Banyamulenge has become associated with a warrior group in Eastern Congo because of the role some of its community members played in the war against the Mobutu regime. Researchers have been intrigued by the political motivations which unfortunately do not cover the cultural aspects of this community. This article attempts to document the cultural heritage of the Banyamulenge community. Many of the practices and traditions have become obsolete. The article explains the Banyamulenge cultural way of living, and how the divine was traditionally revealed to them in the form of human deities. Burnt sacrifice was part of community worship. The article documents what has been learnt from elders about the oral tradition, the cultural and religious realities of the community.

Despotism and Democracy in the Congo

DESPOTISM AND DEMOCRACY IN THE CONGO Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History. London: Zed Books, 2002. Distributed in the U.S. by Palgrave/St.Martin's Press, New York, xiv + 304 pp. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $69.95. Cloth. $25.00. Paper. The Congo has caught the eye of the rest of the world for all the wrong reasons. Conrad's "heart of darkness" image weighs as heavily today on Western imaginations as it did one hundred years ago, and the country probably has attracted more than its share of glib, superficial, ideological, or even frankly racist reportage. Yet for all the stereotypes, the Congo can indeed be seen as a paradigm of Africa's travails. It has been held up consistently as the true and shameful face of imperialism, the emblem of Europe's fraudulent "civilizing mission" (as in King Leopold's implausibly named "Free State"), of the paternalistic "benevolence" of colonial rulers, of the allegedly "liberal" intent of "decolonization," as well as of the corruption, clientelism, authoritarianism, foreign avarice, and interventions that have plagued colonial and postcolonial Africa. But while the Congo has attracted a great deal of attention, it has often been denied the attention it deserves from serious scholars, who have been daunted, perhaps, by the sheer magnitude, intricacy, and seemingly unmanageable dimensions of its political vicissitudes, which Crawford Young once characterized as the country's "unending crisis." It is perhaps fitting, therefore, that a few Congolese scholars have risen to the challenge of presenting us with a comprehensive view of their country's political history. Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem's Histoire generale du Congo (Paris & Brussels, 1998) offered an openly nationalistic, yet solidly documented general history of the Congo. Now Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja adds a relatively short but densely packed and fluently written account of the Congo's political history that runs from the inception of modern colonialism to the dawn of the twenty-first century. A former president of the African Studies Association, Nzongola may well be the best known of the many Congolese intellectuals working (until recently) in the United States, where his teaching activities, mainly at Howard University, were recurrently interspersed with consulting and research assignments in Africa or Europe. Throughout his career he has maintained a tireless involvement in his native country's struggle to free itself from neocolonialist oppression. As a "privileged witness," an actor on the Congo's political scene, Nzongola has a stake not only in the country's future, but also in the way its story is told. He makes it clear that his is not a dispassionate reading of the Congo's history, especially where its recent past is concerned. His personal involvement is most noticeable when he deals with the ill-fated Conference Nationale Souveraine (CNS) in whose accomplishments (notably the drafting of a solid constitutional document) he took a direct part, but whose deliberate sabotaging by Mobutu (not to mention the unseemly antics of some of its participants) left it discredited in the eyes of the populace and thus easily ignored when Laurent Kabila took power in 1997. Nzongola may be guilty, however, of a degree of semantic obfuscation when he describes his book as "a study of the democracy movement in the Congo" (3). He traces this movement back to the "culture of political struggle" that arose "in areas where prophetic religious movements and peasant resistance to colonialism were strongest," and follows its history through the emergence of a "relatively strong working class movement" and of "a class of white-collar workers," especially the evolues from which the leadership of the nationalist movement developed (5). In successive chapters, he analyzes the Congo's struggle for independence, the "Congo Crisis" (the first of many, but particularly momentous because of the distorting cold war perspective it injected into every vicissitude suffered by the country over the next thirty-odd years), the "Second Independence Movement" (crushed by an externally led counterinsurgency, but whose leaders, with the exception of Pierre Mulele, Nzongola dismisses as "neither revolutionaries nor democrats"), the rise and decay of the Mobutu regime, the flawed struggle for multiparty democracy, and finally the conflict in the Great Lakes region. …

Bushmeat Poaching and the Conservation Crisis in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Summary The gorilla and elephant populations of Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have recently suffered from intensive commercial and subsistence poaching. In just four years, the highland sector of the park lost more than 95% of its elephant population and about 50% of its gorilla population. This tragedy was precipitated by the recent political and economic crises in the region. Many factors contributed to increased hunting of wildlife for food known as “bushmeat.” Among the principal factors were starvation and economic desperation in local communities, the spread of small arms, and the collapse of park protection during the civil wars. The incentive to hunt gorillas in the park may have developed gradually with the collapse of the Mobutu regime, the influx of refugees, and the two subsequent civil wars. Local re sentments felt toward the park and its authorities may have contributed to the willingness of local people to engage in illegal exploitation of wildlife resources. By promoting ecotourism and improving the infrastructure of the park and surrounding villages, the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) and the German Technical Agency for Cooperation (GTZ) have made great efforts to improve local conditions. Local people, including park guards and guides, established a non-governmental organization that played an important role in the spread of conservation knowledge and the reduction of conflict among local people. Since the park began employing former poachers in 1999 and resumed conservation ac tivities, gorilla poaching has decreased significantly. The broader civil conflict continues and sporadic poaching is still common. This paper con siders and recommends optimal and urgent conservation measures to im prove the protection of the park and its gorillas.

Bad Policies Under an Autocrat's Production

Bad policies (i.e., policies harmful to private producers such as excessive taxation, arbitrary confiscation, and negligence of pubic goods) are observed in quite a few countries. These countries tend to have autocratic regimes. I explore a reason why bad policies may benefit autocrats. I present a model economy where the autocrat manages his production (e.g., military exploits, plantation cultivation, mining) in addition to setting policies for the private producers. The autocrat has an incentive to repress the income level of private producers: it reduces the wage rate that he must offer to his workers and thereby increases the surplus from his production. Thus the autocrat chooses a tax rate that is higher than the revenue-maximizing rate: it lies on the backward-bending part of the Laffer curve. He may also choose to lower the productivity of private producers through confiscation, neglect of public goods, and other non-tax policies. I argue that the story is helpful in understanding bad policies present in militaristic regimes of the Ottoman and Mughal empires, Trujillo's regime in the plantation-based economy of the Dominican Republic, and Mobutu's regime in mineral-rich Zaire.

Bad Policies under an Autocrat's Production

Bad policies (i.e., policies harmful to private producers such as excessive taxation, arbitrary confiscation, and negligence of pubic goods) are observed in quite a few countries. These countries tend to have autocratic regimes.I explore a reason why bad policies may benefit autocrats.I present a model economy where the autocrat manages his production (e.g., military exploits, plantation cultivation, mining) in addition to setting policies for the private producers. The autocrat has an incentive to repress the income level of private producers: it reduces the wage rate that he must offer to his workers and thereby increases the surplus from his production. Thus the autocrat chooses a tax rate that is higher than the revenue-maximizing rate: it lies on the backward-bending part of the Laffer curve. He may also choose to lower the productivity of private producers through confiscation, neglect of public goods, and other non-tax policies. I argue that the story is helpful in understanding bad policies present in militaristic regimes of the Ottoman and Mughal empires, Trujillo's regime in the plantation-based economy of the Dominican Republic, and Mobutu's regime in mineral-rich Zaire.

The State of the State in Congo-Zaire

The armed struggle against Mobutu's dictatorship raised many questions regarding the viability of the Zairian State. Indeed, the rebels, led by Mr. Laurent Desire Kabila, did not face strong resistance from the Zairian army assisted by foreign mercenaries. The victory of the rebels clearly demonstrated the extent to which the Zairian State was vulnerables. On the socioeconomic level, the lives of the Zairian people under the Mobutu regime kept deteriorating day after day. Public employees were not receiving their salaries for months or even years, and the army and police that were supposed to protect citizens became, on the contrary, citizens' nightmares. On many occasions, soldiers harassed and terrorized the masses while public services were performed on the basis of briberies or kickbacks. Under Mobutu, Zaire became a kind ofjungle where the rule of law did not exist. In this context, some analysts did not hesitate to argue that the state was no longer existent in Zaire. In any society, the role of the state is to guarantee the protection of its citizens and to provide any other basic needs that promote the welfare of the masses. Unfortunately, Zairian masses whose territory possesses large amounts of mineral resources were among the most impoverished people in the African continent. Hospitals were in bad shape, roads were full of holes, public schools were out most of the time because teachers were never paid on a regular basis, and public services were almost nonexistent. Under these conditions, many students of Zairian politics reached the conclusion that the state did not exist in Zaire. This view was echoed by the Zairian masses, who felt unprotected and subject to conditions for which

BRIEFING: THE SECOND CONGO WAR: MORE THAN A REMAKE

THE WAR which brought Laurent-Desire Kabila and his Alliance des forces democratiques pour la liberation du Congo-Zaire (AFDL) to power in May 1997 cannot be seen in isolation. The events of 1996-7 were embedded in the larger context of three conflicts, which although not intrinsically linked have tended to merge over the last couple of years: the Great Lakes conflict, which has been the most immediately visible one, and the Sudanese and Angolan civil wars. The geographical proximity of these hotbeds of instability and the play of objective alliances (where all actors reason in terms of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend') have imbricated these conflicts, thus opening the perspective of the emergence of a war zone stretching from Luanda to Asmara. Zaire, as it then was, constituted the junction between these zones for two reasons. First, the Zairean state had virtually disappeared, thus leaving a 'black hole' with porous borders, almost no effective national army or administration, very poor communications between centre and periphery and between peripheries, and an essentially informalized economy. Secondly, the Mobutu regime was implicated in the neighbours' wars: it supported the Khartum government in its war against the Southern Sudanese rebellion, which was in turn supported by the United States, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea; Zairean territory served as a rear base for attacks by armed movements against Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi; and the support offered by Mobutu to the Angolan rebel movement UNITA had not ceased with the 1994 Lusaka peace accord. Therefore, the change of regime in Congo-Zaire has been the result of the combination of two factors: on the one hand, the extreme weakness of the Forces Armees Zairoises (FAZ), which were just the mirror of the collapsed state; on the other, the operation of a formidable regional coalition in support of Kabila's rebellion. Five out of Zaire's nine immediate neighbours have actively contributed to the downfall of the Mobutu regime: it is no coincidence that the Presidents of Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia were present at the inauguration of President Kabila on 29 May 1997.l This was of course a conjunctural and therefore fragile alliance which ran the risk of losing its cement, once

L’épuration ethnique au Katanga et l’éthique du redressement des torts du passé

After briefly reviewing the events of ethnic purification in Katanga and recent historical antecedents, the author analyzes the discourse used to justify these events, discourse addressed above all to the population of the province. Through an examination of declarations and speeches by politicians and certain Catholic priests and intellectuals, seeking at the time to justify to the Katangese the explusion of their fellow citizens of Kasaian origin, he reveals the construction of an ethics of compensation for wrongs presented as collectively endured by the Katangese at the hand of the Kasaians, in turn presented as the beneficiairies of both the colonial system and the Mobutu regime. Nonetheless, as the author points out, the ethnic cleansing of Katanga was organized with Mobutu’s consent.

Congo's Odious Debt: External Borrowing and Capital Flight in Zaire

During the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo (or Zaire, as Mobutu renamed the country) accumulated a public external debt of roughly $14 billion. At the same time, Mobutu and his associates extracted wealth from the country. By 1990, real capital flight from Zaire amounted to $12 billion. With imputed interest earnings, the accumulated stock of Zairian flight capital was nearly $18 billion. Congo's successor governments may be able to repudiate liability for the Mobutu regime's debts on the basis of the doctrine of odious debt. Creditors could then seek to recover their losses by identifying and impounding flight capital which was extracted from the country.