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.