Corona Crisis, Nature Strikes Back, Coltan, Congo's Curse, Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Shopping

The next morning, I took an early train. There was a lot I wanted to do. First, I needed to make sure that the money Didier had pledged was available. I knew he was an early riser and found him behind his desk around eight. We drank coffee and waited the arrival of his lawyer whom he had summoned to be there no later than eight-thirty. Didier understood that to catch a big fish, he needed big bait, so he did not argue or ask any more about the sum I required. Ten million was in fact quite a bargain to save a multi-billion-dollar turnover. We chatted about the business and sales. He had understood my hint quite well that the less he knew, the better it would be.

A pin-striped attorney from the law firm Schuster & McMann arrived punctually and made arrangements for me to pick up the cash when Credit Suisse in Geneva opened. At nine o’clock, I was at the bank. At a quarter past, I walked out of the bank with the money in a backpack casually hanging from my right shoulder.

The bank clerk told me that a credit card under my name would be sent to me as soon as it was processed that same day and promised that it would be ready before Friday.

The rain had stopped, and a nice warm sun accompanied me. It was Wednesday, time was  getting short. My trip to the Congo came closer each day. Back at my desk I started to make a list of things and equipment I would need. I typed in the website address of EasyJet and booked myself a flight to Brussels for that evening, departing at 17:35. My initial stop would be Brussels, before Kigali. I needed to go to Belgium first, my home country.

I called Pauline and told her that something came up and that I needed to travel to Belgium just for the evening to see a customer and that I’d be back next morning on the first flight. She was used to that, so she wished me a safe flight. ‘See you tomorrow, mein Schatz,’ she said.

With that million dollars under my desk, I felt like a rich man. I decided to stash the cash into one of my desk drawers and took the hundred-thousand Euro which I put in my jacket pockets, one wad of fifty in each pocket, left and right. Then I locked the drawer. No one had seen me doing that, of that I was sure. It was a normal morning with people on the phone or at their desk scanning the screens for opportunities. Now all I had to do was to wait until my plan commenced. The clock ticked, minutes dragging on. The remaining hours before my flight were spent making an estimate cost calculation of the shopping list I made earlier. I smiled; perhaps I would even have some money left over for myself.

 

***

 

The flight to Brussels took a little over an hour. I landed at Zaventem Airport just before seven that evening and walked straight to Sixt to pick up my pre-booked car. I noticed the heavy security everywhere I looked. A combination of police, private security and armed soldiers were scouting the various areas with weapons at the ready. The terrorist attack a while earlier had had its impact. A strange odour of fear welcomed me when I left the plane. Not a very nice feeling. I had felt that in Rwanda too when the shit started to hit the fan, when this eerie sentiment took over a whole country. Airports, train stations or open markets had become contaminated with anxiety, places you’d pass through as fast as you possibly could.

I managed to locate my car in an underground car park and drove in the direction of Antwerp which was my true destination. I was going to see a man about a dog, as a manner of speaking. But first I needed to find him. We hadn’t spoken for ages and I did not want to reach him on his mobile phone. From now onwards, radio silence was essential. No email, no phone, no WhatsApp and no text messages.

I believed that I would be able to find him using some old contacts in the rough areas around Coninckplein. The guy I knew lived in the Statiestraat, just a few minutes’ walk from Antwerp Central Station. I parked my car in a subterranean car park and walked to his last known address. It was quiet, some pedestrians walked by. I pushed the bell for the third-floor apartment. Nothing. No one opened the door. I pushed again, but now tried the apartment on the second floor. Usually that helped, and I was fortunate that another tenant opened the main door. I walked in and took the three flights up as I had done many times but years before. I knocked. I held my breath, because I believed I heard someone inside. Yes, now it was clearer, there definitely was someone home.

I knocked again and tried the doorknob. The door wasn’t locked. I stepped inside and found the place in a terrible mess. Dirty clothes, empty pizza boxes and shawarma wraps, newspapers were scattered on a dining table, a television blurring in the background. I walked on and there, passed out on the couch, lay someone I once knew as a friend, a colleague and a mate, Luc Tournicourt, soldier of fortune, para commando once, a drunk today. He snored like a freight train. Bottles of beer, most of them empty, were lying around him, a full one stood standby on a coffee table next to him. I looked at him and asked myself if I had made a mistake coming here. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed someone being there, but after about five minutes I decided to leave, knowing he would be neither suitable nor fit to help me with my plans. But just  as I was about to open the door, I changed my mind as I heard him moan, ‘Hey, anybody there?’

I had come all this way because he could perhaps reconnect me with old mates from  years ago, so I turned around, walked back, took a chair and sat down next to the couch where he was slowly coming back to his senses.

‘Erik? Erik? Is it you? You’ve changed, you look…’

‘Older?’

‘No, not older, but perhaps, er , more a man. I do remember you having that baby face back then.’

‘I was quite young then and you’re right, I only started shaving after my time in Africa.’

He sat up, coughed badly and shook my hand. ‘Sorry for not standing up.’

‘So, how are you, Luc? By the looks of this place, I guess you don’t have anyone to pick up after you.’

‘Ah, well, now that is a long story. You guessed right, she eventually left. Just leave it at that.’

He grabbed the full bottle and took a long swig. He sighed deeply as if he truly needed it.

‘You look a mess, Luc. What happened? Do you want to tell me?’

‘You first. You first tell me what the hell you ‘re doing here and then, maybe, I ‘ll tell you my life story, how about that?’

‘Alright, I ‘ll tell you, but when you’re sober. So, what I ‘m going to do right now, is make you a pot of good strong coffee. Meanwhile, you must get yourself up and by the smell of you, a hot shower wouldn’t do you any harm.’

He grunted and tried to put the bottle to his mouth, but I grabbed it and drank it myself as I had become quite thirsty. ‘So no more beer, get a shower and if you’ve got it,  a change of clothes. We are going out on the town.’

Slowly, he got up and stumbled to the bathroom. I heard him pee first and then turning on the shower. I found a jar of Nescafé and heated a kettle of water on the stove. Luc was worth a lot to me; I needed his expertise and hoped that he still had enough brain cells left to remember what that was.

What people like Luc lacked was purpose. I was going to give that back to him, plus his self-esteem, because without either one of them, I understood he’d rather be dead. This was the way he and I had always felt and known, ever since we served together in Africa and experienced what could happen to dignity.

‘Come on, ready to go?’ I asked after he came back, cleaned, shaven and changed.

‘Just about.’

‘Here’s your coffee, please drink.’

‘Let me get some aspirin and I’ll be fine in just a minute.’

He drank and popped about four.

‘Okay, before I tell you why I came, we first have to find Marc. Do you know where he lives?’

Luc looked at me incredulously. ‘Our old Colonel? He must be retired by now, I guess, he ‘ll be in his sixties. Yeah, I know where he lives.’

‘Let’s go then, we have to see him.’

‘About what?’

‘Patience, my old friend. When we see Marc, I ‘ll explain it all.’

We walked down the stairs, he in front of me. Now a bit cleaned up and seemingly sober, he looked better and spoke more coherently, ‘It’s not too far, we can walk there.’

 

***

 

The next morning, I flew back to Geneva and landed on time. I took the train back to Cornavin and decided to walk the remaining distance to the office, playing back the memories of the night before in my head. I hadn’t slept that night at all. After we arrived at Marc’s home, we talked, reminisced, dug up old stories, cried about our lost mates and laughed about others who we ridiculed. I recalled our talk verbatim. ‘Look,’ I said to them. ‘You both are or actually were hardened soldiers. I have come to you because you are the only ones I trusted and still trust with my life. I want you,’ I looked at them both, ‘to come to Africa with me to do a job.’

Luc watched Marc’s reaction. Marc, a lean man, in very good shape, was well into his sixties now. We had always been a good team under his command. Luc, not a true alcoholic, just felt sorry for himself and agreed after insisting that his lack of purpose caused his drinking. ‘So what if I give you both a purpose, a goal in life? Would you be interested?’

They both nodded. Marc said, ‘Okay, let’s hear it. What would you like us to do?’

I showed them my shopping list. ‘Listen carefully, I want you to go to Africa, not together, but as individual visitors and go shopping. Don’t fly to Congo, but land in a neighbouring country. I suggest you book a Tanzania Vacation using TUI, travelling as  tourists, and work yourselves to where I ‘ll be needing you. Cross the border into Burundi and Congo. You both know very well how to cross borders unseen? Better not get visas the official way as they may suspect trouble when two ex-military apply for Burundi, Rwanda or Congo around the same time. You have to disappear and reappear at the correct place where and when I need you, okay? Where exactly, I do not yet know. Here is some money to start with.’ I gave them both an envelope with fifty thousand Euro. ‘So, get these items down there somewhere. Are your passports in order? When you are in Tanzania, just leave them in a safe place for later pickup. Do not carry anything that would reveal your true identities. This is a clandestine operation. Do you have jobs to quit or are you allowed some vacation time?’ Luc said he was unemployed and Marc lived on his army pension.

‘You ‘ll travel in about ten days on different flights. You ‘ll be contacted by me. The money I gave you is spending money. A contact in Tanzania will provide you with hardware, wheels and other necessary equipment and will assist you to prepare for travelling through Burundi. After the operation has been successfully concluded, you each will receive a sum of half a million dollars as an additional retirement package.’ I paused to watch their faces begin to glow.

‘It sounds like a plan, but I  haven’t seen it yet. Why don’t you explain it to us?’ asked Marc.

I looked at them once more. An almost washed-up drunk and an ageing fighter. Would they be fit enough? ‘Are you guys healthy enough,  er, I mean, fit?’ I asked.

Luc laughed. ‘Of course man. Look at me, I can lose this belly in a fortnight, you’ll see.’

Suddenly, I grabbed one of Luc’s hands and held it in mine, observing it. ‘Look at you! You ‘ve got the shakes! Can you control those shakes? Tell me!’

Luc violently pulled his hand out of mine and lifted it in front of his own eyes. ‘Well, I must admit, they are shaking a bit right now, but I promise you they ‘ll be steady as a rock.’

‘They’d better!’

I explained a way I saw what could be done.

Marc confirmed his eagerness to participate by saying, ‘Since my wife died and I had to retire from the army, the only home I ever had, my life stopped. You couldn’t have come at a  better time, Erik, because between you and me, I was planning to end it all. Die with honour, put an end to these damn nightmares which my doctors call PTSD and all that jazz…but now, we’ll get a chance to avenge our murdered brothers. And by the way, I’ve always stayed fit, still running half marathons occasionally.’ I had noticed he certainly looked healthy and appeared younger than his true age revealed. He was just about bald, but I pictured him in his bush fatigues and that image appealed to me.

‘Very well. Let’s drink to that. By the way, no more alcohol until the job is done. We may all agree that we suffer from PTSD, but some are better able to handle it than others.’

Luc added, ‘I realise Marc is right. The spectre of past doom always resurfaces during the wrong moments, perhaps that’s the reason we are ready to chase those ghosts away once and for all.’

We drank water that night, the first step towards regaining a much-needed clear-headedness, an imperative condition to survive. We all knew that from our first lessons from Marc, our teacher, our commander, our protector.

He smiled and nodded his head in agreement with the idea of being wanted, needed and useful once more.

When I left Antwerp in the early morning hours to drive back to Zaventem, I left them sitting in Marc’s flat. They were going over the shopping list. I had made clear what my intentions were and waited eagerly for their approval, because perhaps I had overlooked something important. But they both said, ‘A good plan and feasible if no one talks. If someone talks, we’ll be dead in an instant, so no bonus, no retirement. We both understand and accept the risks.’

‘I ‘m very aware of that, gentlemen. Only if nobody suspects anything and business carries on as usual, do we have any chance of success. It depends on us sticking to the plan.’

‘Understood, Erik,’ confirmed Marc, ‘I  won’t be in charge this time,  - you will. Tell us what you want, and we ‘ll follow your orders.’

‘Just get ready, I ‘ll let you know when you are expected. First, I must prepare the groundwork down there myself. That ‘ll take some time, I hope not more than a week. After that, I ‘ll contact you in the manner we agreed.’

I reached my office and asked a colleague of mine to gradually take over my workload because I was going to Africa the week after. So, we worked together until the evening. An email from CIBT confirmed that my visa applications were successful and that they’d courier my passport back to me on Friday.

 

***

 

The weekend that came was totally for Pauline and me. My flight would leave early Monday from Geneva via Brussels to Kigali. I took Friday off, which was not unusual when I had to travel. There was no boss telling me what to do or how to work. The only thing that counted was my financial results. They had been better than the previous year, but now, we all understood that the same level of earnings could not be maintained unless I was going to do something about it.

Pauline and I decided to go to Valais and booked a nice hotel deep in the Alps near Simplon and Brig. We went by car and drove to Domodossola on Saturday morning to visit the Italian city’s popular market place to buy Italian salami, olives and fresh ravioli, and continued later that morning towards Stresa, where we had a slow and delicious lunch at a small and colourfully decorated restaurant in the centre of town named Caffè Torino.

After that we walked hand in hand along the shore of magnificent Lago Maggiore and took a small ferry to one of the Borromean Islands named Isola dei Pescatori, where we shopped for souvenirs, had desserts and a digestive, but for me, again without alcohol. ‘You are very strict with yourself, Erik,’ she noticed. ‘Are you on the wagon?’

‘No, not really, but I’ve been putting on too much weight recently, so I thought I ‘d stop drinking alcohol, then compare my waistline now with the size of it when I get back from Africa, I  think it’s true that alcohol changes into sugar and ,   ends up giving you an enormous belly. It also makes me,  er, slow. So I’m starting cutting down now because I’m really intending not to drink at all when I ‘m there.’

‘ Oh, well, I don’t mind having a brandy.’ She laughed and touched my body. ‘I like you just the way you are.’ Her eyes reflected the sunlight. Her golden hair danced in the breeze.

My Swiss angel, she kept me alive. She was my main purpose for wanting to grow old, for intending to survive my risky voyage.

She looked for her bag that was standing on the floor next to her chair and placed it on her lap. She opened it and took out some papers. ‘Here is what I could find out about Congo and the current conflict situation. I want you to read it. It gives you a good idea what ‘s been happening and how the diverse interested parties are intertwined. It also highlights the stance of the international community and their geopolitical motivation not to interfere. Did you know that the US promised to solve the issue, but because Rwanda and Uganda deliver anti-terrorism assistance in the form of soldiers, the US President didn’t pursue it? What do you make of that?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. If the conflict had just been local, it  might have been resolved a long time ago, but there are diverse interests by a variety of parties who are not interested in stopping the killing at all. Every player is politically motivated to continue. Rwanda and Uganda made a deal to ensure that the US military industrial complex cannot run out of base materials that are essential to the manufacturing of weapons and airplanes. They don’t say, “Let’s end the conflict by stopping arm sales.” Quite the opposite, selling arms is a major objective. In Geneva the UN meets about it, but absolutely nothing is done, ever, because any decision that contradicts business or geopolitical interests is immediately vetoed.’

She handed me two reports on DRC, one by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the other by Médecins Sans Frontières. I opened the HRW report and looked into the usual summary of observations, findings and facts. The report issued by Pauline’s employer talked about the continued instability and its effect on their operations. It stipulated actual risks for MSF personnel in that area. It also provided the addresses of their operations headquarters in Goma and the locations of their field hospitals, which, in fact, could be quite handy. The analysis spoke about that political stability was not to be expected anytime soon. Planned elections were deliberately postponed, keeping the sitting President Joseph Kabila and his cronies in perpetual power, which was fuelling political tensions and clashes between opposition supporters and security forces. The threat to political stability was caused by armed conflicts in the eastern provinces, driven largely by the population displacements and competition over control of natural resources, disputes over land and citizenship, lack of economic opportunities and poor delivery of basic services. Because governmental control failed, a growing number of lawless militias fought to divide that control to profit from selling natural resources.

Pauline was not aware of my hidden plans, because what was true for Didier, was even more for her; the less she knew, the better she’d be protected and the safer she would be.

The HRW report Pauline had given me was already known to me. A very important part of my job was gathering information by closely observing the local situation daily since our company started to trade the raw materials from there. Business intelligence was crucial. If there  was  something valuable to know, we had to be the first to know about it. That role was played masterly by Aldabi, but perhaps we could no longer rely on him. What struck me was that Africa was gradually but surely being re-militarised by the West. France had expanded its volume of boots on the ground quite significantly. In Gabon alone, 6,000 troops were stationed to protect 60,000 French nationals and of course protect their economic interests. They dealt with President Ali Bongo with a cat and mouse mentality. The French allowed him enough money to pay for about 35 houses in France and elsewhere, and allowed his family to run the country full of oil and manganese if he followed orders. In return, Bongo would stay President while French corporations ran many of the Gabonese industries. That was no different in other ex-colonies that were openly re-colonised by big business, the IMF and World Bank, protected by soldiers or, if armies were not available, by hired mercenaries. Despite numerous investigational reports, also by the UN, no action to stop protecting neo-liberal perpetrators influencing DRC, Rwanda or Uganda was undertaken. Neo-colonialism, under the disguise of globalism, was the term used for it and such conflicts looked only like the beginning of a grand scheme that was played to eventually control “all the wealth” in the world. That certainly was the priority objective of globalised private banking systems such as IMF and World Bank. The coltan conflict had no different causes. The beauty of the scheme was that now Western governments bribed and coerced or bought African leaders to go and kill their own peoples. It only appeared that Europe and the US were not involved, but that was just a layer of conceit, spun by corporatism and denied by politicians. Our firm benefited big time and so did I. The new definition of sustainable business that was supported by Western Nations was called neo-liberalism. This meant everything earned would be for the corporate state whilst some crumbs were left for the people so they would not yet die. They were needed to do the dirty work; divide et impera – Gaius Julius Caesar was alive and well, living in Congo. Bread and games. Someone in Angola once told me: “We are poor because we are rich.”

Pauline interrupted my thoughts, ‘Let’s get back to our hotel, darling,’ Pauline suggested. ‘I ‘m tired. Thanks for a wonderful day. You know how much I love this area.’

‘Me too, we have about an hour and a half to drive. Let’s take the boat back and get our car from the car park at the ferry terminal.’

Driving over the Simplon Pass always excited me enormously. Winding through an ever-narrowing Italian Alpine valley, climbing to an altitude of about 2,000 metres where the temperature dropped considerably, followed by a road full of S-curves into the medieval city of Brig. The Maserati’s ability to handle such roads was impressive. Her loud engine roared like a lioness, echoing between steep cliffs on either side. I noticed Pauline also seemed to enjoy the ride. She placed her two feet on the dashboard, spreading her legs just a little while she looked at me with those eyes through which I could immediately read her mind. Her skirt slid down just a little to show a piece of her thigh. I touched it softly which caused an immediate physical reaction within both of us. ‘Almost there, honey, we ‘re almost there.’