It's sunrise here in Kinshasa, home of US Covert engineering. No one here really likes Americans, even the ones sucking on coke bottle mouths like they were cocks filled with the elixir of life. They like our movie stars, though our stars are theirs too. Doesn't help an American's reputation here. But it's not personal...these folks are hospitable, friendly. Met a man who whispered in my ear. He say things like, "US paid for Rwanda-Zaire genocide in 1994 through 1996." He say, US send soldiers way back in 1991. They bring Orions and counted the gold not yet extracted. I could smell the Lumbumba airlift in his hair, as if it just happened yesterday, when he was just a young wide-eyed boy.

This country is built on gold and diamonds, but you won't find the streets of Kinshasa lined with it. The leadership still participates in its tradition of smuggling its own diamonds out of the country. Even Mobutu did it, and he nationalized the whole fucking thing (he named it Gecamines) and was reaping the proceeds anyway. But he had to smuggle from his own pot to make even more. Diamonds, gold, copper--you name it--its all here. every last bit of it. As the US prepares to scramble for the last bits of oil reserves it can justify stealing, you can feel standing here in this buzzing city, that it's only a matter of time before attentions focus once again on the "strategic minerals" that is the eastern DRC. I feel fortunate to be far away from the madness and despair of eastern Congo right now, that is for sure. there's already talk of treating Zimbabwe as another country in need of being "liberated" by the United States. Mugabe is unfortunate and horrific, yes, perhaps as bad as any other dictator. But the US might liberate them and give them what? Another dictator? Another one of these governments where the first two years is "provisional" and unelected, and then after that two year period, that country and its future democratic elections have been forgotten by the world community? Brothers and sisters....

AIDS has consumed this country perhaps far worse than even the wars of the last 6 years. you can pick a nice place here if you can actually count the bullet holes on one hand.

anyway. i'm rambling. Man, these folks sure have suffered. Me? Nahh...the munkoyo is pretty strong.

All these years of funding every side of strife..funding Mobutu, Kabila, Kabila's opposition, and so on. the more strife, the easier it is to get the diamonds. every new leader signs a new contract. and every new war supplies hungry workers (cheap labor) and hungry soldiers (cheap security, cheap smugglers). not to mention all the guns that wars sell. And genocides help depopulate, "get the natives out of the way" of the gold and diamonds and copper and col-tan and so on. gawd how could I forget Col-tan? That's the stuff the War Machine Mongers need for chips in their tax-looting Expensive Weapon Systems. 2.5 million dead in an ongoing war. Ugh.