Congo - Laurent-Désiré Kabila

Born in Kalemi, Kabila is not from any major ethnic tribe in the Congo. With his seven-month KO of Joey Mobutu, this guy's either the George Foreman or Idi Amin of modern Africa. Kabila, in his late 50s, has finally achieved his dream of taking over an area the size of Western Europe. His job now is to figure out how to govern more than 250 tribes and rebuild an economy that has been sliding over the abyss. If he does it the right way, Congo could become an affluent country with its copper (Shaba), diamond (Kasai) and gold mines. Kabila is a down-home, old-line Marxist who battled Mobutu for three decades. Camped out in the cool jungles around Lake Tanganyika, he never made much headway but did convince the Soviet Union, Cuba and China to send his rebels lunch money. Back then, his group had the snappier sounding name of the People's Revolutionary Party and the name he had for his country to be was the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In his days as a jungle fighter (Kabila hosted Che Guevara in the 1960s before Che decided Desire's boys made better detox patients than revolutionaries), Kabila got to know Yoweri Museveni, now leader of Uganda. It paid off big-time when Paul Kagame was looking for a front man to cover his back. When it became apparent in early 1997 that Kabila's march to Kinshasa would hit little flak, Kabila doffed his military fatigues in favor of business attire, ready to cut deals rather than throats. One mining firm gave Kabila's government US$50 million as down payment to dig for copper and cobalt as well as a private jet. In 1998, diamonds earned Kabila's government a cool $616.5 million. Meanwhile, Kabila has banned all political parties and essentially created a military dictatorship run by Tutsis-turned-Hutus. He's lost Museveni's support, as well as that of neighboring Rwanda, as Rwandan and Ugandan Hutu rebels continue to freely use Congo soil as a base for their attacks on those two countries.

After many of his original government started their own rebellions, Kabila has filled government positions with his relatives, built a support base of cronies from Katanaga and has developed all the hallmarks of a classic African dictator.