Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (22 page)

Americans are overly fond of good guy/bad guy dichotomies, especially in Africa, which for many already seems so unknowable and forbidding. But analogies like these paralyze debate over Central Africa rather than clarify it. Nothing could ever pardon the organizers of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, yet it is no less true a fact that the wild adventurousness of the Tutsi leader Paul Kagame, who mounted a Rwandan insurgency from bases in Uganda in 1990, primed a country that had already long been an ethnic powder keg for a sharp escalation in violence and hatred.

The Tutsi, unlike Europe’s Jews, were a small minority that had enjoyed feudal tyrannies in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi for centuries. In Burundi they had perpetrated genocide against the Hutu three times in a generation, and in both countries they were committed to winning or retaining power by force of arms.

There were no good guys in Rwanda’s catastrophic modern history, and the same was true for Zaire’s civil war. We in the press were far too slow in seizing upon the recklessness of Rwanda’s invasion, and by the time the true dimensions of the tragedy it had unleashed could be discerned, almost no one cared.

On our way to Tingi-Tingi, our old DC-3, a shiny and unpainted model, probably built sometime in the late 1940s, flew low over the unbroken carpet of forest below, so low that the air inside the aged cargo plane never really cooled down on that blazing hot day. The handful of reporters allowed aboard were sweating in the aft amid the din of the airplane’s propellers, and the jittering tambourine sound of ten thousand loose rivets rattling.

We were told Tingi-Tingi was 125 miles southwest of Kisangani, but the tiny settlement was too small to figure on my Michelin map. As we reached our destination, there was no airport below. There was not even a landing strip. What awaited our plane’s rubber wheels instead was the pitted asphalt of a narrow, old two-lane highway, long abandoned to the jungle.

Throughout the flight my mind searched for images of what to expect at Tingi-Tingi, but in the end, nothing could have prepared me for what awaited us. When the fading drone from the plane’s engines announced our imminent landing, I looked out the window as we banked for the descent and discovered a scene worthy of
The Ten Commandments.
On either side of this road, pressed to its very edges and sometimes spilling onto the highway itself, was a sea of refugees— 150,000 people or more, dressed in tatters and jumpy with excitement over the arrival of a special visitor bearing desperately needed relief supplies. Ours was the second of two identical planes to land. The first was loaded with aid, and, I suspected, with crates of guns as well. As we touched down, the sea of people parted in a feat of just-in-time reactions. I saw mothers reaching out to yank the shirts of overexcited children, and others sucking in their guts or feinting and skipping backward like skilled boxers slipping a punch.

Later we learned that someone had been killed during the landings, his head lopped off by the first airplane’s wing. If true, the incident had done nothing to dampen the mood of joy for these people who had walked for seven weeks through some of the world’s most inhospitable territory with killers in their midst and more killers on their trail. As we taxied, I was impressed by the way the crowd’s eyes were fixed on the airplanes’ glinting skins; from the looks of beatitude they doubtlessly imagined their salvation was at hand.

As Ogata began her tour of the camp, working the crowd and giving encouragement to the relief officials in the manner of a politician working a rope line, only far more dignified, I broke away from her party. There would be little time on the ground, and chances like these to encounter the wandering Hutu population were too rare to limit myself to a tidily arranged inspection tour.

Wide-eyed refugees swamped me as I plunged into the crowd. Many were desperate to tell me their stories, but could speak only Kinyarwanda. Others, their faces severely drawn, their ribs and shoulders protruding sharply through their flesh, held out their hands in hope of food. Others simply wanted to touch me, almost as if to confirm that this tall, well-clothed foreigner was not an apparition.

A thirty-year-old Protestant pastor named Thaddée Twagirayeza stepped forward to identify himself, and managed to quiet the crowd. “Like many of these people, I fled the combat in Rurengeri in July 1994, and lived in a parish in Bukavu,” he said. “Most of the people here were living somewhere in South Kivu. When the war broke out in Zaire, we fled into the forest, moving westward, without clean water, without food, without medicine and without hope, in fact. Reaching here alive was the greatest trial of my life.

“Most of the ground we covered was uninhabited. Whenever we did find a village or a small town, the Zairian army had already passed through. Everything had been looted, and the villagers had fled.”

I had little doubt that if I had allowed him to continue talking, Twagirayeza would have kept me planted there until it was time to leave. His story was powerful, but equally remarkable was the hold that he exercised over the people huddled around us. No one in the huge crowd interrupted while he spoke.

I recalled things I had read about the regimented and hierarchical nature of Rwandan society, a feature that had made the hundred days of door-to-door butchery perpetrated against the Tutsi possible. I was also wary because of what I knew about the role of church people in the genocide. How could I know whether this pastor had been one of the many Hutu men of the cloth who had called on his flock to go out and exterminate the cockroaches, as the Tutsi were called in the terminology of the genocide? There was simply no way to rule it out.

As I moved on through the crowd, I soon settled on a new interlocutor, or rather, he settled on me. Eugène Munyangoga, a thirtyfive -year-old teacher from the Rwandan town of Ririma, introduced himself to me in as low-key a way as the surrounding crush of people allowed, proffering a piece of paper. They were credentials stating that UNICEF had selected him as a camp aide. As I read it, Munyangoga began to talk, his words spilling forth in a jumble that mixed personal history, details about the camp and stories about the extraordinary trek that had brought these people this far.

“The people you see here are survivors,” he said with a clear touch of pride. “But we will have to begin moving again soon, and many are simply not in any condition to carry on. We will have to say goodbye to them. For them, Tingi-Tingi will be the end.”

I told Munyangoga that I wanted to see children, and I asked him if he would translate for me. I was suffocating with doubt, not knowing whom I could trust or what I could believe, but my gut said that children beneath a certain age should be free of any taint from the genocide. Hearing their stories might deliver me from one moral conundrum—assessing the humanity of people who may have committed beastly crimes—even if it placed me before another: the helplessness of innocents.

Munyangoga told me the camp had its own makeshift orphanage. Some of its occupants were children whose parents had disappeared long ago, and others were children whose parents had only just succumbed to hunger, malaria or the unrelenting diarrhea that comes from drinking pond water.

The orphanage was nothing more than a tent, really, and as we neared it, three barefoot girls approached us. They wore simple muslin dresses, stained and torn from their walk through the forest, and one of them, Sophie, had a plastic rosary with a small cross that dangled on her bony chest. She and another girl named Marie-Claire were both twelve. Another girl named Edwige, feral and silent throughout, was said to be thirteen.

“We were separated from our parents in the forest,” said Sophie, the smallest of the three, but by far the most self-assured. “Whenever I would ask someone if they had seen my parents they would either say that they had been left behind, or they would just shake their heads and say they didn’t know.”

Marie-Claire then spoke up and said that she had not seen her parents since the refugees in Bukavu broke camp in a panic after it came under attack from a rebel mortar barrage in the first days of the war. Then, deeply suspicious, she asked me why the airplanes had landed here. Most of the refugees had seen the DC-3s as a portent of their salvation, but others clearly feared that something much darker was afoot, perhaps a forced repatriation.

I followed up my quick explanation of the visit with a question: How do you feel about going home? “We will never go back to Rwanda. The Tutsi will kill us,” little Sophie said, her eyes widening and her voice suddenly aquiver. “If they try to put us in an airplane we will run away. We must remain here in Zaire, even if it means dying.”

I caught a glimpse of the Ogata party in the far distance. They were wrapping up their tour and beginning to gather near the airplanes. My time was already running short. It was now or never for a frank discussion with Eugène Munyangoga. “There are fighters here, aren’t there?” I asked him directly. His face froze, in a reaction that I immediately took for an admission.

“We don’t call them fighters, but yes, there are former army members here among us,” he said. “They have been receiving weapons from the Zairian army. Some of them were unloaded here today.”

Munyangoga himself seemed conflicted. His job as a camp worker was the only thing that had spared him from forced enlistment in the Hutu effort to fight off their Tutsi pursuers, a fight he said he wanted no part of. Then again, he said, he knew that every day the mortar fire from the rebels was drawing closer. With no return fire, they were all as good as dead.

What does one say to a thirty-five-year-old Hutu man who, whatever his denials, might have had a hand in one of the century’s great murder sprees? I thanked him for his help, and, sensing the humanity in both his person and his predicament, I wished him good luck. It was all I could do.

My last conversation in Tingi-Tingi was with Mike Deppner, a Canadian doctor who was the medical coordinator for the UN refugee agency. Mike had spent a lot of time on the ground here, and had a keen sense of the perilous fluidity of the situation. He also had a deep understanding of the military and humanitarian stakes at hand.

“Things are moving very quickly. Too quickly,” he said. “Last week we were scrambling to set up a basic camp in Amisi. That has been destroyed already, and the people from Amisi are on their way here. It has been this way ever since Goma. The only thing that has changed is that the process is speeding up, and the deeper we get into Zaire, the heavier the concentration of the FAR becomes.” The acronym FAR stood for the Forces Armées Rwandaises, and referred to the remnants of the country’s former Hutu army.

Deppner spoke with a quiet anger that was altogether distinct from the smooth, well-worn diplomatic formulas of the visitors from UNHCR headquarters. They were international civil servants in both title and style; he was emphatically a man of the field for whom lives lost often meant stains on his own clothing, not merely digits in a statistical tally.

“In strict military terms, the rebels would be foolish to try to take Kisangani from this direction,” he said. “Normally you just don’t rush down the path of greatest resistance. But that is exactly what they are doing, and the reason they are pushing in this direction is the refugees. They were unable to make them return to Rwanda. Now it looks like they just want to kill them.”

Events later proved Deppner right. Most of these refugees were indeed slaughtered. The killings occurred just days after my visit, and the bodies were buried so hastily that later they seemed to call out from the grave. Months later, after Kabila had been installed in power, he blocked UN human rights investigators from visiting the mass graves in Tingi-Tingi, and in many other parts of his country. The United States provided political cover, blocking condemnation of the regime in the Security Council and lobbying for the slimmest possible accounting of the massacres.

But the will to survive of some of the refugees had been more powerful than the bullets that rained down upon them. Quite by accident, the following year, in yet another refugee camp six hundred miles to the west, which they had reached almost miraculously by foot, I would encounter some of these people and hear their stories. But first, there would be a war of sorts.

I dropped the name of Guy Vanda, the closest aide of Mobutu’s son Kongulu, and won quick approval from the Zairian general in charge of Kisangani airport to hang around for a few days. He even offered to give me a tour of the city’s defenses. Ogata’s Caravelle was taking off into the sunset, and with darkness approaching and no other contacts on the ground, I had to find a place to stay quickly.

As I set out from the airport on foot, a car full of foreigners stopped to ask where I was going. They were from the World Food Programme, and after scarcely a minute of conversation they offered me a place to stay. It was one of those breaks that one thanks the stars for. I rode through Kisangani’s heavily pitted streets for the first time as darkness fell on the equatorial town. At first blush, the city seemed as if it had little to recommend itself: On the riverfront, huge cranes sat rusted frozen, undoubtedly just as they had been for years. Downtown, meanwhile, was nothing more than a dust-ridden collection of miserable little cement-box houses with tin roofs.

This was the innermost river station, the scene of innumerable horrors since the days of Leopold II, the port beyond which no boats traveled. Kisangani had once boasted movie theaters and a bowling alley. There had been a Rotary Club and foreign consulates. People had attempted the grafting of Western culture here many times, but it never seemed to take. Outsiders were forever promising “progress,” whether through industry, administration or Western religion, but seeing how it always involved violence and rape, the Africans who eked out a living here preferred to be left alone.

The diamond trade was the only surviving business in town, as was made plain by the cheaply stenciled advertisements on the walls of the storefronts. Rambo Diamond bore the image of a large gem and a machine gun. The next shop on the dusty roadway, Mr. Cash, strove for a slightly less intimidating image, with its picture of sparkling gems set off against a crudely reproduced $10,000 bill.