Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (35 page)

Guy called me back at the hotel that afternoon to tell me that Ofeibea and her crew had been released unharmed.

Late that Friday evening, as I sat in the Memling Hotel writing about the final day of Mobutu’s thirty-two-year rule, my telephones started to light up again. Likulia’s aide-de-camp told me to expect the general/prime minister to go on television at 11:30 that night to announce an agreement stipulating in part that the ten thousand theoretically loyal troops who remained in Kinshasa would lay down their arms. Another confidant, General Ilunga, Mobutu’s interior minister, told me that Mahélé had urged Likulia to cross the river to Brazzaville, to wait there in safety; in case of a foreign intervention, Likulia could then be called upon to rule as an interim leader. “Both of us will be marked for death; at least one of us must remain alive,” Mahélé is reported to have said.

In the instance, neither man was leveling with the other, but Mahélé’s objectives, at least, had a partial purchase on honor. Likulia had already been selling himself to the French as an eleventh-hour alternative to Kabila, whom Paris, paranoid as ever, imagined to be an American battering ram wielded to shatter the last vestiges of French influence in Central Africa. Mahélé had taken Ambassador Simpson up on his invitation to place a call to Kabila’s satellite phone, and may have envisioned himself as a future commander of the army or perhaps one day even president. The bottom line, though, was that Mahélé truly wanted to avert a catastrophe in Kinshasa, while Likulia’s only hope for advancement depended on one.

Yet another call came. The caller, who was with Mahélé, said that Mobutu’s son and dreaded enforcer Kongulu had called the general from Camp Tshatshi. Few words were spoken, but the air of emergency was unmistakable. “We have a situation here,” Kongulu said. “I need you to come right away.”

Mahélé understood this to mean that a revolt was spreading through Camp Tshatshi among the troops from Equatoria Province, who were Mobutu’s ethnic relatives and the final rampart against the rebels. With the AFDL closing in and Mobutu gone, the troops from the Division Spéciale Présidentielle feared for their lives. It was as if Mahélé’s worst nightmare were coming true. All that remained was for the men at Tshatshi to break out of the barracks with their weapons and rampage through the town, looting while the looting was good.

In fact, it was another of Mahélé’s nightmares, the fear of his own assassination, which he had confided to me a few days before, that was coming to pass. Mobutu’s generals had spread the word that he was a traitor, and the word of an uprising at Tshatshi was little more than a trap, one that the general, true to himself and to his uniform, fatally could not resist.

Not long after his first call to my informant, who even today insists on remaining unnamed, Kongulu called again. “Mahélé is dead,” he announced starkly. “The situation is extremely dangerous. Tell me where you are.” Alarm bells were going off in my informant’s mind, but for some reason he answered truthfully. “I’m at the Intercontinental.” My informant then fled the hotel, taking refuge in a mansion nearby, in the ritzy Gombé district.

Next came a call from Guy. “Howard, Mahélé is dead. I saw the whole thing. They killed him while he was trying to address the troops. Soldiers from the DSP began denouncing him as a traitor and tried to arrest him. Mahélé’s bodyguards tried to push him into a car and rush him away from there, but somebody ran up to him and shot him in the head, point blank.”

I told Guy that I felt sure that Kongulu was the killer, but he insisted that was not the case. “We had arrived when this happened. It happened before my eyes. We could have been killed ourselves.”

The early editions of the
New York Times
were already coming off the presses with the news of Mobutu’s departure emblazoned across the front page. I needed to update my story with this latest drama, but by the rules of the trade, in order to state Mahélé’s death as a fact, one eyewitness was not enough. I required a second source.

I called Ambassador Simpson on his private number and insisted that he come to the phone. “I have it from eyewitnesses that Mahélé has just been murdered,” I told him. There was a long silence. “Mr. Ambassador, can you confirm that?” Simpson told me to call back in a few minutes. When I reached him the second time, he told me that all he could confirm was that Mahélé “had been detained” at Camp Tshatshi. Hours later, the U.S. military attaché confirmed the news of his death.

Dawn came after a brief and fitful sleep. Artillery could be heard far away, its low and muffled boom like the slamming of a distant door. Soon my phones were ringing again, and with the calls came details of Kongulu’s marauding all-night rampage through the city, culminating with a visit to the Intercontinental Hotel, where he searched for traitors, real and imagined.

Word came of an SUV abandoned in the middle of the road that ran alongside the river in Gombé. A small, clandestine pier sat half hidden in the overgrowth nearby. By all accounts, Mobutu’s most dangerous son, the one who had nicknamed himself Saddam Hussein, had fled into the neighboring Congo Republic.

Nervous and excited, the press gathered by the hundreds downtown to share impressions and exchange snippets of information in the lobby of the Memling Hotel. A carload of Mobutu’s generals had stopped by and urged the reporters not to wander the streets. Then they zoomed off with a loud screech.

I returned to my room on one of the upper floors, and within minutes a call came from Guy. “Stay in your room because a death squad is going to pull up to the hotel and spray it with machine-gun fire, and maybe launch a grenade or two,” he warned. This was the last gasp of the regime, the long-dreamed-of scenario whereby death or danger to foreigners draws the French army, and perhaps the Americans, too, across the river from Brazzaville, preventing a Kabila takeover of Kinshasa.

The elevators crawled with traffic, so I ran downstairs to the lobby as fast as I could and shouted to my colleagues to clear the area and go to their rooms. Someone asked what I was talking about, and breathlessly, I explained the substance of the telephone call. For a moment, it was absolute pandemonium as the lobby cleared.

I waited in my room for over half an hour, and nothing happened. The only noises were the rumbling of the artillery, which had grown steadily closer, and the occasional clatter of small-arms fire. Ofeibea and I then summoned our nerve and set out onto the streets, against the advice of our colleagues, who were now warning
me
of the danger. Sticking close to the walls of buildings for cover, in almost comical mockery of a police movie, we headed for Avenue 30 Juin, the city’s weed-filled Champs-Elysées. The only other people about were glue-addicted street children, a scruffy young teenage boy and a couple of little girls, perhaps child prostitutes, their barely formed breasts half exposed in their grimy, tattered clothes.

At 5 p.m. the first Kabila troops came marching into the city center, in parade fashion: neat and orderly. Conspicuously, they were not,

for the most part, Rwandan. The columns seemed to stretch without end as the troops marched, dripping sweat and visibly fatigued, chanting in the humid late-afternoon air, kicking up dust from the fine riverine soil they trod underfoot.

Once it became clear that the shooting was over, huge crowds began descending into the streets and leaning from the balconies of the central city buildings, cheering, “Congo! We are free! Congo! We are free!” as they watched the would-be liberators file by.

Bantus love a spectacle, and now it fell to Laurent Désiré Kabila to provide it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Le Roi Est Mort (Long Live the King)

Mobutu’s homecoming in Gbadolité turned out to be little more than a hasty stopover. Neglecting to pay the troops can be a costly mistake, even if they are from your own ethnic group. Knowing the game was up, the Ngbandi garrison in the city heeded Mobutu’s old watchword—pay yourselves—and commenced looting. In better days, Mobutu had flown off to vacation from here with his large clan in tow aboard specially chartered Concordes. For his final departure from Gbadolité, only his innermost circle would clamber aboard the Soviet-built Ilyushin cargo plane loaned to him by his longtime protégé, the leader of Angola’s UNITA rebellion, Jonas Savimbi.

As Mobutu’s plane gained altitude, though, even these rudely downgraded travel plans went sour when members of the Division Spéciale Présidentielle, irate at being left behind to face advancing rebel armies, opened fire on the jet. Thus went the departure of Mobutu, molder of nations and tamer of men.

Laurent Kabila’s very first act as president, on May 17, 1997, would be to restore the name Congo to the country—Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Washington wasted no time in recognizing the new reality. “We will no longer be calling this country Zaire,” State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns announced. “Zaire went away on Friday afternoon with Mobutu. That country has vanished.”

Mobutu had changed the name from Congo to Zaire in 1971 in a bid to overcome Lumumba’s enduring legacy, but only with time would I realize how carefully Kabila was stealing from Mobutu’s playbook, although sometimes, as with the name change, he was doing things in reverse. It was not long, too, before extracting criticism of the new regime from the American Embassy would become as difficult as it had once been under Mobutu and his serviceable prime minister, Kengo wa Dondo—that is, before Washington designated them, respectively, a “has-been” and a “big crook.”

With the change in regimes, I moved across town to the Intercontinental to watch the new elite as it settled into residence in this ritzy hotel, built by Mobutu in the 1970s as one of the proudest monuments to his own glory. Breakfast and cocktail hour were the best times to observe this motley crowd—Kabila’s ethnic allies from Katanga Province, who formed his inner circle, and the Tutsi officers from Rwanda who eyed them carefully from beneath ten-gallon hats, or as some observers already whispered, pulled the real strings. Exempted from paying any bills, the Congolese piled their plates high, and wined and dined a parade of mistresses new and old, who grew ever more gaudily dressed as the weeks went by. The Rwandans, for their part, affected fatigues or sober business suits and were far more modest in their tastes, or at least more discreet. This cast was filled out by the kadogo, the pint-sized boy soldiers with AK-47s, who would crowd into the elevators, excited to be riding in them for the first time, and the carpetbagging foreign businessmen, here to cut quick and sleazy deals with a government in need of cash.

As I said, when Kabila and his sponsors entered the city, they had been careful to keep the Rwandan forces who constituted the brunt of the rebel army out of the picture. But when it came to taking charge of the country, and of the sprawling city of Kinshasa, there was no hiding the identity of the men who owned the guns. The first signs of trouble came early in the new regime, when Tutsi soldiers launched an ill-advised crackdown on moral laxity and roughed up some downtown streetwalkers. The new government then issued an edict banning miniskirts, and began rounding up women—including my driver Pierre’s girlfriend, Nounou—who had failed to comply.

The rebels may have won some good press early on by straightening out the bedlam at border crossings in the east, but we were in a city that lived on beer and soukous and reveled in its Gomorrah-like image. All it took to realize this was to listen for one hour to the hip-churning tunes that played on the radio. But the Rwandans and their handpicked new president, with his long years in the bush, were way out of touch.

I had no idea of its importance at the time, but the flap over miniskirts helped seal Kabila’s image as a man totally out of sync with “his people” and, even worse, in the eyes of the Kinois, residents of Kinshasa, who soon invented a zombie-like dance in mockery of Kabila, known as the “dombolo,” a man held prisoner by his sponsors. The warning signs multiplied steadily. Severe-looking Tutsi agents took over security at Ndjili airport. Kabila’s son, Joseph, a shy, boyish man in his late twenties,
¹²
was named to lead the army, but
everyone
answered to a Rwandan officer named James Kabarebe. Though burly and mightily prepossessed, Kabila himself soon appeared to be imprisoned by a wiry phalanx of Tutsi bodyguards.

Kabila and his minions contented themselves with the illusion of power, dividing up the spoils from regimes past by setting up a Bureau de Biens Mal Acquis, or Office of Ill-gotten Gains, to parcel out the spacious villas built by the Belgians in the breeze-conditioned hills of Binza. Meanwhile, schools and health clinics were not yet opened, and Congo, a vast and proud, albeit disheveled, country of 45 million, was being reduced to a satrapy by Rwanda, a tiny and cramped land of 7 million.

The first serious headaches, though, came from the United Nations, which was demanding access to Mbandaka to investigate reports of mass killings of Hutu refugees there. Kabila had been toying with the organization for a long time, as the United States ran interference in the Security Council, just as it had done at the outset of the war, when Washington had blocked calls by Canada and France for humanitarian intervention.

Here again, Philip Gourevitch, the chronicler of the Rwandan genocide whose writings had deeply influenced the Clinton administration’s thinking on Central Africa, helped supply the rationale. Gourevitch’s marked sympathies for Rwanda’s Tutsi often led him astray on the Congo, and he played an important role in selling Laurent Kabila in Washington, ironically by restoring him to the Lumumbaist tradition of respectable nationalism. In his writings, Gourevitch curiously airbrushed the old Congolese highwayman and mountebank, minimizing his ideology and avoiding unpleasant details of his dodgy past.

“Oddly, a number of recent reports have called Kabila’s qualifications for leadership into question by noting that Che Guevara, who visited the Congo in 1965, found him wanting in Marxist-Leninist fervor—as if Che’s regard had suddenly become a credential for statesmanship,” Gourevitch wrote in one of a series of articles on the fall of Mobutu. Subsequently, he downplayed the importance of the massacre of Hutu during Congo’s civil war, accusing the United Nations of “cavalier, imperial irresponsibility” in Central Africa, and ridiculing its demands to be allowed to investigate and account for the dead.

“For weeks now, the U.N. sleuths have been stuck in Kinshasa, waiting for government travel approval, which appears more unlikely each day,” Gourevitch wrote in
The New Yorker.
Rwandan Hutu, he said, had formed the core of Mobutu’s defenders, and were perceived as “future génocidaires by
Kabila’s forces,
and this population was the main target of the massacres that Kabila’s government is denying ever happened.” A bit later, Gourevitch said of international calls for an investigation of the alleged atrocities: “It’s hard to imagine that anybody in the Congo stands to benefit from this test of wills.”

With a new strategic vision wheeling into position in Washington—one based on fighting Islamic radicalism in Sudan, securing the lion’s share of Angola’s petroleum reserves for American oil companies and atoning for its criminal negligence during the Rwandan genocide—the White House anointing of Kabila as one of its newly designated group of African renaissance leaders was an act of expiation meant to soothe Tutsi-led Rwanda. Long rumored, Gourevitch’s influence in Washington became explicit during the visit of Madeleine Albright to Kinshasa on December 12, 1997, and for Kabila, a man who had lived a life of such little consequence, it was an undreamt-of consecration.

Kabila’s breaking out in Mobutu’s leopard’s spots had accelerated alarmingly in the weeks before the Albright trip. His government had banned opposition parties and begun ruling by decree. It had successfully forced the United Nations to replace the head of its forensic investigation team, effectively sacking Roberto Garreton, a renowned Chilean lawyer and human rights investigator, after he produced a preliminary sixteen-page report that identified forty sites where Kabila’s AFDL was suspected of having committed atrocities. The worst stories centered around Mbandaka, where the government had banned visits by journalists, and had repeatedly disrupted UN attempts to commence field work, as Gourevitch wrote.

Etienne Tshisekedi had been silenced by house arrest, and anyone else who challenged the government was being thrown into prison. “We thought we were getting a sweet orange and we ended up with a bitter lemon,” one of the streetcorner parliamentarians told me in Matongé, speaking with the deft and playful allusiveness typical of Kinois. “Maybe our country is just cursed.”

But if the Congo was cursed with dictators, it was also blessed with a resilient civil society, and articulate new opposition figures willing to risk their freedom to fight for democracy were sprouting up as fast as Kabila could eliminate them. One of them was Arthur Zahidi Ngoma, a former UNESCO official, whom I first met in August 1997. “In our countries, dictators establish themselves by two methods, by creating fear, and when that no longer works, by corrupting people,” Ngoma told me. “We have seen it all before under Mobutu. Kabila has been jailing people. Now he is going to move to the next phase.”

Pinned down in the capital covering Mobutu’s fall, I had been unable to get to Mbandaka or any other flashpoint during the final stages of the rebels’ advance. Thus I could not assess for myself the proliferating charges of the massacre of innocents. But Robert Block, a South Africa–based reporter for the
Wall Street Journal,
had somehow managed to visit Mbandaka in early June 1997, about two weeks after Kabila’s triumph, and the accounts of fresh atrocities by the Tutsi troops that he brought back were bone-chilling. “Townspeople say they little suspected what was in store when the rebel troops strolled into town on May 13, virtually unopposed,” Block wrote. “The people of Mbandaka were on the streets eager to welcome the soldiers of Kabila’s army as liberators. . . . As soon as they arrived [the soldiers] said they were looking for the place where the refugees were kept. . . . They said that their first enemy were these refugees from Rwanda, not the population and not even the Zairian soldiers of Mobutu’s army.

“What happened next beggared belief, say those who were there,” Block continued. “The soldiers approached the refugees near the harbor. When they arrived, says Justin, a local Red Cross worker from the nearby village of Wendji, the soldiers had someone shout in Lingala, the local language, ‘Zairians get down.’ The Zairians dropped to the ground, Justin says, while the Rwandans remained standing. ‘They shot them. They shot them. They shot them,’ Justin says, trembling.”

In the end, the UN human rights team was never allowed to do its work in Mbandaka, where two thousand or so people were gunned down or beaten to death, and given testimony like that quoted by Block, it is little wonder why. I never made it to Mbandaka, either, but with Madeleine Albright’s visit to Kinshasa approaching I came very close to the truth of the killing fields there nonetheless.

By August 1997, the stalemated UN investigation had become the biggest story in the Congo. All around, Central Africa was coming apart at the seams, and Kinshasa’s most interesting diversion, as depressing as it was, was an invitation to dine on the balcony of a tony downtown high-rise to watch the fireworks across the river. Brazzaville could be reliably counted upon to deliver a breathtaking sound-and-light show every evening, as militias loyal to the present and former presidents slugged it out savagely with heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and anti-aircraft batteries. Just a few miles and a monster of a river away from wherever we might gather by evening over Chardonnay and canapés, a half million refugees were on the march, almost completely ignored by the world.

“You have the French ambassador living in his bunker, protected by thirty gendarmes, and you have the oilmen who work in Pointe Noire, who live in a heavily protected enclave, and you have us watching from up here,” a diplomat remarked to me over cocktails at a UN dinner party in early September. “Other than that, this is a war without witnesses.”

With that, someone asked if I was interested in going into the “other” Congo with a UN human rights team to visit a refugee camp a day’s boat ride downriver from Mbandaka, where 4,800 Hutu lived more or less stranded. I answered yes.

I showed up at Kinshasa’s junk-strewn, inner-city airfield early on the appointed morning. It was the same place I had flown to Kikwit from to report on the Ebola epidemic two years earlier, but that already seemed like a lifetime ago. There was a small crew of UN refugee officials, yet another banged-up old DC-3 and a hold full of food and medicines. With minimal fuss we were airborne, and after a short flight that followed the course of the river northward, until it reached a great fork—the junction with the Sangha, a huge river in its own right—we put down. I expected to spend two nights in Loukolela, the little town where the refugee camp was located, and had brought a minimal kit: my briefcase-sized satellite phone, a laptop, my Sony shortwave radio, one change of clothing, spiral notebooks, a novel and some magazines. There was also a medicine kit stuffed with something for almost any tropical eventuality.

The resident staff in the camp wore the hardships they endured like badges of honor. In their neat little tent city, temperatures soared to well over 100 degrees every day, and the humidity seemed to surpass saturation. In greeting me, their eyes appeared to be saying, We’re just waiting to watch you wither.