Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (16 page)

The initial tensions were between the “immigrants”—both Hutu and Tutsi—and the indigenous Hunde people. Every harvest, Papy’s family had to pay a tithe to the Hunde customary chief, and most tax collectors and land surveyors were Hunde. Papy’s father and relatives had been well taken care of by the Trappist monks and were wealthier than many Hunde peasants. Papy remembered being called “snake” and “dirty Tutsi” by kids at the market and in school.

By contrast, until the 1990s, relations with the Hutu community were warm. As a child, Papy had attended a boarding school fifty miles away from his home. When he walked home for long weekends, he would often be taken in and fed by Hutu. “Back then, we were all one community; we all speak Kinyarwanda, the common language of all Rwandans. It was politics that got us into this mess.” He wrinkled his nose. “Bad politics.” Relations between the Hutu and Tutsi only started to sour with the eruption of civil war in Rwanda in 1990. The hysteria there contaminated the Kivus, driving a wedge between the communities in North Kivu. Hutu youngsters, in particular those close to the border, rallied to Habyarimana’s side, while the Tutsi joined up with the RPF.

Papy remembered the RPF mobilization with a smile. “It was a great time,” he said. “We organized dances and big parties to raise money. Even the white priests would come and donate for the cause.” I wondered how he could have such fond memories when there was so much violence, but he shook his head. “There’s nothing like having your own country.
Il fallait tupate adresse
. We needed to have our own address.” Abruptly, he began to hum a melody; the words came back to him slowly:

Humura Rwanda nziza, humura ngaho ndaje!
Don’t be afraid good Rwanda, don’t be afraid I am coming!
Isoko y’ubumwe na mahoro.
The source of unity and peace.

Papy remembered with a smile: “I tried to leave in 1991, but I was only thirteen, so the recruiters turned me back—I was too young.”

Every family was supposed to provide one male child over fifteen to join up and fight. He had four older brothers who had already joined the RPF, and was eager to go himself. His father berated him constantly that he would never find a girl to marry, that he would be considered impotent, if he didn’t join his brothers in the rebellion. Frustrated, Papy continued his studies but joined the local Boy Scout troop that was being run as a premilitary education course by a local Tutsi leader. He and other Tutsi adolescents learned how to build bivouacs, give first aid, and dismantle and load an AK-47. In his free time, he baked
mandazi
, fried dough balls, and took them to the local market to raise money for the cause—a Congolese version of a neighborhood bake sale.

Finally, when Papy was sixteen, he joined the RPF. His parents rejoiced, and his father sold several of his cows to give him some cash to take along. His mother hugged and kissed him, telling him how proud she was of him and his brothers. “We knew that we were leaving to eventually come back and free our country.” Sitting in the bed of a truck with several dozen other youths, he traveled by night to Goma, sailing through the roadblocks, where Mobutu’s soldiers had been bribed to let them through. When they were out of earshot of the villages, the youths sang RPF songs
sotto voce
to bide the time.

The beginnings of his military career were bittersweet. He was elated, surrounded by like-minded youths, all humming with purpose and ideals. He had studied and could read and write, gaining him preferential treatment among the other youngsters. But the hard side of war also became apparent. He learned of the death of two of his older brothers, who had died in the RPF’s final push to take Kigali in 1994. Then there was the genocide, when the countryside was filled with stinking corpses, when you couldn’t even drink the water in the wells because bodies had been thrown into them and contaminated the groundwater. Everybody seemed to be a killer or a victim or both.

It was a world full of fury and pain; there didn’t seem to be anything pure left. When the RPF sent him and a friend back to school in Rwanda—they wanted some of their young soldiers to catch up on the education they had missed—his friend attacked the Hutu teacher one night, strangling him with a rope, saying that he was a
génocidaire
. Papy sought solace briefly in a Pentecostal church, where he and other soldiers would speak in tongues and sing all night, but he left soon afterwards, finding it hard to relate with members of the congregation.

Bugera stayed in Goma, preparing for an RPF invasion, even when the town was teeming with ex-FAR and Interahamwe. “As long as you didn’t go out at night and didn’t go into the rural areas, it was actually relatively safe,” he remembered.

Bugera had a construction company, and with the influx of aid organizations, he managed to win several lucrative contracts. Beginning in August 1994, when the RPF took control of the last ex-FAR holdout in northwestern Rwanda, Bugera used his company as a front to set up an elaborate network of RPF spies. “As soon as the RPF conquered Rwanda,” he told me, “they set their sights on invading Zaire, much sooner than most people realize.” Overnight, he replaced thirty of his bricklayers with Hutu RPF soldiers. Other RPF officers took up jobs as motorcycle taxi drivers, ferrying ex-FAR officers and exiled politicians around the province and collecting intelligence, or worked in the markets in the refugee camps. Bugera remembered one of his friends exclaiming in disbelief when she saw her brother, an officer in the Rwandan army, on TV posing as a trader in a refugee camp. “The RPF could tell you with topographical precision where all of their enemy’s troops were located,” he said with admiration. “It was like having GPS.” By 1995, young Tutsi soldiers had started infiltrating Goma, armed with maps on which they drew ex-FAR positions and strategic targets. “It was like Mossad,” Bugera said, smiling proudly. “These guys were good.”

The RPF’s daredevil efficiency was in stark contrast with the decay of the Zairian state. Bugera attended nightly meetings in the house of General Yangandawele Tembele, Mobutu’s regional military commander, where he would receive information regarding troop movements and political developments. Tembele, whom a UN official remembered as “famous for being afraid of his own soldiers” and stealing cars from the refugees, had been bribed by the Rwandans and even provided Bugera with one of his lieutenants as a liaison officer, institutionalizing his treason.
¹⁰
In 1996, with Tembele’s help, Bugera boarded a plane for Kinshasa, where he bought weapons and ammunition from corrupt officers. He packed the goods into a chest freezer, put dinner plates on top to conceal them, and wrote “Gen. Tembele, Goma,” on the lid. The porters at the airport groaned under the weight, complaining: “What is in here, boss? Rocks?” Bugera laughed.

By 1995, Papy and his fellow Zairian soldiers in the RPF were getting restless. The arrival of refugees had led to a drastic escalation of the violence. Until then, there had been a fragile alliance between Hutu and Tutsi in Masisi, as both communities had immigrated there from Rwanda during the colonial period and faced similar discrimination. With the arrival of the ex-FAR, Zairian and Rwandan Hutu allied together against the Tutsi, in order to loot their thousands of head of cattle. Still, some Tutsi families were holding out in Goma and in clusters in the surrounding hills. “The decision to abandon the soil on which your father and mother are buried is not an easy one,” Papy told me.

Based on the intelligence they were gleaning through their network of spies and moles, the RPF realized the ex-FAR were preparing a major attack.
¹¹
In early 1996, Vice President Kagame gave orders to set up two camps in Rwanda’s western provinces of Gisenyi and Cyangugu to regroup the Zairian Tutsi soldiers, including Papy, and train them as crack troops to form the vanguard of the impending invasion. “I had never seen so many soldiers in one place,” he remembered. It was during the training that he learned that ex-FAR and local Hutu militias had attacked his hometown of Ngungu, in Southern Masisi.

“I was sitting around the camp in the evening, eating from a pot of plantains and beans with some other soldiers, when a friend of mine from Ngungu came up crying,” he remembered. “‘They attacked Ngungu, they attacked Ngungu,’ was all he said. I knew my family had been butchered.” Two of Papy’s brothers and several cousins were among several dozen Tutsi who were killed.

Between 1995 and 1996, a total of 34,000 Tutsi fled to Rwanda from North Kivu. Barred by the RPF from owning radios, Papy and his friends gleaned bits and pieces of information about their families from refugees who managed to make it across the border.

I never knew what to make of Papy. He was friendly and open, but rarely laughed or showed much emotion. His voice was a steady monotone, his body lacking the gesticulations typical of many Congolese. “The war sucked the life out of me,” he told me.

He told the story of the wars by way of scars on his body—a shiny splotch on the back of his head from a piece of Zimbabwean shrapnel in 1999, a long thick scar that bunched up the flesh on his lower thigh from an ex-FAR bullet in 1996. He lifted up his T-shirt to show me a welt on his ribcage where a bullet had perforated his lung. Still, he smoked. “I’m not going to live long anyway, no need talking to me about cancer.”

Papy had left the army and come to Kinshasa looking for a job in 2007, even though many of his fellow Tutsi had refused to leave North Kivu and had continued to fight against the central government. Money and war fatigue had lured him out, he told me. When I asked him about his former comrades who remained rebels, he said, “We Tutsi have problems. We will do anything to protect our community, and it is true that many people want to destroy us. But there are also manipulators in the Tutsi community, who will use that fear in their own interest. ‘Oh, we must fight or the Hutu will kill us! Oh, take up your guns or Kabila will exterminate us!’ But you discover later that it isn’t true. We can’t spend the rest of our lives fearing other communities. We have to make that first step.” Then he shook his head. “But the stupid thing is that the Congolese government doesn’t seem to want us. There, too, there are opportunists who use the Tutsi threat to mobilize people. So we are stuck in the middle, between extremists.”