Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (19 page)

He also felt a sense of entitlement. After all, he was at least twenty years older than the Rwandan officers milling about; he had been a guerrilla leader in the Congo when they were still in diapers.

Kabila was also smarter than most gave him credit for. He realized there was little he could do at the moment other than bide his time and try to position himself. After all, the Rwandans’ ambitions were initially strictly military, and they had given little thought to the government they would set up once they controlled the conquered territory. Given Kabila’s seniority, the Rwandans allowed him to become the movement’s spokesperson and to begin setting up a political directorate for it.

He got his hands on a satellite phone himself and began calling members of the Congolese diaspora whom he had worked with in the past. Without his own soldiers on the battlefield, he would need to rally loyal advisors around him. He contacted one of his former comrades from the 1960s, who was a nightclub owner in Madrid. Another one was a lawyer in Belgium, while a third had been with him in Tanzania. As the rebellion became more visible, and Kabila began making appearances on radio and television, other diaspora figures contacted him, and his political clout grew.

Laurent Kabila emerged as an accidental leader of the AFDL movement and eventually as the president of a liberated Congo. In an example of Rwandan hubris, the RPF planners desperately tried to foist ideology and sincerity upon the Congolese they had handpicked. As ingenious as Kagame’s military planners were, their political strategy ended up being simplistic and short-sighted. For many Congolese who had labored long—and ultimately unsuccessfully—to overthrow Mobutu peacefully, Kabila was a living symbol of foreign meddling in their country. It is one of the Congo’s historical ironies that the same man came to be seen as a bulwark of patriotism and resistance against Rwandan aggression.

PART II

THE FIRST WAR

7

MANY WARS IN ONE

KIRINGYE, LWEBA, AND ABALA, ZAIRE, AUGUST–OCTOBER 1996

On August 30, 1996, the first battle of the Zaire war took place. Leaving their training camps in Rwanda, a small group of seventy Banyamulenge soldiers crossed the river into Zaire just south of the customs post where Burundi, Zaire, and Rwanda meet. It hadn’t rained in weeks—the short dry season was the perfect time to launch the assault, as the roads were in decent shape—and the group made its way quietly through the waist-high elephant grass. On the other side of the plains, they could see the outline of the Itombwe Mountains rising into the clouds, cradling the highland pastures where they had grown up.

At dawn, they hid in a banana grove close to the small village of Kiringye. As they were resting, a woman on her way to farm her cassava field stumbled into their makeshift camp and began screaming at the sight of Tutsi soldiers armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. They were tempted to kill her, but then let her go. She ran to the nearby military base, where she alerted Mobutu’s army. They surrounded the rebels and opened fire, killing ten and capturing five others. It was one of the few battles of the war that Mobutu would win. The war, still at the planning stage in Kigali, had been jump-started.
¹

The army’s ambush accelerated the spiral into outright conflict. The captured soldiers were paraded in front of television screens across the country. Five haggard-looking young men in military uniforms were placed under spotlights, with camera flashes illuminating their sunken eyes. This was the enemy. For many Zairians, it was the first time they put the Tutsi name to their distinctive features. “Rwanda invades!” read the September 1 headline in
Le Potentiel
, Kinshasa’s most read daily newspaper.

In Bukavu, the state radio read out an editorial titled “A Historic Chance for Zaire.” The broadcaster exhorted listeners not to believe the Tutsi’s lies about citizenship, using a metaphor that has since become routine when arguing that the Banyamulenge can never become Zairian: “A tree trunk does not turn itself into a crocodile because it has spent some time in the water. In the same way, a Tutsi will forever remain a Tutsi, with his or her perfidy, craftiness and dishonesty.”
²

By now, it was obvious that more and more Banyamulenge troops were infiltrating into the high plateau, where the rebels began stockpiling weapons and preparing for another attack. Farmers and traders hid in the bushes by the side of mountain paths, as bands of rebels with metal boxes of ammunition on their heads climbed up the mountainside. A movement in the other direction was also visible: More and more Banyamulenge youths began crossing the Rusizi River into Burundi at night, where they were met by guides who would take them to training camps in Rwanda.

Most Congolese refer to the 1996 invasion as the War of Liberation. The population had had enough of Mobutu; despite the suspicions regarding Rwanda’s involvement, crowds across the country welcomed the rebels as liberators. At the local level, however, this image of heroic patriots does not hold water. In the east, the advancing rebels became embroiled in bitter feuds between communities over power, land, and identity. Anti-Tutsi demagogues whipped up mobs to kill innocent civilians; the Banyamulenge rebels retaliated, blaming entire communities for their victimization. Thousands were killed.

A prime example of this was Anzuluni Bembe, the vice president of Zaire’s national assembly, who had created a youth militia called, modestly, Group to Support Anzuluni Bembe. The short, pudgy firebrand held rallies along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, calling on people to take up arms against the invaders. At a meeting at a local school in Fizi, he called out: “Children of Fizi, are you sleeping? The Banyamulenge are taking our country! I want you to get weapons and attack them, attack the Banyamulenge!”
³

In Uvira, Banyamulenge leaders were rounded up and put in jail, while the mayor mustered gangs of youths to kick their families out of their houses. Several days after the first clashes with the infiltrators, local authorities told the Banyamulenge to regroup in camps “for their own safety.” A local Banyamulenge leader later wrote about the experience of being arrested: “They beat us up and took us to jail.... Minute after minute, they brought in more Banyamulenge in that minuscule cell where there was a hellish stench due to the urine and feces and no oxygen. [Several days later] they took out the late Rukenurwa who they beat like a snake. His sobs made us all cry.”
⁴

Hundreds of Tutsi in eastern Zaire, but also in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, were harassed and beaten. The hysteria reached a fever pitch, in which anyone who had a thinnish, hooked nose and high cheekbones was targeted. At a border post with Rwanda, youths attacked and hacked to death a Malian businessman.
⁵

By 1996, social conditions in Zaire were ripe for youth-led violence. Due to Mobutu’s predation and disastrous economic policies, the country’s infrastructure and industry had collapsed. By 1996, the country had been through seven years of economic contraction. Zairians earned just over half of what they had been making in 1990. According to the United Nations, a full 27 million people, or 60 percent of the population, were undernourished. Even when people were paid, the money was worth little: Inflation soared to 5,000 percent in 1996.

This misery provided fertile terrain for ethnic prejudice. In the crowds, youths were able to channel their anger against a visible, known enemy. Leaders like Anzuluni provided added incentives, such as free alcohol and modest wages for some of their organizers. The Banyamulenge, while poor, had attractive and inflation-free assets: cows. Soldiers and youths rustled thousands of head of cattle in the early days of the war.

How can we explain this kind of brutality? It is difficult to describe the impact of abuse and dysfunctional government on the psyche of people in war-torn areas.

In March 2008, I traveled to various massacre sites in the region. Everywhere I stopped, people eyed me suspiciously, and local officials demanded to see my papers. Even though the war had officially come to an end years earlier, the region was still very tense; Rwanda and the Congo continued to fight a proxy war in the Kivus, each supporting different militia groups.

One morning, I was packing to leave for Makobola, perhaps the most notorious massacre site, when a friend from a local human rights group called me on my cell phone.

“Stop packing and turn on the radio,” he said.

I quickly tuned into a debate show on a local Protestant radio station to hear the member of a local political party say, “I wanted to draw your attention to President George Bush’s visit to Rwanda.” Bush was visiting Kigali as part of his whirlwind Africa tour. “Is it a coincidence that his visit comes at the same time as Nkunda withdraws from the peace process? At the same time as there is an American mercenary by the name of Johnson who is here in Bukavu, recruiting youths for the next Rwandan invasion?” He got my name wrong, but it was clear by his following description that he meant me. He said he had proof of my activity and that he would provide it.

Friends in local civil society helped debunk this rumor, and the analyst retracted his allegations. Nevertheless, I needed a good justification to prevent harassment in the remote areas. A nonprofit group agreed to provide me with a “mission order,” a hangover from the colonial era confirming that your employer takes responsibility for the trip. Local officials saw the piece of paper, with its letterhead and stamp, as a possible indication that I was not, as some apparently believed, working for the CIA.

I had taken a second, more important, precaution: I traveled with Remy Ngabo, a local human rights activist who was from the area and who organized interethnic soccer games as a way of reconciling youths from the Bembe and Banyamulenge communities. Once a month, the Banyamulenge players would walk five hours down the mountain to face off with a local Bembe team. The players paired up and spent the night at their rivals’ houses. Some of the Banyamulenge players were survivors of the 1996 massacres, and Remy hoped they would open up and tell their story.

Our plans were cut short before the soccer game could start. Alerted by the presence of a foreigner in her small village, the local intelligence official arrested me and Remy for suspicious behavior.

“Don’t you know it’s International Women’s Day today and I had to abandon my important activities in town to come climbing hills, running after you?” The woman huffed, leading us to her office, a bench under a mango tree. “All activities here have to be approved by me!” She chided us as we slalomed down through cassava fields.

In negotiating bribes, the local official’s main leverage is time. Prudence, as her name turned out to be, had no real reason to detain us, other than the fact that she was in charge of security in town. With nothing on her hands—except, apparently, a Women’s Day celebration—she could easily wait us out. Back in town, she sat us down underneath a mango tree and subjected us to a long lecture on the Rwandan threat and the superpower conspiracy against the Congo.