Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (22 page)

It was not just in South Kivu that the war brought calamity. Throughout the country, the invading forces pillaged. The killing, however, was largely confined to the east, where the Tutsi communities had long-standing quarrels with other groups. In North Kivu, the invading Rwandan troops systematically rounded up and killed thousands of Hutu villagers, accusing them of supporting the
génocidaires
. Many prominent Hutu businessmen and traditional chiefs were also killed. Tutsi communities, of course, nurse their own memories of persecution and decimation at the hands of others.

None of the killings has led to prosecutions or even a truth commission that could ease the heavy burden of the past. Skeletons can still be found, stuffed into septic tanks, water cisterns, and toilets, reminders of the various tragedies. In Bukavu, mass graves dating back to this period are now covered with the cement of shopping centers. Every new bout of violence summons these spirits up and manipulates the past into a story of victimization, ignoring the wounds of the other communities. Peace, many diplomats and locals say, is more important than justice, especially when the government is full of yesterday’s military leaders. Prosecute those leaders, and they will start the war again, the prevailing wisdom goes. Plus, some Congolese leaders say, war is nasty, and people die. One erudite politician reminded me:“Didn’t General Ulysses Grant give an amnesty for Confederate soldiers after the American Civil War? Didn’t the Spanish do the same for crimes committed under Franco? Why should it be different for us?” Unfortunately, the impunity has thus far brought little peace, and the criminals of yesterday become the recidivists of tomorrow.

8

THE DOMINOES FALL

Yo likaku, obebisi mbuma, bilei na ya moko!
You monkey, you are destroying the seeds, that will be your food!

—KOFFI OLOMIDE

BUKAVU, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1996

Lieutenant Colonel Prosper Nabyolwa was sent in October 1996 to Bukavu, on the border with Rwanda, to be the commander of operations for Mobutu’s army. “Naby,” as his friends called him, knew the town well: He had been born in the hills just outside of Bukavu and had gone to the Jesuit secondary school perched on a hill in the middle of the lakeside town. The provincial capital of half a million people was enjoying the end of its three-month dry season; for once, its hilly roads were not clogged with mud and puddles, although a slight haze of dust hung over the whitewashed buildings, getting into clothes and food. At a mile above sea level, the nights were cold, while the cloudless days were scorching hot.

The experienced paratroop commander, who had been trained at military academies in Belgium and Oklahoma, surveyed the situation. It didn’t look good. The Rwandan infiltrations across the Rusizi River south of Bukavu were continuing; intelligence reports told of Rwandan troops and their AFDL allies massing on the other side of the border to attack the refugee camps that sprawled out on either side of town. Naby had been taught how to deal with similar guerrilla threats during his training courses. His task would have been feasible for a disciplined army with adequate resources. But that was not what Naby had at his disposal.

Over the past twenty years, Mobutu had cannibalized his own state, particularly his army. Not surprisingly for a leader who had taken power through a coup, Mobutu feared his own officers the most, and he made sure that they would not have the wherewithal to contest his power. He gutted his regular army, depriving it of resources and salaries, while he invested millions in separate, paramilitary units—the presidential guard and the
garde civile
—which he then pitted against each other. Throughout these various units, he named close associates, often members of his own Ngbandi tribe, as commanders and allowed them to get rich off extortion rackets, gun-smuggling, and illegal taxation. A similar situation prevailed in the intelligence services, which proliferated and spied on each other. “We didn’t have an army; we had individuals,” Nabyolwa remembered.
¹

When he arrived in Bukavu, Nabyolwa took stock of the situation. There were 800 presidential guards, 1,000
guardes civiles
, and 200 paratroopers in town who answered to different chains of command. The paratroopers had gone to seed, abandoning their positions to moonlight for private security companies in order to make a living. The presidential guards told Nabyolwa that they were deployed to protect the refugees under a deal they had negotiated with the United Nations. Despite Nabyolwa’s entreaties that they had sworn an oath to protect Zaire with their lives, they refused to send any of their troops to the front lines.

The lack of intelligence further confused matters. Commanders in Bukavu received exaggerated, contradictory information about the security situation to the south of town in the Rusizi plain and in the High Plateau, where Rwandan vanguard parties began skirmishing with Nabyolwa’s units in August and September. “I didn’t know whether it was it 300 or 3,000 enemy troops active there,” he remembered. He sent reports to the army command in Kinshasa but received little response. Politicians in the capital were too busy feuding with each other to pay much attention to the situation in Bukavu, a thousand miles away. When Nabyolwa radioed Kinshasa to tell them he urgently needed one battalion of special forces, the commander of the presidential guard answered, “We have problems in Kinshasa, too, you know. We need the soldiers here.” Mobutu had been in power for so long, Nabyolwa remembered, that no one could conceive of him failing, least of all to a Lilliputian neighbor like Rwanda.

The Rwandan attacks to the south of town sent thousands of refugees and Zairian civilians spilling into Bukavu, where they sparked alarm and protests. On September 18, the Catholic Church and civil society groups rallied tens of thousands of people in the streets of Bukavu in protest of the “aggression by the Tutsi invaders.” Waving banners and singing songs, they streamed down Avenue Lumumba, the main thoroughfare. They demanded that the government in Kinshasa “mobilize the means ... to kick the invaders out of the national territory and to resolve, once and for all, the issue of citizenship.”
²

This firebrand rhetoric was, of course, not well received on the other side of the border. Thousands of Banyamulenge had been seeking refuge in Rwanda from the abuses of Mobutu’s army and armed gangs. A week after the demonstration, Nabyolwa tuned into Radio Rwanda to hear Prime Minister Pasteur Bizimungu give a speech. “There is no difference between the Interahamwe and the Zairian authorities,” he thundered. “Each time they mistreat us, Rwanda will get revenge.... If their gambit is to chase out those who have lived in the country for four hundred years, the only Banyamulenge we will welcome are the children and old women. The others must stay there to correct and give a lesson to those who want to chase them out.”
³

It was not long before it became clear to Nabyolwa that he was in serious trouble. Perhaps the first sign was the Lemera hospital massacre. The clinic was perched on the steep hills overlooking the Rusizi plain, forming an ideal military outlook. It had been founded in the 1930s by Swedish Pentecostal missionaries and by the time of the war was the largest hospital in the province, with 230 beds, several foreign doctors, and advanced medical equipment. Given its proximity to the fighting, it had received dozens of wounded soldiers, both Hutu militiamen and Zairian troops. The hospital had asked the Zairian government for protection in exchange for providing treatment, and a company of around a hundred men had been deployed there.

At dawn on October 6, nurses at the hospital were woken by gunfire from the military camp. The generator had been switched off for the night, but the almost full moon provided some light. The Rwandans were known to infiltrate vanguard units while the rear guard shot volleys into the air; it was possible that the rebels had already reached the hospital. Nurses saw fleeting shadows moving through the nearby banana groves. Havoc broke out in the rows of hospital beds, as those wounded soldiers who could move tore intravenous tubes out of their arms and ran, hobbled, or crawled for safety. The nurses barricaded themselves into their rooms and waited.

A few villagers ventured down to the hospital the following afternoon. The scene they saw turned their stomachs. Seventeen patients, mostly soldiers, lay dead in their beds and sprawled on the floor in the wards, bayoneted and shot to death. Broken glass, Mercurochrome, and intravenous fluids lay spilled around them. The attackers had looted the stock of medicines, spilling cartons of syringes and bandages on the floor. In the private quarters, they found the bodies of three nurses—Kadaguza, Simbi, and Maganya—in their white aprons, all shot by AFDL and Rwandan troops. At the nearby Catholic parish, several bodies of Zairian soldiers lay twisted in the courtyard. Inside, they found the bodies of two Catholic priests in their habits, also shot dead.
⁴

Similar attacks took place across the Rusizi plain, following the same pattern: infiltrators from Rwanda attacking army positions and refugee camps, scattering the Zairian army and Hutu militia and killing civilians. Soon, 220,000 cowering refugees were flooding into Bukavu, bringing with them word of more massacres and spreading panic.

Nabyolwa decided to go to the Rusizi plain himself to rally the troops. He drove his Land Rover pickup to Luvungi, the Zairian army’s most advanced position, only to find his soldiers piling into a truck, with their belongings and guns stacked up over the cabin. “Colonel,” one of the men told him, hurriedly saluting him, “You are on your own.”

Retreating back to town, he reported to his commanding officer, telling him they urgently needed reinforcements. “He couldn’t have agreed more,” Nabyolwa remembered, laughing. “When he heard what had happened, he succumbed to a sudden stomach ailment. He packed his suitcase and said he was going to Kinshasa to get more troops. He was on the next plane out.”

The following day, Nabyolwa’s mood was lifted briefly when he got word that a plane was arriving with the promised reinforcements. He hurried to the airport to receive the troops, only to see a cargo plane landing with a company of
garde civile
troops disembarking with their wives, children, and belongings. “There were two hundred shabbily dressed soldiers with pots and pans on their heads. Goats were running around the airstrip. They asked me where they could set up camp.” He moaned in dismay, holding his head in his hands. “Goats!”

Nabyolwa called headquarters in Kinshasa three times, urging it to deploy more troops and more resources. Nothing came. Finally, as the enemy troops were just a few miles from Bukavu, Naby rang the army chief of staff one final time: “General, if you wait any longer you will have to pick us up as prisoners of war from the Red Cross!”

If the Rwandan genocide and the exodus of the
génocidaires
and refugees to Zaire were the immediate causes of the Congo war, the decay of Mobutu’s state and army provided the equally important context. By 1996, Zaire was a teetering house of cards—as the
Economist
quipped, “They call it a country. In fact it is just a Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa.”
⁵

The army that Nabyolwa joined in 1973 was a jumble of contradictions. Like the rest of the state apparatus, it was present everywhere, harassing and taxing the population, but effective nowhere. On the one hand, the Zairian Armed Forces (FAZ) received hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance from western countries in their effort to make Zaire a bulwark against the socialist states—Angola, the Republic of Congo, and Tanzania—that surrounded it. On the other hand, despite their partners’ profligacy, Mobutu’s army was rarely able to deal effectively with even the most amateurish challenge. On numerous occasions, Mobutu had to call on his foreign allies or mercenaries to prop up his floundering army.