Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (50 page)

The massacre in Kasika, a small jungle village a hundred miles west of the Rwandan border, was a prime example of these tactics.
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Kasika has attained mythical status in the Congo. Politicians have invoked its name in countless speeches when they want to drum up populist support against Rwanda. Children in Kinshasa, who had never been close to the province of South Kivu, are taught about Kasika in classes intended to instill patriotism; Kabila’s government cited it prominently in a case it brought against Rwanda in the International Court of Justice. It was here that the RCD took its first plunge into mass violence just days after its creation in August 1998, massacring over a thousand villagers in reprisal for an attack by a local militia.

Kasika is nothing more than clusters of mud huts built around a Catholic parish on a hill overlooking a valley. It was the headquarters of the customary chief of the Nyindu ethnic community, whose house and office sat on a hill opposite the parish, a series of large, red-brick structures with cracked ceramic shingles as roofing, laced with vines.

When I visited, the only place to spend the night was at the parish guesthouse, which the church had recently equipped with several beds so that visiting priests could spend the night before saying Mass. Just above the house, on a small hill, was the church itself, a larger structure covered with green corrugated iron roofing and with rows of small holes in its sides for ventilation. The hall inside echoed when we opened the wide doors; it was bare except for some rickety wooden benches, and a large cross hung above a dais.

“ This is where it all happened,” explained the groundskeeper, who was showing me around.

“They were killed in here?”

He nodded. “Twenty-three. Including three nuns, the priest, and a catechist.”

The hall didn’t show any sign of violence. “Where are they buried?” I asked.

“You just walked over their graves,” he said, smiling.

Outside, in front of the church was the tomb of an Italian missionary, Father Mario Ricca, set neatly in cement and slate with the date “23.6.1973” chiseled into a stone plaque. He had founded the parish many decades ago and had stayed there until his death. Next to his tomb, overgrown with grass, were five other, barely visible graves. My guide pointed to what looked like a vegetable garden next to the tomb, where several wooden crosses had been stuck amid squash vines and weeds.

“We never had the time to give them a proper burial,” he said regretfully. “ We have nothing to remember them by. It is a shame.”

It was a disturbing image for a culture that reveres its ancestors. I later walked through town with my guide to visit other graves. He pointed vaguely at piles of dirt, long overgrown with shrubs and vines, by the side of the road. He had no idea who was buried where. “There are hundreds buried like this,” he said. There were no crosses, and no one had taken the time to rebury the bodies in a cemetery or even just weed the mounds they were currently buried under. Nowhere in town was there a monument to the dead. It was as if the town was still in a daze from the massacre and, a full decade later, hadn’t had the time to collect its wits enough to commemorate its victims.

The massacre followed what would become the standard mold for RCD abuses. Days after the rebellion began, a battalion of RCD and Rwandan soldiers marched through Kasika. The road was strategic, as it led to several lucrative gold mines. They had been sent to join up with rebel troops that had been stuck in Kindu, a major trade town on the Congo River two hundred miles to the west. Those marooned troops were led by Commander Moise, a legendary fighter and the second-highest ranking Munyamulenge commander among the rebels.

When the RCD rebels passed through Kasika on their way to Kindu, they stopped to meet with the traditional chief, François Naluindi, a young thirty-five-year-old who was extremely popular among his Nyindu tribe. He had launched several local farming cooperatives, through which he was trying to develop and educate the largely peasant community. He had recently married, and his wife was seven months pregnant.

Naluindi met with the Rwandan officers and slaughtered several goats for them to eat. The atmosphere was cordial, but the chief was nervous. In the backlands of his territory, a young upstart chief called Nyakiliba had been causing trouble. He had begun arming some youths with spears and old machine guns, saying that he would defend his country against the Tutsi aggressors. Like many other local militias, he called his group Mai-Mai (“water-water”), claiming that he had magic that would turn his enemy’s bullets into water. Nyakiliba’s real goal, Naluindi was told by his advisors, was much more mundane: He wanted to claim rights to a traditional territory much larger than his own and was trying to inflate his importance. He was a small-time thug but could stir up trouble nonetheless.

Just before the Rwandans arrived, Naluindi had held an emergency security meeting with Nyakiliba, warning him not to do anything brash. “You think you will be a hero, but you will have me and the population killed,” a village elder who attended the meeting remembered him saying. “ I hear you have seven guns. They have hundreds. How will you win?”
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Before the RCD rebels pulled out of town on the way to Kindu, their commander asked Chief Naluindi how the security situation was. Damned if I tell him, damned if I don’t, he thought, and he reassured the officer that everything was peaceful. The Mai-Mai, however, hadn’t listened to the chief, and a few miles outside of town they took a couple of potshots at the troops before running into the bush. The village held its breath, but there were no casualties, and the rebels continued on their way.

The troops picked up Commander Moise, exhausted from his week-long trek through the jungle, and made their way back toward the Rwandan border. On the morning of Sunday, August 23, 1998, a column of several hundred RCD soldiers passed back through Kasika. The population recalled their typical appearance: wearing gum boots and carrying their belongings and ammunition boxes on their head. A truck full of soldiers brought up the rear of the column, along with a white pickup carrying the officers.

It was the dry season, so the road was in decent condition, but the pickup had some mechanical problems and was lagging behind. As it came around a bend close to Chief Naluindi’s house, the Mai-Mai launched another attack on the RCD convoy, opening fire from a hut overlooking the road and riddling the pickup with bullets. Commander Moise died on the spot, along with two other officers. The remaining RCD soldiers fired back, but by then Nyakiliba and his boys had already fled into the bushes.

The commotion prevented the villagers from going to church. They watched in dismay through their windows as Rwandan troops came back to the site of the killing, bundled the bodies up, and transported them back to Bukavu. Troops milled about Kasika that day, searching for Mai-Mai, but the situation was otherwise calm. Nyakiliba and his Mai-Mai had fled to his home village in the mountains, thirty miles away. In the evening, an RCD officer visited the parish and asked to use the high-frequency radio there to contact their headquarters in Bukavu. According to the catechists who overheard his conversation over the crackly radio, the officer received instructions, but they couldn’t make out exactly what was said.

It was not difficult for me to find a witness to the massacre. The groundskeeper at the church showed me to a small mud hut built on the slope beneath the road. This was where Patrice,
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a local handyman and a catechist at the church, lived. It was a typical hut for the region: a low structure built on a frame of bamboo sticks, with mud packed onto the sides to keep out the cold at night. Patrice, a deferential man wearing an untucked, stained shirt, told me to sit on a bench in the corner. The shack was barely big enough for both of us, but people attracted by the presence of a foreigner quickly gathered by the window to listen to our conversation. On the wall there was a faded picture of Jesus in a wooden frame with a saying in Swahili: “A drunken wife arouses anger. Her shame cannot be hidden.” Arranged on a crossbeam overhead were Patrice’s few belongings: a machete, a row of Chinese-made AA batteries held together by a rubber band that served as a power source for his transistor radio, and a broken storm lantern.

“There was a thick mist in town that morning,” he began. “There had not been a Mass on Sunday due to the commotion, so the priest rang the bell to call the village to Mass that Monday morning. It must have been around 6:30. We saw some soldiers on the way to Mass, but didn’t think anything of it.”
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I had been awakened just that morning by a similar Mass. A catechist had struck the old rim of a car tire before slow choral singing in Swahili began to the beating of drums. When I peered through the air ducts in the side of the church, I had seen several rows of women and men swaying gently and clapping their hands. It was the same air ducts, according to Patrice, through which they saw the Rwandan soldiers gathering outside. They had machine guns and small hatchets slung across their shoulders.

“The priest had just begun blessing the host,” Patrice remembered, “when they entered the church. The priest was alarmed, but didn’t interrupt the consecration, motioning discreetly with one hand to the sacristy behind him, at the back of the church. I was sitting at the front of the church and made a run for it with six others. We hid in the thick bushes by the back door before the soldiers blocked off the exit.”

At this point, the crowd outside Patrice’s window began groaning and sucking their teeth. They knew what came next.

Patrice spoke calmly, making sure he didn’t forget any details. “ The Tutsi tied up the people in the church, hands behind their backs, and then took the priest and the three nuns outside. I could hear the nuns screaming, screaming: ‘ Don’t kill our father—please don’t kill him. Take us instead!’ Father Stanislas, the priest, told them to calm down, that the Lord would provide. The soldiers separated them, taking the nuns to the convent next door and the priest to the parish, where they forced him to give them money and his radio. My friend the plumber was hiding in the ceiling and heard all of this. Then they told the priest to kneel down and pray. And shot him in the back of his head.”

The crowd outside the hut where we were sitting erupted into lamentations: “They killed them all!” “They killed our Father!” “He was such a good man!” “His poor father went crazy afterwards—he was all he had!” “Animals!” Patrice looked down at his hands and shook his head. The name of the priest, he told me, was Stanislas Wabulakombe. In their language, it meant “What God wants, he does.”