Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (62 page)

To underscore his point and to bolster his position, Joseph immediately embarked on a diplomatic offensive. As one political analyst of the region remarked, “Devoid of any national constituency, he had decided to treat the international community as his powerbase.”
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The American ambassador in Kinshasa, William Swing, invited him to take up an invitation to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington that had been extended to his father. He traveled first to Paris, where he met with President Jacques Chirac, and then on to Washington, where he met with Secretary of State Colin Powell and later, privately, with President Kagame, with whom he discussed the possibility of a peace deal. He finished off his tour with an address to the UN Security Council in New York, all within a few months of becoming president.

His presidency marked an abrupt U-turn in government policy. His father had insisted that the war would be “
longue et populaire
.” It had been the former, but certainly not the latter. His son immediately abandoned this purely military approach.

After his speech at the UN, diplomats lined up to shake Joseph Kabila’s hand and applauded his desire to restart the peace process. His eagerness to comply with the demands of the United Nations put Rwanda on the defensive for the first time since the beginning of the war. Other factors also played in his favor. The American representative to the UN remarked, “We do not believe that Rwanda can secure its long-term security interests via a policy of military opposition to the government of Congo.” The British UN ambassador asked President Kagame to bring an end to the plunder of the eastern Congo.
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Several months later, a UN report concluded that Rwanda and Uganda were plundering the eastern Congo for personal enrichment and in order to finance the war.

The new Kabila was no pacifist. He did not stop fighting with his enemies; he just changed tactics. He largely respected the front line cease-fire but provided weapons and supplies to fuel the Mai-Mai insurgency on his enemies’ turf. It was as brilliant in its logic as it was brutal. The ramshackle Mai-Mai were little military threat to the RCD and their Rwandan allies, who had much greater firepower, but they provoked ruthless counterinsurgency operations by Rwanda and its allies, making them even more unpopular. It was typical guerrilla warfare, as practiced by Mao Tsetung and Che Guevara: Keep the enemy swinging with nine-pound sledgehammers at flies.

Suddenly, it was Rwanda and Uganda who were seen as the obstacles to peace. The RCD rebels refused to allow UN peacekeepers to deploy into their territory, seeing it as a “declaration of war,” prompting demonstrations against them in Kisangani and Goma.
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Kabila, on the other hand, urged the Security Council to increase its deployments and to relaunch the investigation into the massacres in the refugee camps that his father had so adamantly blocked.

Within his own government in Kinshasa, the new president took equally drastic steps. Three months after he came to power, he sacked almost his entire cabinet, including most of the people who had chosen him as his father’s successor. The aging generals who had fought side by side with his father since the 1960s received handsome pensions and were retired. In their place, he appointed a new group of technocrats, young Congolese who had not been as tainted by corruption and warmongering. The new finance minister came from the International Monetary Fund, the new information minister was a U.S.-educated journalist. The average age of the new ministers was thirty-eight.
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But who was in charge during these turbulent reforms? Who allowed Joseph Kabila to take such drastic steps and reverse his father’s policy?

To a certain extent, during the early days of his presidency, the government was guided by Kabila’s international partners. Western ambassadors came with wish lists of people they would like to see sacked and made decisions that needed to be made to advance the peace process. Both the Angolans and the Zimbabweans were tired of the war and encouraged Kabila to bring an end to the conflict. After all, most of the population saw the various rebel factions—with the possible exception of Jean-Pierre Bemba’s MLC—as foreign proxies and would not vote for them during elections. “Sign a peace deal, stand for elections, and consolidate your power” was the advice of western and African diplomats alike.

In general, Joseph Kabila seemed much less in charge than his father, who had managed state affairs with an iron fist. Joseph was not often seen on television and rarely took charge in cabinet meetings. Where almost of all his father’s ministers had spent at least a few days in prison, Joseph almost never arrested any collaborators. Instead he slowly marginalized them if they fell out of favor.

Government officials often did not know where they stood with the president, a style of management that kept everyone guessing. When they went to present projects, he would nod at their comments but not say anything. Thinking that he wanted more explanations, they would expound further, only to be met by more silence or a few words. Encouraged by his polite smiles and silence, they would leave thinking they had succeeded in convincing him, only to find out weeks later that he had canceled the project.

This kind of prevarication often shone through in his contacts with international partners as well. “It used to infuriate Kagame and Museveni,” a UN official who attended meetings of the heads of state told me. “Kabila would be silent throughout the meeting; then someone would come and whisper something in his ear, and he would answer.”
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Kabila’s reticence also marked his personal life. He kept out of the limelight, avoiding cocktail parties and other social events. He would wake up at around 6 o’clock in the morning, check the news and his e-mail, and work out in his exercise room, lifting weights and sweating on his stationary bike. Before he assumed the presidency, he lived in a modest townhouse with his common-law wife, Olive Lemba, a light-skinned woman he had met in the eastern Congo during the AFDL. He doted on his young daughter, Sifa, named after his mother.

Surrounded by well-groomed bureaucrats, Joseph was conscious of his modest background. He began French classes soon after he arrived in Kinshasa and enrolled in an online course in international relations at Washington International University, a small outfit based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, from which he obtained a bachelor’s degree after completing ten courses online. His French improved considerably, as did his self-confidence.

Diplomats who met him regularly were often impressed by his knowledge of world affairs and understanding of the region. A favorite rhetorical tool he liked to use was to defend his record by comparing the Congo with western countries. “You criticize democracy here, but our elections turnout was over 80 percent—in the U.S., barely half of the voters show up,” he told an American diplomat.
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When confronted with allegations of corruption, he countered with the Enron scandal in the United States and Silvio Berlusconi’s manipulation of laws to protect himself from prosecution.

He did not have many close friends. His twin sister, Janet, and his younger brother, Zoé, visited frequently, and a Tanzanian friend showed up from time to time. In the evenings, he would relax in front of the television and play video games with his brother, a habit that earned him the nickname “Nintendo” from a skeptical French ambassador.
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He also began to take an interest in designer watches, clothes, and sports cars. On weekends, he relaxed in his Kingakati ranch outside of Kinshasa, drove rally cars around a dirt track, and received a few select diplomats and businessmen. One had the impression of repressed energy, a man looking for a release valve. In Kinshasa, foreigners going for a morning jog along the Congo River—a secluded, leafy area with shady streets and ambassadorial residences—would sometimes be surprised by the young president whizzing by on a motorcycle, followed by a pickup full of sheepish presidential guards. Unfortunately, he could only drive his Maserati around the street outside his presidential house in Kinshasa, and then only up to half its maximum speed; there were too many potholes.

Joseph Kabila’s greatest accomplishment was the peace deal with his rivals. Of course, peace was in his interest, as he was recognized as the incumbent president and controlled the bulk of economic assets and state administration, while his main military rivals were tarnished by their association with Rwanda and Uganda.

In February 2002, after several false starts, Kabila finally met with his main military and political challengers in South Africa for the Inter-Congolese Dialogue, peace talks that would result, after ten months, in a comprehensive deal that would unify the country.

The setting for the Inter-Congolese Dialogue was surreal. The South African government had leased part of the Sun City luxury resort, once an entertainment haven for apartheid South Africa elites. The inaugural ceremony took place in the Entertainment Center’s Superbowl area, a stone’s throw away from Jungle Casino and the Bridge of Time, gaudy buildings decorated with stone elephants and artificial waterfalls. Three hundred and thirty Congolese delegates spent their free time trolling the slot machines and racking up tabs at the bars.

After two months of talks, on the eve of the deadline fixed by the facilitators, the government and the MLC shocked the conference. Following late-night meetings in a nearby hotel, the two delegations announced that they had reached a bilateral agreement, making Joseph Kabila president and Jean-Pierre Bemba prime minister in the joint government. The talks collapsed in furor, as Kabila and Bemba went back to their respective headquarters to set up the government, while the RCD went back to the trenches.

The deal was bound to fail. Bemba refused to come to Kinshasa to take up his position, citing security concerns. In the meantime, regional fault lines began to shift. Together with their British counterparts, the American diplomats went on the offensive with Rwanda and Uganda. Washington abstained from a vote to renew the International Monetary Fund’s loans to Rwanda, while London privately made clear to Kampala that it would not extend further loans if it did not withdraw its troops. In June 2002, President Kagame committed to withdrawing all Rwandan troops within three months. Museveni followed suit in November. Journalists lined up at border posts to see a total of 30,000 foreign troops march across, as crowds of Congolese celebrated.

The RCD and MLC, already destabilized by their allies’ withdrawal, further weakened their positions with blunders on the battlefield. In May 2002, RCD commanders brutally put down a mutiny in Kisangani, killing over a hundred sixty civilians. Bodies that had been eviscerated and weighed down with stones floated to the surface in the Congo River in plain sight of journalists and UN investigators. To the north, the MLC launched an attack against a rival faction of the RCD while also deploying troops to support President Patassé in the neighboring Central African Republic. On both fronts, Bemba’s soldiers were guilty of egregious human rights violations.