We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (34 page)

Once again, Western leaders turned to Mobutu as a power broker in regional affairs; emissaries of the United States, the European Union, and the UN Secretariat shuttled in and out of Gbadolite, the vast jungle palace where Mobutu held court and where Habyarimana was entombed. France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called “the free world,” and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire—which meant, of course, to Mobutu, who shoveled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. “That genocide,” a European diplomat told me, “was a gift from God for Mobutu.” The Rwandan officials I spoke with believed that Mobutu, by tolerating and even encouraging the creation of a highly militarized Hutuland in Zaire, was seeking to ensure that this gift would keep giving.

“If anybody thinks Mobutu can continue to fool people, I don’t think it’s going to take very long to show people that we’re not fools,” Colonel Karemera, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, warned. The last battalions of UNAMIR had finally withdrawn from Rwanda in April of 1996, and one month later it seemed that the war everyone had been waiting for was getting underway. “Zaire is just provoking and provoking,” Claude Dusaidi told me at the Ministry of Defense. “If Zaire wants to expel its citizens and give them to us, let Zaire give them with their land.” I heard this line so often from officials in Kigali that I asked Dusaidi, who was famously blunt, if Rwanda was preparing to invade Zaire. “We have enough problems,” he said. “We don’t have to go beyond our borders to get frustrated. But if we wanted North Kivu, we would go take it.”

FOLLOWING THE MASSACRE at the Mokoto monastery, hundreds of Tutsi survivors managed to flee and take refuge in a nearby Zairean village. I wanted to know what was to become of them there. On my way to the border, I stopped at a camp in northwestern Rwanda where thousands of Zairean Tutsis recently expelled from North Kivu were being held. I spoke to about a dozen men, who said that when the Hutu Power attacks began early in 1996, Zaire had sent troops. The Tutsis had expected that the troops would defend them, that Zaire would protect its own people. Instead, most of the soldiers had joined in robbing them, and then forcing them across the border. “They made us pay them for transport to the frontier,” said a man, whose outfit—a pair of heavy-duty cross-country ski boots and an Icelandic sweater—testified to his sudden dependence on handouts.

The Tutsi refugees from Zaire were convinced that Mobutu was behind their troubles. “He’s a very strong man,” said a refugee who had been a Zairean civil servant for decades. “He’s been there thirty years, and every time he has domestic opposition he allows a civil conflict, then puts it down, and says, ‘
Voilà
, peace.’” The refugees also believed that Mobutu could restore order if he chose to. After all, his full, self-given name, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, has been translated as “the all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake,” and also as “the cock who leaves no hen alone.” Nobody seemed to doubt that everything that happened in his realm was his doing, by dint of his actions or inactions, and that the end result would be just what he intended.

But Mobutu didn’t want outsiders to see the work in progress. When I arrived at the border, I learned that Zaire was not admitting journalists. “They want to camouflage the total disorder,” said a Rwandan mechanic, returning from a day trip to Goma. “That country is finished. Businesses are pulling out.” But the border guards didn’t know me, and the customs men who grabbed my bag never even looked in it: what they wanted was ransom, a little drinking money, and three dollars sufficed.

Zaire, as a state, had long been considered a phantom construct. Its very name, which Mobutu had conjured up as part of a program of “authenticity,” was a bit of make-believe: “Zaire” was an antique Portuguese bastardization of a local word for river. And Mobutu, who liked to appear on television in clips that showed him walking among the clouds in his trademark leopardskin hat and dark glasses, had gone further, claiming the Adamic power of renaming all of his subjects—or, at least, requiring them to abandon their Christian names and take up African ones. In pursuit of the “authentic” he also nationalized all foreign businesses, put in place a constitution granting himself absolute power, prescribed a national dress code (neckties and suits were outlawed in favor of a snappily modified Mao shirt known as an
abacos
—short for
à bas les costumes
, “down with suits”); he replaced crucifixes with his portrait, struck Christmas from the holiday calendar, and purged every vestige of political opposition. “We are resorting to this authenticity,” he once said, “in order to rediscover our soul which colonization had almost erased from our memories and which we are seeking in the tradition of our ancestors.”

Mobutu’s principle, then, was a double negative: to erase the corrupt memory that had erased the genuine national memory, and thus to restore that original chain of memory. The idea was romantic, nostalgic, and fundamentally incoherent. The place Mobutu called Zaire had never been a nation before the rapacious King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, drew its map, and the very word “authenticity”—an import from the French existentialism that had been the vogue during Mobutu’s youth—was blatantly at odds with his professed Africanism. One is reminded of Pol Pot, who returned to Cambodia after studying in Paris, changed his country’s name to Kampuchea, chucked out the calendar, proclaimed “Year Zero,” and slaughtered a million or more of his countrymen to eradicate Western influences.

Mobutu, to magnify his own grandeur, systematically reduced Zaire to rot, and—despite the defiantly determined spirit of the great mass of Zaireans, who went on procreating, schooling, praying, trading, and debating with some eloquence their prospects for political emancipation—an alarming number of Western commentators took cynical solace in the conviction that this state of affairs was about as authentic as Africa gets. Leave the natives to their own devices, the thinking went, and—
Voilà!
—Zaire. It was almost as if we
wanted
Zaire to be the Heart of Darkness; perhaps the notion suited our understanding of the natural order of nations.

Of course, Mobutu was never more than a capricious puppet of his Western patrons, and ultimately even the idea of authenticity was abandoned to decay, as he shed any pretext of ideology in favor of absolute gangsterism. Zaireans—who used to be obliged to gather and chant Mobutist slogans like “It is better to die of hunger than to be rich and a slave to colonialism!”—watched Mobutu grow richer while they grew hungrier. With time, some even dared to modify Mobutu’s pet mantra about the “Three Z’s”—Zaire the country, Zaire the river, and Zaire the currency —by privately adding a fourth Z: Zaire the Zero.

All that remained of the state were the chief, his cronies, and his troops—a vampire elite, presiding over nearly a million square miles of decay. The so-called eleventh commandment of Mobutism was “
Débrouillez—vous
”—“Fend for yourselves”—and for at least a generation it had been the only absolute law of the land. Foreign visitors to Zaire were forever marveling that the place managed to survive at all. How did the center hold? A better question might have been whether there was a center. Having allowed his country to unravel, Mobutu liked to pretend that he alone kept it together, and as the war in North Kivu began to heat up, what worried many Zaireans and foreign diplomats even more than Zaire under Mobutu was the thought of Zaire after Mobutu.

“Tribal war and disaster,” my cabdriver said as we tooled into Goma, traveling in the oncoming lane of a divided boulevard because it was the side with shallower potholes. “In the end we’ll all pay for it.” A tour of the humanitarian agencies produced no better news. A convoy of three trucks belonging to CARE had been shot up the week before by machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades on the road near one of the UN camps. Thirteen Zaireans had been killed, and I found several Western aid workers with lakefront houses checking on the condition of their inflatable Zodiac boats, in case—or in hope—of an evacuation.

Everyone had stories of fighting in the hills, but little concrete information. At UNHCR headquarters, I found the repatriation officer sitting before a spanking clean desk. “Forget repatriation,” he told me; he was applying for a new post.

ONE WEEK AFTER the killings at Mokoto, I drove into the combat zone of North Kivu. The road ran west from Goma across the lava field, skirting the giant Mugunga refugee camp, where about a hundred and fifty thousand Rwandans lived in a sea of shanties draped with UN-issue blue plastic sheeting. A few miles on lay Lac Vert, the ex-FAR headquarters. The paved road ended in the town of Sake, a derelict settlement crammed with about thirty thousand people of the Hunde tribe, who had been chased out of the hills by Hutu fighters. Hundes, like Hutus, were mostly subsistence farmers, and the two groups’ rivalry was entirely economic and political. “Morphologically, we are the same,” one Zairean Hutu observed, employing the vocabulary of European “race science” to assert that there was no ethnic animus in the Hutu-Hunde conflict.

Beyond Sake, a dirt road rose sharply through the dense vegetation of the rain-soaked volcanic massif. We soon came to a clearing, and my driver gave me the name of a village. But there was no village, only plots of land where a village once stood, some charred beams, bits of smashed crockery, and sometimes a few bright flowers in a row that implied a human hand. We drove for an hour without seeing anyone—past the sacked homes of Hundes and the abandoned homes of Hutus, many of whom were said to have taken refuge with the Rwandans in the camps. Masisi was known as the breadbasket of Zaire, a zone so fertile, so temperate, and so moist that some crops would yield four harvests a year. Now the devastation appeared complete, except for occasional carefully tilled fields of vegetables, their greenery iridescent beneath low dark clouds that sporadically dumped a few minutes of bright rain.

Along steep, rutted switchbacks, the irregular hills tilted at obscure angles, opening at times into deep ravines with tumbling cataracts, then closing in with a forest of eucalyptus. It was a landscape well worth fighting for, but I couldn’t understand the endless procession of desolated villages. When you expel people and conquer territory, don’t you occupy it? Weren’t these hills supposed to be packed with Hutus? Or was the land just being prepared for the day when the money ran out in the camps? When at last we came to a village with a few people—Hutus and Zairean soldiers—my driver didn’t think it advisable to stop and ask what their long-term strategy was.

At the top of the escarpment the forests fell back and the vast alpine pastures of Tutsi herdsmen opened out, rolling over the domes of the hills and folding into the valleys. But there weren’t any Tutsis, and there weren’t any cattle. After four hours on the deserted road, we had covered about fifty miles and reached Kitchanga, a village where the Tutsis who fled from the Mokoto monastery had found temporary refuge. A large crowd stood outside a shack to buy pieces of a freshly butchered cow. The cow had also come from Mokoto—“escued,” villagers said, from the monastery’s dairy; there was suddenly so much beef in town that ten dollars could buy almost thirty pounds of it.

But ten dollars wasn’t enough to buy a Tutsi his life: the going rate for transport to the border was between twelve and fifteen dollars. Eight hundred of the Tutsis who had been attacked at Mokoto were now packed into a sodden and steaming thatch schoolhouse in Kitchanga, and they were too poor to pay for their own “ethnic cleansing.”

A FEW DAYS before I arrived in Kitchanga, a relief team from Doctors Without Borders had driven up to the Mokoto monastery and found the road blocked by two charred, naked corpses; the hands, feet, and genitals had been cut off, the chests had been opened, and the hearts had been removed. The relief workers counted ten corpses and smelled many more; they estimated the dead to number at least a hundred. While they were at the monastery, some wounded Tutsis came out of the bush where they had been hiding. One was a naked boy who had contrived to cover only the back of his neck. When he let the covering fall away, they saw that his head had been cut almost halfway off, exposing his spine and a patch of cranium. A doctor had sewed the boy back together, and I saw him walking tentatively around an emergency field hospital at Kitchanga.

A barefoot man in a tattered raincoat and shorts at the village school, who identified himself as “the captain of the Mokoto refugees,” said that many of the attackers had come from the UN camps. It was easy to identify them, he said, because “they spoke excellent Kinyarwanda and were well dressed,” while “we Zaireans are hill people, and feel more at home in Swahili.” He explained that some of his people had been able to flee when “the attackers, seeing others pillage, forgot killing to steal, and only came back later.” The Mokoto survivors had straggled into Kitchanga empty-handed, and a few old men were wrapped only in blankets because their attackers had stripped them naked, intending to kill them. No one could count on being so lucky again. The captain told me that the Hutu Power militias at Mokoto had chanted, “Kill, kill, kill,” and “This is how we fled our country.” Unlike the Zairean Tutsi refugees I had met in Rwanda, who said their only hope was to return to Zaire, the captain of the Mokoto Tutsis had given up. When he told me, “We want to go home,” he meant Rwanda. “We have no nationality here,” he said.

The Mwami of Kitchanga, the hereditary Hunde chief, a stout man in a brown velvet shirt, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a white baseball cap, agreed. “Truly,” he said, “the Hutus want to exterminate all the Tutsis.” His own people, too, were having a hard time protecting themselves: their fighters included boys of six and seven, and their arsenal consisted largely of spears, bows and arrows, and homemade rifles that fired nails. “It’s not an automatic,” the Mwami said of such a gun, “but it kills.” Kitchanga, which was formerly home to a mixed population of about two thousand people, was now an exclusively Hunde stronghold whose ranks had been swollen by an influx of thirty-six thousand displaced people. The Red Cross and the UN estimated that about half the population of Masisi, some three hundred thousand people, were displaced from their homes. Even the Mwami was living in temporary housing; his estate five miles out of town had been destroyed. I found him drinking banana beer in his “office”—a gazebo made of UN plastic sheeting—and he told me that Kitchanga was a very hospitable place, but that by giving shelter to Tutsis, it was making itself a magnet for a Hutu attack. He wanted the Tutsis out of there.