We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (39 page)

Girumuhatse was suffering from a nasty cough, and he sat doubled forward over his knees on a low stool, staring unhappily at the floor. When he told me that he had commanded people from about fifty families during the killings, Emanuel let out a little snort. “Did you direct all of that?” he said in a mocking tone. “Just you?”

Finally, I asked Girumuhatse if it was true that he had tried to kill his wife’s brother. Only then did I realize that Emanuel understood French, because his expressions lurched out of control. But Bosco refused to relay the question; Girumuhatse, he said, was shutting down with embarrassment. A few minutes later, Emanuel stepped outside, and at that point Girumuhatse told me he had tried to save his wife’s brother, explaining, “I tried to take him to his neighborhood to protect him, so that he wouldn’t be killed here before my eyes.”

When I got up to leave, Girumuhatse walked outside with me. “I’m glad to have spoken,” he said. “To tell the truth is normal and good.”

21

UNSOUND OF BODY—his prostate cancer spreading—in his final days as President of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko was incontinent. Trophy seekers who scoured the military camp where he played out his endgame in Kinshasa found little of greater interest than the Big Man’s diapers. It was said that Mobutu’s mental grip was also rather weak. Several people who boasted impeccable access to the gossip of the old court assured me that by the end he was barking mad—pharmaceutically and characterologically unmoored, sometimes maundering and sometimes vivid with rage—and steadfast only in his delusion that he was on the brink of battering Laurent Kabila’s rebel Alliance, which had in fact conquered his immense land almost to his doorstep in just seven months.

And yet, Mobutu’s last completed act as President suggested that, at least in broad terms, he grasped what was happening. On May 11, 1997, he ordered that the remains of Rwanda’s assassinated Hutu Power President, Juvénal Habyarimana, be exhumed from their mausoleum on his estate at Gbadolite and brought to Kinshasa aboard a transport plane. Mobutu was said to fear that Kabila’s cohort might rip Habyarimana from his rest and make mischief with him, and he wanted the Rwandan disposed of. Through four days and four nights, the dead President of Rwanda remained in the plane, on the tarmac at Kinshasa, while the dying President of Zaire made his satraps scurry, one last time, to figure out what to do with the ghoulish cargo. The verdict was cremation, not a normal Congolese rite. Improvising a little over the body of a man who had been a practicing Catholic, Mobutu’s fixers impressed a Hindu priest into service, and Habyarimana went up in smoke. The next morning, Mobutu, too, had flown away—to Togo, then Morocco, where he soon died—and within twenty-four hours of his departure the first soldiers of the RPA marched into the capital of Zaire at the head of Kabila’s Alliance.

IN FRETTING OVER Habyarimana’s last rites, Mobutu had really staged a funeral for a generation of African leadership of which he—the Dinosaur, as he had long been known—was the paragon: the client dictator of Cold War neocolonialism, monomaniacal, perfectly corrupt, and absolutely ruinous to his nation. Six months earlier, when the Rwandan-backed rebel Alliance first captured Goma, I had driven directly to Mobutu’s lakeside palace at the edge of town. The gates stood open and unguarded. The Zairean flag lay in a lump in the driveway. Munitions abandoned by Mobutu’s Special Presidential Division littered the grounds—heaps of assault rifles and cases marked “TNT” packed with sixty-millimeter mortar rounds. Five mint black Mercedes sedans, a shiny Land Rover, and two ambulances were parked by the garage. Inside, the house was a garish assemblage of mirrored ceilings, malachite-and-pearl-inlaid furniture, chandeliers, giant televisions, and elaborate hi-fis. Upstairs, the twin master bathrooms were equipped with jacuzzis.

Goma was largely a shantytown. Its poverty was extreme. One day I stopped by the house of an acquaintance who had gone away, leaving his dogs. Their snouts stuck out beneath the locked gate. I was feeding them some United Nations high-protein biscuits when three men came around the corner and asked for some, too. I held out the box to the first man, who was clad in rags, and said, “Take a few.” His hands shot out, and I felt the box fly from my grip as if it were spring-loaded. The man’s companions immediately pounced on him, tussling, cramming biscuits into their mouths, snatching biscuits out of one another’s mouths, and along what had seemed a deserted street people came running to join the fray.

Mobutu’s Jacuzzis were lined with bath oils and perfumes in bottles of Alice in Wonderland magnitude; they must have held about a gallon apiece. Most were quite full. But one appeared to have enjoyed regular use: a vat of Chanel’s Egoïste.

He bathed in the stuff.

That was Zaire, and in the spirit of Louis XTV’s
“L’état c’est moi,”
Mobutu was fond of boasting, “There was no Zaire before me, and there will be no Zaire after me.” In the event, Kabila—who used to call Zaire
“le Nowhere”
—made Mobutu’s word good; on May 17, 1997, he declared himself President, and restored to the country the name Mobutu had scrapped: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The speed with which he had swept to victory owed much to the fact that, as a rule, the Zairean army had preferred to flee than to fight, raping and looting its way through town after town ahead of the rebel advance. The only forces that truly made a stand for Mobutu were tens of thousands of fugitive fighters of Rwanda’s Hutu Power and a couple of dozen French-recruited Serbian mercenaries.

Kabila, too, had required foreign help to accomplish his march so efficiently, and not only from Rwanda. Behind his Alliance there had formed a pan-African alliance representing the political or military enthusiasm of at least ten governments across the continent. After the initial rebel victories in North and South Kivu, as Congolese recruits flocked to Kabila’s cause, support also poured in from neighboring states—Angola, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia—and from as far afield as Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Had the war in the Congo happened in Europe, it would probably have been called a world war, and to Africans the world
was
at stake. For this was the war about the Rwandan genocide. As Uganda’s President Museveni told me shortly after Kabila was sworn in: “The big mistake of Mobutu was to involve himself in Rwanda. So it’s really Mobutu who initiated the program of his own removal. Had he not involved himself in Rwanda, I think he could have stayed, just like that, as he had been doing for the last thirty-two years—just do nothing to develop Zaire, but stay in what they call power, by controlling the radio station, and so on.”

Mobutu had certainly been warned, and not only by those who dethroned him. In the study of his abandoned palace in Goma, I found a long memorandum about the Rwanda conflict addressed to Mobutu by one of his counselors. From its contents it appeared to have been written in 1991, not long after the RPF first invaded Rwanda, at a time when Mobutu was presiding over the negotiation of a series of short-lived cease-fires. The memo described Habyarimana’s court as “composed for the most part of intransigent extremists and fanatics,” and predicted that the RPF rebels would “in one manner or another realize their final objective, which is to take power in Rwanda.” The memo urged Mobutu to serve as “a moral umbrella” and “the Spiritual Father of the negotiation process” without alienating the RPF or Uganda’s President Museveni, and above all to protect the “primordial interests of Zaire” regardless of who should prevail in Rwanda.

Standing there—as a looter, really—in Mobutu’s “liberated” study, reading this banal document that had been rendered remarkable only by the enormity of intervening events, I was struck again to think how completely the world was changed by the genocide in Rwanda. It wasn’t necessarily a nicer or a better world, just a few years and a million deaths ago, before the genocide. But in central Africa it was a world in which the very worst was still unknown.

In 1994, during the height of the extermination campaign in Rwanda, as Paris airlifted arms to Mobutu’s intermediaries in eastern Zaire for direct transfer across the border to the
génocidaires,
France’s President François Mitterrand said—as the newspaper
Le Figaro
later reported it—“In such countries, genocide is not too important.” By their actions and inactions, at the time and in the years that followed, the rest of the major powers indicated that they agreed. Evidently, it did not occur to them that such a country as Rwanda can refuse to accept the insignificance of its annihilation; nor had anybody imagined that other Africans could take Rwanda’s peril seriously enough to act.

The memory of the genocide, combined with Mobutu’s sponsorship of its full-scale renewal, had “global repercussions, wider than Rwanda,” Museveni told me, “and here in Africa we were determined to resist it.” Just as Mobutu was what Museveni called an “agent” of his Western puppeteers, so the Rwandan
génocidaires,
who had once again threatened to reduce the entire region to blood, owed their sustenance to the mindless dispensation of Western charity. The West might later wring its hands over the criminal irresponsibility of its policies, but the nebulosity known as the international community is ultimately accountable to nobody. Time and again in central Africa, false promises of international protection were followed by the swift abandonment of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the face of extreme violence. Against such reckless impunity, the Congolese rebellion offered Africa the opportunity to unite against its greatest homegrown political evil and to supplant the West as the arbiter of its own political destiny.

I OFTEN FOUND it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe—plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty,
and
laden with promise. Of course, a key process that had helped European peoples pull toward greater prosperity and saner governance was colonialism, which allowed for the exporting of their aggressions and the importing of wealth. Ex-colonies don’t enjoy such opportunities as they tumble into the family of modern nation-states; whatever forms of government they come up with, in their struggles to build sustaining political traditions, are likely to be transitional.

Long before Rwanda became a case study in international negligence, Museveni once said, “A little neglect would not be so bad. The more orphaned we are, the better for Africa. We will have to rely on ourselves.” And the extent to which the Congolese revolution took the outside world by surprise exposed a stubborn misconception that had dominated Western attitudes toward post-Cold War Africa—that Africans generate humanitarian catastrophes but don’t really make meaningful politics.

Appeasement had been the wrong policy toward Nazi Germany, and so it had been in Goma, too. Yet the very vacuum of responsible international engagement at Goma had created an unprecedented need and opportunity for Africans to fix their own problems. Although Kabila’s foreign backers were openly skeptical about his capacities to serve as more than a temporary leader of the Congo—and even in that role he would quickly disappointment them—the Alliance’s swift sweep to victory inspired Uganda’s President Museveni, speaking at Kabila’s inauguration, to proclaim that the war had “liberated not only the Congo but also all of Africa.”

As the political godfather of the new central African leadership, Museveni was listened to closely. He called for national and international solidarity, and for economic order and physical security as the basis for political development. Hearing him, one could almost forget that central Africa’s prospects remained terribly bleak. What was left of much of the region looked a lot like this:

The infrastructure of the country, especially the roads, had almost totally collapsed. Most of the country was inaccessible … There was a critical shortage of trucks … Utilities, such as water and power supply, had severely deteriorated … Manufacturing plants were either closed or operating at very low rates … There was a total lack of basic consumer goods such as sugar, soap, and paraffin. Goods were being smuggled into and out of the country, and sold on the parallel (“black”) market. The economy had become completely informal and speculative.

This passage from Museveni’s autobiography described Uganda in 1986, when he installed himself as President after more than a decade of armed struggle. When I told him I thought I was reading about the Congo—or, for that matter, much of Rwanda after 1994—he said, “Same situation, exactly.”

Uganda’s annual economic growth in the early 1990s averaged close to five percent, and in 1996 it exceeded eight percent. Decent roads laced the country. There were good state schools, improved medical care, an independent judiciary, a rather feisty parliament, a boisterous and often contrarian press, and a small but growing middle class. Insecurity remained, especially in the rebellion-plagued north and west of the country. But Uganda, a decade after the ravages of Idi Amin and Obote, set a standard of promise that had to make anyone who called the Congo or Rwanda “impossible” or “hopeless” think again.

MUSEVENI WAS A heavy-handed manager, technocratic, pragmatic, accustomed to having things very nearly his way. He was a man of enormous energy, not only as a politician but also as a cattle breeder, and he possessed a frontiersman’s inventiveness. On the morning that I visited him, the state-owned
New Vision
newspaper announced: “Yoweri Museveni has disclosed that a local grass species he recently introduced to Egyptian researchers has been processed into a highly effective toothpaste which has been called Nile Toothpaste.”

The item about the toothpaste unfolded as a classic Musevenian parable of African self-reliance. As a child in the bush, Museveni had learned to chew a grass called
muteete
and found that it left his teeth perfectly clean and smooth. Then, at a British colonial secondary school, he was introduced to Colgate, to cure him of his bumpkin ways. “But,” he said, “when you use this Colgate and you pass the tongue over your teeth you feel these ‘roadblocks.’” The white man’s toothpaste was inferior. As President, he remembered the
muteete,
and modern science confirmed his memory. The grass, he said, possessed “the best toothpaste agents ever found.” Nile Toothpaste would soon be on the market, and Uganda would collect royalties. Museveni urged his compatriots to pursue similarly market-oriented research. He thought banana juice might make a hit in the soft-drink industry. He noted that Ugandan flower exports to Europe were soaring, and exporters elsewhere were running scared. The message was clear: seek the value in a devalued Africa; we are on a roll.