by James Steel
They chat more about plans and make arrangements to communicate by email. Rukaba has a satellite uplink, the dish sticking incongruously up from the roof of the farm.
Rukuba then waves them off with his huge white smile and they wander back down the hill to the cars.
Alex, Col and Yamba get into one jeep and Zacheus and Arkady into the other. As they drive away over the bumpy meadow, Alex says, ‘Well, he seemed very charismatic. He’ll make a good front man. What did you think?’
‘Hmm,’ Col shrugs. ‘Seems very eager to please. Smiles a lot.’ As if that were nasty habit.
Alex looks at him in exasperation. ‘Oh, come on! Smiling is not a sin. Just because he’s not a grumpy old sod like you. He seemed very well-read on political theory. I liked his bit about Rousseau and democracy; he sounds very liberal-minded to me.’
Yamba is also being cautious. ‘Hmm, yes, but remember Talleyrand was a famous political chameleon and Rousseau is also the foundation of fascism; his idea of the general will can also be twisted into the idea of a supreme leader who interprets it …’
Col butts in. ‘Jacques Rousseau? I’n’t ’e the bloke with the aqualung?’
Alex looks at him nonplussed and then guffaws loudly.
Yamba is momentarily puzzled and then his jaw tightens in irritation and he turns his head away and looks out of the window.
‘Oh, sorry, Professor Douala, I seem to have interrupted your lecture, do please continue.’
Yamba tries to get going again but Alex is still laughing and he gives up.
Alex eventually manages to say. ‘Look, he isn’t a nutter, he isn’t a warlord and he doesn’t have multiple human rights abuses on his hands. That’s about as good as we’re going to get for a front man in Kivu.’
‘OK, we have a problem.’
Fang looks at Alex, Yamba, Col and Arkady sitting round the table in the centre of the planning room in their government villa in Kigali. It’s early June, a month after their initial reconnaissance of Kivu, the table is covered in maps and they each have a desk in one corner of the room.
Fang has just returned from one of their many meetings at the Ministry of Defence across the valley from the villa. The Rwandans have a large staff team working on the project as well. Fang speaks slowly, choosing his words carefully.
‘There is a partner who is not conforming to the business plan. We need to restructure his involvement in it.’
Alex is baffled by the business jargon. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Our negotiators report that there has been a problem in the discussions between the government in Kinshasa and the local Congolese army commander in Goma.’
This doesn’t sound good; the mercenaries look at him with tense faces.
Alex frowns. ‘Hang on, I thought the whole leasing deal was supposed to be secret and now you’re saying that they have been discussing it with the Congolese army in Kivu? What about mission security?’
There are angry nods around the table; they are all very touchy about this. If news of the mission leaks then the whole project could collapse or lose them the element of surprise that they are relying on to make up for the huge difference in size between their force and the troops opposing them.
Fang holds up his hand. ‘Some discussions are necessary with the senior Congolese commanders in the area to get their commitment to the plan. But they have been with only two people – Brigadier General Sylveste Sabiti, commander of the 8th Military District in North Kivu, and Brigadier General Mutombo Oloba, commander of the 10th Military District in South Kivu.’
He levels with them. ‘We have to do it. Otherwise we might end up fighting the Congolese army as well as the FDLR and we cannot do both.’
There are reluctant nods around the table.
Alex continues cautiously. ‘OK, so what’s the problem?’
‘Brigadier General Sabiti fears that he will lose control of his mining assets if he agrees to the deal. Rukuba has assured him that he will keep the mines that his brigades control but he is not confident. He doesn’t like Rukuba, says he doesn’t trust him. He has a very nice set-up at the moment and doesn’t want to lose it.’
The team absorb the news. It’s easy to see it happening – just like the various militia groups, the different Congolese army brigades control different mines and, in the absence of any salaries, fund themselves with the money from them.
Alex thinks he can see what sort of restructuring Fang is thinking of.
‘Is this a Unit 17 job?’
Fang nods slowly.
Unit 17 is the reconnaissance and black ops unit they have set up under Major Zacheus Bizimani. It combines agents from the Rwandan Directorate of Military Intelligence, Rwandan Special Forces soldiers and members of the Kivu People’s Party who provide ground-level intelligence from inside Kivu through their party branches and the charcoal trader network.
Alex thinks for a moment. He knew this was coming, but it’s still difficult to face it. Did he really think he was going to set up a new country in one of the most violent and chaotic parts of the world without shedding blood?
Fang looks at him hard. ‘Now that Brigadier General Sabiti knows about the deal and is resisting agreeing to it, he is a liability to the business plan. He would be replaced by Brigadier General Oloba, who has indicated that he would be willing to take on the role of joint commander of the 8th and 10th Military Districts in a new combined, all-Kivu command.’
Fang’s circumlocutions make the assassination sound like an opportunity for an act of generosity.
Alex takes a deep breath.
There are six million people living in Kivu, most in a permanent state of fear, hundreds of thousands in refugee camps, thousands raped and killed every year. Nothing about their circumstances will change for decades unless the operation goes ahead.
He looks at Fang and nods.
The road to hell …
Chapter Fourteen
Gabriel watches the bare legs of Patrice, the FDLR soldier, disappear down the burrow that leads out from the gallery in the mine.
His friend Marcel watches him as well and says, ‘I think our position in life has become that of human maggots.’ He used to be a French literature teacher.
‘Maybe you should write a poem about it.’ Gabriel grins. His torch is fading after their twelve-hour shift but he can still see Marcel’s face streaked with ochre mud.
Marcel smiles, obviously taken with the idea. ‘Maybe I could do something like Metamorphosis.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Come on, hurry up!’ Robert, the other FDLR soldier, shouts from the back of the gallery. He has been on the shift with them and tends to boss them around.
‘OK. OK, I’m going.’
Gabriel drags his sack of ore in front of him, stuffs his hammer and chisel in it and shoves it down the hole. He wriggles in after it, his body sliding along the wet mud.
He’s been working in the Versailles tunnel for a while now and the money is OK. He’s building up his pot of cash to pay off Eve’s treatment. He gets messages about her passed on from a friend of her family in the manoir who has a mobile phone. He knows she has got a date for the operation and prays it goes well. It’s nearly killing him scraping the cash together. But once she is fixed up they can get married and the thought of it warms him and keeps him going.
By now he’s used to the feeling of being in an enclosed space with thousands of tons of rock over his head and has taken on the friendly, macho attitude of the other miners. In the evenings the manoir stinks of dope and the lads get together and sing songs noisily. Marcel plays an old guitar and has a good voice.
The work is very hard though – twelve hours a day of bashing at the rocks with a hammer and chisel. At night Gabriel dreams of chips of rock, scrabbling through them to sort out the coltan ore. His right elbow is sore from the heavy blows he rains down all day and the loud tink, tink, tink of hammers on chisels stabs at his eardrums. The gallery where the ten men work
is cold, dank and stuffy through lack of air: there’s one rubber hosepipe pumping air in and one sucking it out but the system doesn’t work very well. They also have to piss at the back of the gallery and with all the water around they just end up sitting in it all day.
At the end of each shift, when the maggots emerge from their burrows, Vernon is there to check their sacks, rummaging through them and pulling out handfuls of chippings, carefully assessing that the ore is good and not just rubbish that they have put in to make up weight. After that he hangs each sack under a portable scale, notes the weight in his little book. He deducts his half share from the overall value and then charges extra for torch batteries and tools.
After that he accompanies them as they trudge wearily down the hill to see the negotiants on the track outside the manoir. Vernon has certain guys he works with but there’s always a market going on with men standing next to their tshkudus shouting their transport rates. Vernon haggles and then does a deal and they all go over and tip their sacks into the negotiant’s. The FDLR soldiers then impose their tax on him by weight of the sacks. Finally he wheels the ore down the mountain to the main road ten miles away to give it to a comptoir in a big truck who will take it back to Bukavu for sorting and grading before it gets shipped on to Rwanda and then out to the Kenyan ports and on to China for putting into mobile phones.
Gabriel has got used to the process. He is thinking about getting back to their hut in the manoir, having a bath in a metal tub and crashing out.
He gets onto his hands and knees, takes the torch off his head and puts it in the sack before stuffing it down the tube, sticking his head in and crawling forward. It’s pitch black; the mud is cold and soaks through his thin clothes. His elbows and knees scrape along the floor and the stink of wet clay is in his nostrils.
He comes to the sump in the tunnel; he hates this bit. He has to hold his breath and squeeze through the muddy water that fills the tube. He takes a deep breath, shoves his sack into the water and wriggles after it, closing his eyes and feeling the cold water enter his nose and ears. He shoves again and moves on a few feet. He’s completely submerged now, eyes tightly shut.
That’s when the ground moves all around him – one of the many earthquakes in the Rift Valley area. The whole tunnel compresses and then moves sideways a few inches.
His eyes fly open but he sees only blackness.
Alex Devereux is sitting at one end of a table in a small, dimly lit back room in the Rwandan Ministry of Defence in Kigali. The red epaulettes on his green uniform jacket are for a colonel in the Kivu Defence Force, the new army he is in the process of creating, if this presentation works.
It’s mid-June, two weeks after Fang reported the problem with Brigadier General Sabiti and Alex has already issued orders for Zacheus Bizimani’s Unit 17 operation to ‘restructure his involvement in the business plan’.
In front of him are the five people who will make the final decision on whether to go ahead with his grand plan for a new country. At the other end of the table is the tall, gangly figure of the Rwandan president in a suit, with his military Chief of Staff next to him in his full dress uniform. Both are sitting back, staring intently at Alex with their arms folded.
On his left sit Fang and Mr Cheng, the head of the Kivu Investment Corporation, a tubby sixty-year-old man in a plain suit and tie. His hands are folded on the table and his expression is patient but critical. He speaks fluent English and has years of experience of African politics; he is not about to buy any plan that doesn’t make sense.
On Alex’s right is Dieudonné Rukuba. He looks magnificent in his traditional white robes but he hunches forward nervously over the table, anxious for the plan to be approved by the Chinese and the Rwandans. It is his only hope of bringing a solution to the ongoing problems of his homeland. His dark eyes glitter as they dart round the faces at the table.
Alex is feeling nervous but confident at the same time. He glances to his left and sees his team, Yamba, Col and Arkady, all sitting at the side of the room with various map boards and supplementary notes ready to bring them to his aid if he hits any problems in the Q&A at the end.
He is proud of them and the amount of work that they have put in over the last two months of solid effort to get the plan together. They have worked closely with the Rwandan staff team and Rukuba and his network of supporters throughout Kivu to come up with a credible strategy. For their part, his team sit on the sidelines and will their boss on to do the presentation of his life.
Time to get on with it.
‘Good morning, gentlemen, thank you for taking the time to come here today.’ Alex’s voice is deep and authoritative.
‘Before I discuss the details of the plan, I’d like to start by outlining the theory behind Operation Tiananmen, our views on failed states and what we think is the best way to fix them.
‘We think that failed states like Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Kivu fail, not because their insurgencies are strong but because the central authorities are weak. They do not have the mandate of heaven, the power to govern. The insurgencies succeed because their central governments are corrupt. Like the Afghan government, their forces are so ineffectual and oppressive that the population will support any force that opposes it, even the Taliban. In Afghanistan the West is effectively trying to prop up a drunk.
‘Similarly, in Kivu representatives from all of the militia groups have twice signed up to peace deals in the Nairobi Communiqué and the Goma Accords but none of them followed through on these promises and disarmed because the Congolese army cannot force them to do so. In fact the army actively contributes to the problem of lawlessness and rape.
‘Now, attempts to fix these weak states in the past have failed because large outside forces intervening in a country create a nationalist backlash against them, such as the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgency. At the same time an overload of aid agencies spending billions of dollars of hard cash crowds out local civilian effort by creating a parallel government. Ultimately the solutions to these problems has to be local. So why start out by trying to replace all local effort?
He is building up to a key point here, so he slows his voice and leans forward. ‘The question is, how can you intervene in a country just enough to give the central authority the credible force to deal with the insurgency but without at the same time replacing it and provoking a nationalist uprising?’
It’s nine o’clock at night and dark out on Lake Kivu.
The lights of Goma twinkle in the distance and beyond them the red glow from the volcano Mount Nyiragonga reflects eerily on the underside of the low clouds.
A large tourist pleasure cruiser is stationary a kilometre offshore from Goma, just inside Rwandan territorial waters. The boat is called La Joie de Gisenyi, after the Rwandan port town next to Goma where it is based. Fixed to its side are boards listing prices for day trips.
It is odd for pleasure craft to be out on the lake at night as there is nothing for tourists to see. There is also a larger than usual cluster of communications aerials and satellite dishes above the bridge. The ship is blacked out but below decks there is a packed operations room. There soldiers monitor dimly lit radio sets and Major Zacheus Bizimani is hunched over a map table, his face as expressionless as ever.
Behind him, on the bench seats usually occupied by sight-seers, sits a group of heavily armed Unit 17 commandos with black balaclavas rolled up on top of their heads. Two rigid-hulled speedboats are towed astern.
In an opulent villa on the lakeshore, Brigadier General Sylveste Sabiti, commander of the 8th Military District in North Kivu, finishes his excellent dinner on the terrace overlooking the lake, cooked by his personal chef. A refreshing breeze blows in and Claudine, his young wife, pulls her YSL cashmere shawl tighter around her shoulders. She looks very like Beyoncé with her hair coiffed up on top of her head, large doe eyes and an impassive manner. She wears a white silk blouse, pencil skirt, diamond clasp earrings and gold eye make-up.
Sabiti
is a bulky man with a fold of fat sticking over the back of the collar of his shirt, worn with a pink tie and well-cut tweed jacket. He crumples his linen napkin, chucks it on the table and strolls round to the front of the house with his wife. Servants hold open the doors to his black BMW jeep.
They drive out of the gates of his heavily guarded villa and turn right towards Goma. Two Congolese army Peugeot jeeps are waiting. They are open-topped, full of armed soldiers and move into positions in front of and behind the BMW.
Two hundred metres behind them a battered Mitsubishi minivan with tinted windows pulls out of a stand of roadside bamboo and follows at a distance.
The convoy drives two miles towards Goma, passing along the lakeshore at certain points. There is still some traffic on the roads but not as bad as it gets at rush hour. The jeeps enter Goma and drive slowly through the busy streets of the town. Groups of young men are heading out on the town and motorcycle taxis jostle and beep around the cars. Harsh electric light spills out from fluorescent tubes in shop fronts onto pavements strewn with rubbish.
They steer around Rond Pont de l’Independence and head south along the wide Boulevard Kanyamuhanga, the main clubbing street. The sides of the roads are lined with white Land Cruisers belonging to all the NGO workers out on the town. Prostitutes call out to white men in Russian, assuming they are aircrew. They leave the NGO workers alone; they are no good for business.
Soldiers have reserved a space on the kerbside for the Brigadier-General and he and his wife slip out of their jeep and cross the road towards Chez Doga. The single-storey club is sandwiched between a Mobylette dealership and a Lebanese chwarma shop with a kerbside rotisserie; the smell of roasting chicken drifts towards them across the street.
As they enter, two men in casual suits get up from the table at a roadside kiosk and follow them into the club.