There are even dilapidated court buildings in cities large and small, but, a lawyer tells us over dinner, with great feeling, “I’ve never, ever, seen a judge who wasn’t corrupt.” This is so routine, he and a colleague explain, that in civil lawsuits, the judge gets a percentage of the monetary value that a bribe-payer receives. The judge, in turn, is then expected to send some of his take back up the line to whomever appointed him; this is called renvoyer l’ascenseur—sending back the elevator. Being a judge in an area full of mining rights disputes is particularly profitable. Other civil servants also earn extra: Goma is on the border with Rwanda, and one of the lawyers explains that the very hotel where we’re having dinner was built by a customs official. They point along the street to two more hotels owned by customs men.
Government as a system of organized theft goes back to King Leopold II, who made a fortune here equal to well over $1.1 billion in today’s money, chiefly in rubber and ivory. Then for fifty-two years this was a Belgian colony, run less rapaciously, but still mainly for the purpose—as with colonies almost everywhere—of extracting wealth for the mother country and its corporations. The grand theft was continued when, with strong American encouragement, an army officer named Joseph Mobutu seized power in a military coup in 1965. For thirty-two years he maintained a repressive, disastrous dictatorship, changing his name to Mobutu Sese Seko. Delighted to have an anticommunist ally who was friendly to American investors and helpful in covert military operations, the United States provided him with more than $1 billion in aid over the decades. President George H.W. Bush welcomed Mobutu to the White House as “one of our most valued friends.” Before he was deposed and then died in 1997, Mobutu pocketed an estimated $4 billion, buying grand villas all over Europe (one, on the Riviera, was almost within sight of one of Leopold’s).
The dictator built palatial homes throughout Congo as well, one of them here in Goma. It is now the provincial governor’s office, and President Kabila stays there when he’s in town: a sprawling red-brick mansion, whose green lawn, dotted with palms and other trees, rolls down to Lake Kivu. A staff member is happy to show us around. The floors are white marble, and a curving marble staircase leads up to Mobutu’s circular office, where there is a huge kitschy chandelier of hundreds of little glass balls; the frames of the windows looking out on the lake are tinted gold. The initials M and B, for Mobutu and his second wife, Bobi Ladawa (his first, appropriately enough, was named Marie-Antoinette), are intertwined in gold, with many curlicues, on top of an inlaid wooden desk and elsewhere throughout the house. Two walk-in closets, each some ten feet long, once held her clothes. Of the his-and-hers bathrooms, hers, in pink marble, is the more spectacular, with two sinks in the shape of shells and a large Jacuzzi.
Police protect official buildings like this, but little else, and that means boom times for private security firms, whose jump-suited guards are everywhere. Hotels, restaurants, and larger businesses tend to be in guarded compounds behind high walls, often with coils of razor wire running around the top. Such a wall even surrounds a Catholic mission station we stay at in one town. You honk or knock at a sheet-metal gate, and a guard comes out, takes a look, and then lets you in. Such businesses have their own generators as well, since municipal electricity often shuts down. But for the vast majority of people who can afford none of this, security, electricity, and much else is scarce.
• • •
Into the void of the world’s largest failed state, a wide array of organizations have stepped, wanting to help. In Goma, it sometimes seems as if every other vehicle on the deeply rutted streets is an SUV with a logo on the door: Oxfam, Action contre la faim, World Vision, Norwegian Refugee Council, HopeInAction.eu, and dozens more. Many also sport a window sticker: a red slash mark across a submachine gun and the legend NO ARMS/PAS D’ARMES. But the biggest foreign presence consists of people who do have arms: more than seventeen thousand United Nations troops and military observers, assisted by several thousand civilians. They are quickly visible in blue helmets, blue berets, blue baseball caps, or the blue turbans worn by Sikh soldiers from India. Almost all are from poor countries, where UN peacekeeping is a big moneymaker for their armies. The wealthy nations, although they contribute a few higher-ranking officers and civilian specialists, have been generally loath to risk their soldiers’ lives in someone else’s civil war. However, they pay most of the cost. A plan that we have to join one Bangladeshi unit on patrol is scrubbed at the last minute because it receives word that the ambassador of Japan—a major source of funds—is to visit the base the next day, and all hands are needed to prepare.
The UN presence is a mixed story. Far better equipped and disciplined than the Congolese army, these troops have kept a bad situation from getting worse. Yet it is hopeless to expect so few soldiers to keep peace throughout such a vast country. “How many troops would it really take to stop all the fighting here?” I ask one UN official, out of his office. “Oh, about 250,000,” he replies.
On the record, however, officers are brisk, upbeat, and, in the way of soldiers everywhere, bristling with acronyms. In the UN military headquarters in Bunia, several hundred miles north of Goma, a cheerful Pakistani paratrooper colonel holds forth in a room filled with wall maps showing the AORs (areas of responsibility) of battalions from Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Morocco—Nepbat, Banbat, Pakbat, Morbat. Other troops in the area, he says, include Indonesians (who repair roads), Uruguayans (boat patrols on lakes and rivers), Guatemalans (special forces), South Africans (military police), and Indians (helicopters). Tunisians and Egyptians are on the way. “Last week we carried out a heli-recce,” the colonel says, of one trouble spot; when aid groups have trouble going somewhere, the UN provides a “heli-insertion.”
One of the UN’s jobs here is to train the Congolese army—more discipline, less theft—and this, too, he assures us, is on track. Next on that particular agenda, he says, is training forward air controllers (puzzling, since Congo has virtually no air force). And how will they do this, given that few UN officers speak either French—the official language of government—or any local tongue? Simple, they will find English-speaking Congolese officers (although veteran aid workers here say they’ve rarely seen any). And what if forward air controlling is not their specialty? “We’re training the trainers!”
When speaking not for attribution, UN officials are far more somber. I talk to four more, military and civilian, African and European. All agree that the biggest single problem is the chaotic Congolese army itself, which numbers some 120,000 ill-trained men. The United States and the western European nations, working through the UN, have basically decided that backing the nominal national government and its military is the least-bad alternative here. But the army is a mess. Top-heavy with colonels to begin with, it has swollen mightily in recent years, since the price of a series of half-effective peace accords has been the absorption into the army of a number of predatory warlords and their followers.
One result is a great mismatch between soldiers and equipment. On a country road leading to a combat zone where one army unit is relieving another, we see hundreds of soldiers in green fatigues, but not once a truck carrying them. Bearing rifles or grenade launchers, the men are hitching rides with passing cargo trucks and motorcycles. They wave at us, bringing hands to their mouths to beg for cigarettes. Beneath a piece of canvas strung between trees, a solitary sentry manning one checkpoint is sound asleep.
What can be done? The outside world has some influence over the Congolese army, because it’s partly paying for it. The national government depends on aid money to make ends meet, depends on the UN force to retain control of the east, and sometimes needs UN planes to transport its soldiers, for there is no drivable road from one side of the country to the other. But getting a disparate group of nations to put pressure on Congo to purge its army of thugs is by no means easy.
In one realm, aid donors are applying limited pressure. Soldiers often don’t get paid, one reason for the army’s h
abit of looting. “The money comes from Kinshasa,” a UN official explains to me, “then goes to Kisangani”—a city three-quarters of the way to the eastern border—“and by the time it gets down to company level there’s not much left.” To deal with this problem, the European Union has sent a fifty-five-man military mission here.
One member is a sergeant major in the Dutch army, Bob Arnst, a short, wiry soldier with a crew cut. He spells his last name for me as I make notes: “Alpha, Romeo, November, Sierra, Tango.” He is stationed in Bunia, where the blackened shells of burned-out buildings are a reminder of recent fighting, and he talks about his work one evening in the UN’s simple café and recreation center, where a security guard at the gate has the job of keeping out local prostitutes.
“Everything is in cash. They bring the money in big packages, 120 by 80 by 20 centimeters. In great bricks. We’re expecting a convoy now. When the money arrives, they count it again, bill by bill.” Arnst and two French soldiers watch the count at the local army headquarters, after which paymasters from half a dozen battalions arrive in SUVs to collect the funds for their units. “Most of them [the paymasters] have very nice clothing. Once a colonel showed up with his bodyguard and I asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘I’ve come to see where my money is.’ And I said, ‘It’s not your money.’”
In the days following the distribution of cash to the paymasters, Arnst and his French colleagues visit Congolese battalions in the field, usually dropping in by surprise in a UN helicopter. “We ask soldiers, ‘Did you get your payment?’”
And if they didn’t? On three occasions in the last few months, entire units were not paid. Arnst reported each case to his EU superiors in Kinshasa, and a Dutch colonel applied pressure at the Ministry of Defense. Each time, the commander was forced to turn over the money to his troops—but was not arrested or disciplined.
The situation is worse in some outlying areas; Arnst cites one remote town in the north, where some troops, he believes, may not have been paid for four months. Food destined for soldiers sometimes disappears as well. “If they don’t have any money, they have a weapon, so . . .” his voice trails off. Furthermore, commanders often pocket pay for “ghost soldiers” who’ve deserted. And the pay is woeful to begin with: only about $40 per month, and another $8 for living expenses. “And if a soldier does get his money, he’s got no way to bring it to his family.” Hence families tend to follow military units around the country, “living in tents with holes in them.” The officers are little better off. “Last week a captain came to me and said, ‘Can you give me twenty dollars? Ten dollars?’”
• • •
From the dozen years of intermittent war, almost everyone has searing memories. Fabien Kakani, thirty-eight, is a nurse at a Protestant mission hospital whose low brick and cinderblock buildings spread across a patch of lush, green savannah in the town of Nyankunde. One day in 2002, militia from the Ngiti ethnic group and an allied force overran the hospital, burned the mission library of more than ten thousand books, and began killing an estimated three thousand people of other ethnicities—hospital staff, patients, and residents of the nearby town. “I was working in the ICU that day. I had just made the rounds with the doctor and we heard shots from the hill behind the hospital.” He points out the window. “We brought more patients in and locked ourselves in. Then they went to the maternity ward and the pediatric ward, and I heard screams as they massacred people there. Throughout the night, we heard shots. I was a Bira [a different ethnic group], and I knew they would be looking for me.”
The raiders then broke into the ICU, and Kakani and some seventy other people were tied up and marched to a room he now shows us in another hospital building, which we pace out as being about ten by twenty-one feet. “We spent three days here. No food, no drink, we had to defecate and urinate on the floor. Children died because there was no milk in their mothers’ breasts. We were passing their dead bodies out the windows.”
So many people were killed at Nyankunde hospital alone that there was no time to dig graves; the bodies had to be thrown into pit latrines. And the leader of the Ngiti troops who carried out the massacre? He was Kakani’s brother-in-law. He wanted to kill members of several rival groups, including the Bira, even though he was married to a Bira, Kakani’s sister. The commander of an allied militia force involved in the attack was not on the scene, but in close communication by radio, well aware of what his troops were doing. Following one of the incorporate-the-warlords peace agreements, he became Congo’s foreign minister. He is still in the cabinet today, in another position.
• • •
After two weeks my notebooks overflow with such stories. But looking at people I meet, even groups of ex-combatants, do I see those who look capable of killing hospital patients in their beds, gang-raping a woman like Mama Masika, jabbing a young man’s eye with a bayonet? I do not. Men and women are warm, friendly, their faces overflow with smiles; seeing a foreigner, everyone wants to stop, say “Bonjour!” and shake hands, whether on a small town’s main street or on a forest path. I’ve never seen more enthusiastic hand-shakers. At night, when the electricity works, the warm air echoes with some of Africa’s best music. There is no shortage of ordinary acts of human kindness. When our car’s left front wheel goes sailing off to the side of a rough mountain road, leaving one end of the axle to gouge a long furrow in the dirt, the driver of a passing truck immediately stops and crawls under the car, using his jack in tandem with ours to solve the problem and get us on our way.
What turns such people into rapists, sadists, killers? Greed, fear, demagogic leaders who claim that violence is necessary for self-defense, seeing everyone around you doing the same thing—and the fact that the rest of the world pays tragically little attention to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of our time. But even the worst brutality can also draw out the good in people, as in the way Masika has devoted her life to other raped women. In Goma, I saw people with pickaxes laboriously hewing the purple lava that had flooded their city into football-sized chunks with flattened sides, then using these, with mortar, to build the walls of new homes. Can this devastated country as a whole use the very experience of its suffering to build something new and durable? I hope so, but I fear it will be a long time in coming.
2009
SEVEN
All That Glitters
“A STREAM OF MANUFACTURED GOODS, rubbishy cottons, beads and brass-wire” flowed into the interior, Joseph Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness, describing the colonial economy he saw when traveling up the Congo River in 1890, “and in return came a precious trickle of ivory . . . The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.”
The trickle of ivory that Conrad described was highly visible: elephant tusks carried on the shoulders of exhausted porters from the African hinterland to the coast, where they could be shipped off to Europe. More than a hundred years later, far more wealth flows out of this same territory, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. But these days much of the wealth you can’t see. If, for example, you stand beside the washboard dirt road that winds out of the hot scrubland of the Ituri district of Congo’s northeast, you will see a few vehicles, not more than five or ten an hour: a dusty SUV, an army jeep, two men on a motorbike, an ancient truck with a precariously high load of fruits and vegetables and a layer of people hitching a ride on top. But you won’t see the treasure they are carrying, for it is too small. It will be in little plastic bags in someone’s pocket, or perhaps, better to be concealed from thieves and greedy policemen, sewn into a shirt seam or slipped under a shoe’s insole. In this part of the country, the main wealth is gold. More than $1 billion worth is mined in Congo each year, and a good portion of it comes down this road.
Gold is only one of a half-dozen or more lucrative minerals to be found here, and together they constitute perhaps the worst case on Earth of the resource curse. As inevitably as oil drew the United States into Iraq, it
is the temptations of this wealth that have turned Congo into the horrific battleground it has been in recent years. A country with a lavish array of natural riches and a dysfunctional government is like a child heiress without a guardian: Everyone schemes for a piece of what she’s got.
As far back as the territory’s history is recorded, the wealth from this vast natural treasure house has flowed almost entirely overseas, leaving some of the planet’s best-endowed land with some of its poorest people. I have often heard Congolese friends say, “We wouldn’t have so much trouble if we weren’t so rich.”
Of all the minerals to be found here, none has for so long lit up the eyes of foreigners as the yellow metal that has shaped the course of conquest on almost every continent. And today, with worldwide economic troubles and ever-rising demand from electronics manufacturing sending its price to unimagined heights, a new gold rush is in the making here. Some of the richest goldfields in East Africa lie up this dirt road, which begins some 350 miles east of the turnaround point of Conrad’s nightmare steamboat trip. My journey up the road, I hope, will be a way of seeing some of this country’s tragic—there is no other word for it—wealth at its point of origin, before it vanishes into jewelry stores and bank vaults and electronics plants in Europe and China, New York, and California.
The road begins in war-battered Bunia, capital of the Ituri district, a West Virginia–sized region that has some of the country’s most lucrative mineral deposits. Climbing out from under a mosquito net on the morning our trip begins, I hear the bells of a Catholic church summoning the faithful, the dawn call to prayer from a nearby mosque, roosters crowing, and a bugler at the barracks of the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed here. On the city’s rutted dirt streets, women with babies on their backs balance laundry bundles or buckets on their heads; men wheel bicycles piled with precarious loads of cabbages, charcoal, grass for thatching roofs, or yellow jerricans of kerosene. One man carries cargo in a wheelbarrow that, except for its iron wheel, is made entirely of interwoven tree branches. Local merchants buy old clothing from overseas by the bale, and so some people wear American football jerseys or T-shirts promoting an ice rink or ski resort.
Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 9