In Goma I talked about this with Pierrot Bushala, a man who still looked back in amazement at the events of that day: “In the 1980s no one knew what ethnic group his classmates came from; that only started in the 1990s. My class at secondary school was un mélange total [a complete mix]. I had a Tutsi girlfriend at the time, and I didn’t even know that. But in the 1990s, when we wanted to get married, her parents wouldn’t allow it. I’m sure that ten years earlier they would have accepted me.” He was able to place his heartbreak within a historical context. “Look, when Belgium took over the mandate territories in 1918, the border with Rwanda became porous. The Belgians had exported thousands of Rwandan Hutus to the mines and the Tutsis moved spontaneously across the border. Under Mobutu those Tutsis had Zaïrian passports, but in the 1990s, tribalism grew. Suddenly people starting saying that the Tutsis were no longer loyal countrymen, because they supported their brothers’ struggle in Rwanda. ‘If you’re a Tutsi, then you’re a Rwandan,’ the Zaïrians said. That’s where things went wrong. I ended up marrying a Lega woman; her tribe originally comes from South Kivu.”36
In South Kivu, these Zaïrian Tutsis were increasingly referred to as Banyamulenge, the people of Mulenge, an ethnic moniker invented and applied to them by others. Ever since the nineteenth century, they had lived with their herds in the cold, misty highlands west of Lake Tanganyika, close to the town of Mulenge. With their height, their fine features, and their felt hats they confirmed the clichés of the Tutsi herder sauntering along behind his cows with his stick over his shoulder. And increasingly, they became the objects of abuse and hatred. They were like bats, a Congolese woman told me once, neither bird nor mouse, neither Rwandan nor Zaïrian, scary and slippery. And a bit dirty as well! Yes, another person chimed in, they earned lots of money with their cattle but the Banyamulenge had no culture. They bought the most expensive clothes, but all in bad taste. Their men wore women’s clothes. And their women used toilet pots to pound manioc. Ha ha! And the way they grimaced all the time! Was that because of their buck teeth? Or were they just cold?
Mobutu had tried to awaken national sentiment as an antidote to the tribal reflex; in times of scarcity, however, enmity was just around the corner. The Tutsis in Kivu (both the Banyarwanda in North Kivu and the Banyamulenge in South Kivu) in particular footed the bill for that. The racial hatred, in turn, caused them to behave increasingly as a group. Those reviled as Banyamulenge truly began feeling like Banyamulenge. They looked back on their history, recalled that they were indeed different from all the rest, that their roots lay in Rwanda, and that in fact, yes, now that you mention it, they had never been truly welcome in Zaïre. Groups form as soon as they are threatened. Ethnic identification became more important than national identification.37 Even the father of the nation had withdrawn to his native region and entrusted his safety to men of his own tribe. Mobutu, the advocate of unity, himself became a tribalist. Zaïre was once again transformed into a crazy quilt of tribes. Poverty led to aggression, hunger to atrocities.
No money, no foreign aid, and no functional army: Zaïre was crumbling and little would have been needed in 1994 to bring the dictatorship to its knees. But then, in Zaïre’s smallest neighbor, a humanitarian catastrophe took place that destabilized the entire region so badly that the international community once again came to see Mobutu as a beacon of stability, a wise elder, a bulwark amid the storm racing across Central Africa. That catastrophe was the Rwandan genocide, a foreign event that would impact the history of Zaïre like no other.
Like neighboring Burundi, Rwanda had become independent of Belgium in 1962. During the first democratic elections, the centuries-old ruling class, the Tutsis, a cattle-breeding minority, lost power. Ascendancy went to the far more numerous Hutus, a traditional farming people. The social and economic differences between the two groups were real enough, but the Belgian colonial regime had accentuated them and rendered them categorical. You were either a Hutu or a Tutsi. After independence, the new Hutu regime displayed great intolerance for its former masters. Many Tutsis fled with their herds to Burundi, Congo, and Uganda. From there, at the borders of their fatherland, they stared at the distant hills and vowed to return some day and seize power anew. In southern Uganda they banded together militarily in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and fought beside rebel leader Yoweri Museveni in his campaign to oust Milton Obote. Museveni became president of Uganda and the RPF learned for the first time how one went about conquering a country. That military experience would serve them well. Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda, became their military leader. Starting in 1990, the RPF began crossing the Rwandan border and initiated a civil war with the Hutu regime. An estimated twenty thousand people were killed in that war between 1990 and 1994, and 1.5 million civilians became displaced. The attacks created so much bad blood among the Hutu population that the hatred toward anything Tutsi grew even further, even toward those Tutsis who had remained in Rwanda and behaved as good citizens. “Cockroaches” is what people called them.
On April 6, 1994, when Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, all hell broke loose. Kagame’s RPF had to be behind the attack, the Hutus reasoned, and they began murdering Tutsi citizens on a massive scale. This was no battle fought by soldiers with firearms, but by civilians with machetes. Civilian militias had been trained beforehand by the Hutu regime and equipped with machetes. These militias often consisted of teenage boys weaned on racial hatred, the infamous Interahamwe. They set about the business of genocide, egged on by the broadcasts of hate-radio Mille Collines, which kept repeating that the graves were not yet full and that there were still cockroaches scuttling around. Within three months, eight hundred thousand to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. Meanwhile, from the north, Kagame’s RPF continued to press on toward Kigali, the capital.
The international community was not on the ground. At the start of the genocide, the Rwandan government army had murdered ten Belgian blue helmets in order to chase the United Nations out of the country and clear the way for ethnic cleansing. Reporters and foreign journalists fled the country’s violence. The eyes of the world in those weeks were turned much more on South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was elected president. Few people knew exactly what was going on and France’s President François Mitterand was no exception. He saw the Hutus as victims of the Tutsi invasion and sent French troops to Rwanda to help them. The French support was unconsciously prompted in part by the fact that the Hutus were Francophone while the Tutsis in Uganda spoke English. What Mitterand did not know was that he was in fact protecting the perpetrators of the genocide. Under the name Opération Turqoise, the French troops established a safe haven to which Hutus could flee in the southwest of the country, away from Kagame’s advancing RPF, away from the reprisals that were sure to follow.
The genocide was intended to make Rwanda Tutsi-free, but those same Tutsis were now coming in to conquer it from the neighboring countries. The RPF’s military might had been sorely underestimated. The French soldiers took in hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees and helped them across the border. Here it was not only a people fleeing, but also a regime: the government army, the country’s ordnance, the administrative apparatus, and even the state treasury left the country. Some 270,000 people fled to Burundi and 570,000 to Tanzania, but the lion’s share of the refugees—approximately 1.5 million—ended up in eastern Zaïre.38 Mobutu had put his airports at the disposal of the French offensive and granted permission to lodge the refugees in his country. Most of them arrived in North Kivu, in and around the city of Goma (850,000 refugees), and to a lesser extent at Bukavu in South Kivu (650,000).
Along with Pierrot Bushala, the man who had lost his Tutsi girlfriend, I drove in December 2008 to Mugunga, west of Goma, the biggest of the former Hutu camps. It was still being used as a refugee center; since 1994, calm has never returned to Kivu. In the 1990s, under the auspices of the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee organization, Bushala had been invo
lved in trying to maintain hygiene in the camps. “Can you picture it? This whole area was full of refugees, and there was nothing at all,” he said as his jeep bounced through a sinister lunar landscape overrun with garish green vegetation. The earth’s surface in this place consisted of black lava from the imposing Nyiragongo volcano a little farther along, and suddenly 850,000 people had been dropped here. Bushala was responsible for the sanitary conditions in one of the camps. “At first the people relieved themselves wherever they could. But then the UNHCR and the Red Cross brought in tents, and quicklime to sprinkle around. It was only later that toilets were built, over a hole in the ground.” As we walked around Mugunga itself, I realized how grim a task it must have been to dig toilet holes in that volcanic rock. Pierrot looked out over the desolate landscape of clotted lava covered with little huts and tents. “We combated flies, mosquitoes, we walked around with spray guns, we had teams to empty the toilets, we collected garbage.” But it was to no avail. Cholera and dysentery broke out in the camps. At least forty thousand people died. Their bodies were piled along the road. The stench was unbearable. The clouds of flies were so thick that drivers could barely see through their windshields.
The misery that came after the genocide restored Mobutu’s international respectability. The French were grateful to him for his assistance and soon invited him to an international summit at Biarritz. The United Nations recognized his role in taking care of the refugees. When the camps were struck by epidemics, dozens of NGOs and international aid organizations were allowed to descend on the country. The outbreak of the highly contagious Ebola virus in Kikwit one year later lent Mobutu the aura of victim, rather than villain. Now that the world was taking a milder view, Prime Minister Kengo wa Dondo could easily go about delaying and sabotaging the election process. There was no rush.
But providing shelter for a million and a half refugees within one’s own territory was of course a high price to pay for rehabilitation, particularly in a region that was already overpopulated and where hatred toward Rwanda had been growing for years. Just as the people tried their luck with risky games of chance, Mobutu too was playing for high stakes with those camps. At first his gamble yielded some returns, but in the end it was to be his downfall.
ON THAT SAME SATURDAY IN 1996, Ruffin Luliba was playing soccer with the locals. A sunny day. The sound of children’s voices calling for a pass, the dull thud of soccer slippers against the ball, a few screaming spectators, the arbiter’s whistle. Ruffin was thirteen by then. After elementary school in Bukavu he had gone to the Marist Brother’s boarding school in Mugeri and begun studying at the minor seminary there. On that particular Saturday his team was playing in the semifinals, and one of the spectators was Déogratias Bugera, a man who worked as an architect in Goma but liked to spend his weekends in his native region. “When the match was over, Bugera said he would like to sponsor our team. He gave us sugarcane, bonbons, and cookies. If we won the finals that next week, he said, he would pay for everything: all the equipment, the jerseys, even new soccer shoes.” Ruffin could hardly believe his ears: new soccer shoes! “That next week, there he was. We really wanted to win, and we beat the opponents by 2–0. We were all allowed to go along in his Daihatsu to pick up the new uniforms. It was one of those pickups with nets over it. There were thirteen of us. The oldest was sixteen, the others were fourteen or fifteen. My roommate Roderick went too.” But the boys’ exultation quickly changed to confusion.
We drove off in the direction of Bukavu, but we didn’t stop there. We went on, all the way to the Rwandan border. We crossed at the bridge over the Ruzizi. There weren’t even any customs formalities, no guards, no immigration service, nothing. We drove on until we got to an airfield. Wait here, Déogratias said, and he left. We didn’t know exactly where we were, we were just schoolboys. It was already five thirty in the evening and it was getting dark. We were afraid the headmaster at the boarding school would punish us, and we started crying. At seven o’clock a big truck came by and we had [to] climb in. The drive took five hours. “What’s the headmaster going to say?” we asked each other. That was our biggest worry. Finally, we arrived at the military training camp at Gabiro. We didn’t get soccer shoes, but they gave us rubber boots, not leather boots like the ones at home. There were a lot of children at that camp, all of them kidnapped from Goma and Uvira. There were also a few Bunyamulenge, but they were there as volunteers. They cut off our hair right away. It was one o’clock in the morning, and as a sort of hazing we had to crawl through the mud. You have to rid yourselves of Mobutu, they screamed, you are the new liberators of your country.39
Young Ruffin’s testimony is very important, not only because it describes the fate of what was then a relatively new phenomenon, the child soldier under duress, but also because it shows how Rwanda was preparing to invade Zaïre. The Tutsi regime that came to power in Kigali after the genocide was extremely wary of those 1.5 million Hutu refugees in Zaïre. Contrary to international directives, they were not a few dozen kilometers from the border, but bunched up almost right against it. In those camps, the recently routed Hutu regime was busy regrouping. They had money and weapons and were determined to retake Rwanda. Just as the Tutsis in exile had awaited their chance in Uganda from 1962 to 1994, the Hutus in eastern Zaïre were now waiting their turn. Most of the refugees, some 85 to 90 percent, however, did not belong to the national army in exile, had not taken part in the genocide, and had never belonged to Interahamwe.40 They were innocent civilians who simply wanted to go home again, but who feared for a genocidal countercampaign.
An invasion was being planned in the refugee camps. The international community was aware of the problem, but did not seem inclined to do much. After the debacle in Somalia, America had no desire to once again see the corpses of GIs dragged through the dust. Belgium did not feel like losing another ten paratroopers. And UN Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali could not round up enough support to deploy an international force. Any international action in Zaïre, in any case, would be seen as support for Mobutu and no one wanted to go that far. And so Kagame decided to take things into his own hands: his Rwandan Patriotic Front, by then redubbed the Rwandan Patriotic Army, the new government forces, would just have to neutralize those camps itself. His old friend Museveni, president of Uganda, promised his support.
Raiding the camps, however, meant raiding a sovereign country, an act of aggression against a foreign power. Kagame therefore went looking for a stalking horse for his initiative, and found one among the frustrated Tutsis in Zaïre. Humiliated for years by the “real” Zaïrians, they were now being bowled over as well by 1.5 million Rwandan Hutus. Déogratias Bugera, the soccer fan who had kidnapped Ruffin and his teammates, was a Tutsi from North Kivu and the leader of the Alliance Démocratique des Peuples (ADP). Along the same lines, there was also Anselme Masasu Nindaga, a Tutsi from South Kivu who was politically active in Bukavu and led the Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour la Libération du Zaïre (MRLZ). But there were also older nationalists, like André Kisase Ngandu, a Tetela who harked back to the Lumumbist tradition. And then there was Laurent-Desiré Kabila, no Tutsi either but a Luba from Katanga, the man who had kept the area between Fizi and Baraka out of Mobutu’s hands ever since 1964 and made such a lamentable impression on Che Guevara. And if Kabila’s “rebellion” had been an utter mess in 1964, by 1996 it was showing little improvement. Kabila lived semipermanently in Tanzania and earned a living by smuggling a little gold, doing a little gunrunning, and organizing the occasional kidnapping: the mixed farming of African crime, in other words.
In October 1996, at Kagame’s instigation, these four men would set up the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération (AFDL). Kabila was their spokesman and, as the eldest of the four, received the honorable term of address Mzee, Swahili for elder. Bugera was the alliance’s deputy, Kisase its military commander.
Ruffin Luliba saw it all “live”:
During our training, we were introduced to the men who l
ater set up the AFDL. We already knew Bugera. But Kisase Ngandu, Masasu, and Mzee came to visit too. Mzee even gave us two cows, which meant we had our first good meal in a long time! Normally we ate beans and corn from our mess tin. There were two battalions in the camp, and our training lasted six months. Three months of physical training for the battlefield and espionage, two months of ideological training to impress upon us the war’s objective. And one month of concrete preparations. The first part was especially hard. Some of us died. Roderick, my roommate at the minor seminary, succumbed to dysentery. We buried him in a blanket, there weren’t any coffins. At the end of our training we were given our real uniforms, and they told us again that we were “the new liberators” of our country.
It was clear from the start that Rwanda hoped not only to neutralize the camps, but to actually push on all the way to the capital, two thousand kilometers (about 1,250 miles) to the west. Kagame demanded that Mobutu step down, because he had given the génocidaires shelter and protection. Minuscule Rwanda would force Zaïre, the giant of Central Africa, to its knees, and the AFDL had to make it look like a domestic uprising. This was to be Kagame’s third regime change in a Central African country: after Uganda and Rwanda, it was now Zaïre’s turn.
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