At the head of the invasionary force was the fresh-faced but dauntless Rwandan officer James Kabarebe, one of Kagame’s most trusted men. He was only twenty-seven: a boy with a baby face, but also with great charisma and a flexible conscience. The invading army was already known for youthfulness, because it made use for the first time of kadogos (child soldiers) from Zaïre. They were recognizable by their baggy uniforms and particularly by their black rubber boots, the true earmark of Rwandan involvement. Kalashnikovs seemed too big to fit in their hands, but the way they clutched the characteristic curved clip showed more venom than reluctance.
Ruffin remembered the first phase:
James Kabarebe said: I need ten kadogos from Bukavu, ten from Uvira and ten from Goma. I reported to him and we had disguise ourselves as street children and go in and spy. James told me: “I’m entrusting this mission to you. Go and watch the FAZ [Forces Armées Zaïroises, Mobutu’s government forces]. See what kind of guns they have. See whether they have reinforcements.” He gave me a Motorola to keep in touch with him. I crossed the border wearing rags and went to look at their camp in Bukavu. When I got there, the soldiers were busy plundering. One of them shouted to me to come and help him carry the booty! I hid the Motorola. It was complete chaos. Shots were being fired. Then I went back to Rwanda to tell James what I had seen. I didn’t look up my family while I was in Bukavu. When you’re in the army, you forget your family. The army was my family.
The FAZ, plundering? Kabarebe was delighted to hear that. Zaïre, he decided, was now a complete shambles. And indeed: in early October, when the deputy governor of South Kivu announced that he would start the next day with the ethnic cleansing of the Banyamulenge, the threatened group went on a rampage. That was the starting shot for the hostilities. Rwanda commenced the invasion. A few days later, the AFDL came to the fore as rebel movement. Uvira was taken on October 28, 1996, Bukavu two days later. One of the first casualties was Christophe Munzihirwa, the archbishop who had sharply criticized the Rwandan machinations. Ruffin and his buddies fought in the front lines. “There were Rwandans, Ugandans, and even Eritreans with us. We smoked big six-inch joints, that gave us the courage to be patriots.” Mobutu’s soldiers turned and ran right away, but the heaviest resistance came from the Mai-mai, the popular militias that hated all things Rwandan.
My first fight was with the Mai-mai who were guarding the offices of the RTNC, the public broadcaster. I had a short Kalashnikov. That took some getting used to. I’m left-handed, so I kept burning myself; the cartridges ejected on the right side of the gun, right against my stomach. A Mai-mai came running up to me with his red kerchief and his fetishes. He didn’t have any ammunition. I put a bullet through his head. I was terribly upset. I had never killed anyone before and I felt terrible. Let me go back to the third section, I begged the officers. I didn’t want to fight up in the first section anymore. You have no choice, they told me, and they gave me a hundred lashes.
After the fall of Uvira and Bukavu, Goma followed on October 31, 1996. Within only a few days the AFDL had taken the three most important cities in eastern Zaïre, and by no accident the three cities with the biggest refugee camps. The AFDL wanted to press on to Kinshasa as quickly as possible, but neutralizing the camps was crucial for the Rwandans. Ruffin clearly felt the tensions within the mixed invasionary forces: “Whenever we got to a refugee camp, the Rwandan Tutsis would do all the work. Hundreds, thousands of dead people . . . Fathers, mothers, women . . . The Hutus are serpents, they said. At the Kashusha camp, close to Bukavu, I went into a tent where they had just killed a grandmother and a pregnant woman. The only one alive was a child. A toddler. I was supposed to kill him, but I couldn’t. He petted my gun. I let him go, sent him along with a few Hutus who were running away.”
Around Goma, where the five largest refugee camps were located, the killing was particularly remorseless. Rwanda riddled the hovels with mortar and machine-gun fire, causing many of the Hutus there to flee in a panic back to their homeland. Within a few days, almost four hundred thousand refugees, a huge sea of humanity, fled east across the border.41 In Rwanda a new traffic sign was posted: “Ralentir: refugiés” (Slow: refugees crossing).42 But a great many Hutus, especially the more militarized among them, moved farther west into the jungles. By the time the United Nations had put together an intervention team to protect the refugees, the camps were empty. The ensuing struggle between the Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis, the sequel to the genocide, was to take place on Zaïrian soil.
At the age of fourteen, Ruffin learned about the horrors of war from close by. His battalion moved south, by way of Uvira, along Lake Tanganyika to Katanga. At Bendera, a town in north Katanga, he experienced the grimmest fighting. He and his comrades were pinned down by heavy shelling. “A firefight is like a drum set. Bombs and bazookas sound like the tom-toms and the floor tom. The bursts from our Kalashnikovs are like ruffles on a snare drum. The bass drum is represented by an 80-mm mortar. And the cymbals, those are our shrieks, because we were always screaming. We made ghostly sounds to drive the enemy mad, some in a low voice, others shrilling. We shouted their names and said that we would find them.” War, madness, hysteria. Soccer, but then without the ball. Only the screaming. And with guns.
The screaming didn’t help. Ruffin and three other soldiers were taken prisoner by Rwandan Hutus. He was terrified. “The Hutus were notorious for killing people with the machete, the way they had during the genocide. They cut off your arms or pounded in your skull, so they could see your brains. That was typical of them.” He was the youngest of the four prisoners, and that proved to be his salvation. One by one, the others had to lay their arms on the chopping block.
The Hutus had new machetes, they glistened: they were like mirrors. My friend looked the other way when they raised the machete. He screamed. I saw his hand, his hand that was still moving, even though it was already lying on the ground. Then they made him suffer terribly. They kept on chopping, they ran their blades through his body, until he was dead. And then they did the same to the second one, and the third. My friends were slaughtered one by one and I watched. When it was my turn, the commander told me that his name was Mungara and that he had been President Habyarimana’s bodyguard before the president was murdered. He was going to spare me and started writing a letter in Kinyarwanda. “Here, take this to Kabarebe.” They tore off my clothes and sent me away in my underwear. I came down out of the hills and returned to our position. That was the hardest moment of my life, I’ll never forget it. When I finally got there, I handed the letter to James Kabarebe. He read it and said: “Dieu le veut. It is God’s will. Mungara has murdered the whole family, but I’m going to keep you as my bodyguard.”
Ruffin, a Zaïrian boy who until recently had known nothing about politics and found the offside rule already difficult enough to comprehend, had almost been killed in a conflict between Rwanda Hutus and Tutsis. “I didn’t have to go into battle anymore. James loved me, he let me carry his duffle bag. ‘Ruffin, bring me my bag!’ he would shout to me. In the days that followed, I saw him studying the map of Congo. He had never been here before either. Kabarebe had no real education, but he was very logical and calm, he could analyze and listen well. He had lost his family and he said to me: ‘You have to love your country, kadogo.’” And that was how Ruffin, the boy who liked soccer and wanted to become a priest, became bodyguard to the de facto commander of the invading force that would dethrone Mobutu.
THE AFDL USED A PINCER MOVEMENT to conquer Zaïre. Ruffin was with the southerly arm that moved toward Lubumbashi; the northern pincer headed for Kinshasa, the city on the river. After three decades of dictatorship, many tens of thousands of civilians were now overrun by war as well. A virtual exodus began. Many of the inhabitants of Kivu tried to get out, but the last planes were chock full and anyone with a jeep had to hand it over to the plundering soldiers of the FAZ. Thousands of them then decided to travel to Kisangani on foot. It was a seven-hundred-kilometer (435-mile) journey through
the jungle, the first part of which went by way of Kahuzi-Biega, a mountainous natural park where in better times tourists had come to see the gorillas. Dr. Soki, a Bukavu physician, walked away after his house was destroyed by a mortar shell.43 Sekombi Katondolo, an artist from Goma, left town with a few friends in search of safety.44 Émilie Efinda, a relatively prosperous female pharmacist from Bukavu, started the journey in high heels.45 It was an arduous trip through the jungle, at the height of the rainy season. People took shelter beneath the leaves, slept on the ground, fought off the ants, and ate rotten fruit. Hygiene was at a minimum. Stockings, handkerchiefs, and rags were used as sanitary napkins.46 The paths through the interior were muddy; at many places there was no road left. Where the bridges had been washed away, people waded through rivers. Trucks could pass only here and there, but the drivers demanded exorbitant sums to carry the sick, exhausted, and starving a little farther. The column of refugees was huge and heterogeneous: plundering FAZ soldiers, panicky civilians, terrified Rwandan Hutus running for their lives, drugged child soldiers, hardened military men from Rwanda and Uganda. The only ones moving in the opposite direction were the Mai-mai, off to combat the foreign elements. In ragtag groups they moved eastward, with no central chain of command.
Deeper in the interior, the pursuit of the Hutus led to grave human rights violations. As soon as the AFDL came in, villagers noted, the Rwandans would ask where the refugees were, then take off to massacre them.47 This led to massive carnage. The situation was particularly gruesome at Tingi-Tingi, only a stone’s throw from Kisangani, where a group of some 135,000 Hutu refugees had gathered. Many of them were in a pathetic state. Cholera had thinned their ranks and their children were dying in great numbers. When the AFDL approached from the east in late February 1997, the survivors ran into the jungle to hide. The Rwandan Tutsis then misused the international aid organizations to help regroup the refugees in a number of makeshift camps. As soon as a new crowd of Hutus was gathered, aid workers and journalists were barred from the area “for safety reasons” and the ethnic cleansing could begin with impunity. It was not only Hutu soldiers or Interahamwe who were murdered, but also malnourished children, women, old people, the wounded, and the dying. The killing sometimes took place at gunpoint, but much more often with the machete and the hammer. Ammunition was expensive and heavy to carry through the jungle.
The international community was denied access to the area and the true extent of the atrocities became clear only later. Eyewitness accounts from perpetrators are rare. “Yes, I was at Tingi-Tingi,” said Lieutenant Papy Bulaya, a former soldier in the AFDL. Only after many bottles of beer was he able to talk about it.
Listen, our objective was Kisangani, and Tingi-Tingi was in the way. So we had to neutralize it. I was a kadogo, only fifteen, our commander was Rwandan, General Ruvusha. He’s a colonel in the Rwandan army now, but he was terrible. Laurent Nkunda was there too. Drive out the enemy, those were our orders. Our Tutsi commander told us: They’re génocidaires, they have to die. They would call out: Kadogo, kill this person. And we had to obey, otherwise we were executed on the spot. We had to keep going all the time. A lot of Rwandans were killed there back then. Afterward their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned, or buried. The supply trucks moved along behind us: food for us and gasoline for the “mopping-up,” to “clean the slate.” When I think back on it, it hurts so much. I regret it, but we were loyal to the AFDL.48
The emergency camps at Tingi-Tingi had provided shelter for eighty-five thousand people; after the cleansing they were empty, deserted, desolate. Tens of thousands of Hutus were massacred. A group of forty-five thousand fled west, to Équateur, where they were intercepted at Boende and Mbandaka and murdered en masse. Eyewitnesses even saw soldiers kill babies by crushing their skulls with a boot heel or dashing their heads against a wall.49 A few Hutus were able to escape and made it to Congo-Brazzaville, some even as far as Gabon. By then they had covered more than two thousand kilometers (about 1,250 miles) on foot, straight across Zaïre, under conditions more miserable than anything Stanley had endured. All in all there were only a few thousand survivors, a tiny fraction of their original numbers. During the invading army’s advance, an estimated two to three hundred thousand Hutu refugees were murdered.50
THE WAR LASTED SEVEN MONTHS and was, in essence, a steady offensive westward to Kinshasa. Real battles were waged at some places, like Bunia and Watsa, but almost everywhere else the AFDL simply rolled on through. Kindu fell on February 28, 1997, Kisangani on March 15, and Mbuji-Mayi on April 4. The conquest of Kisangani was of particular strategic and symbolic importance, because the city lay on the river, the Central African thoroughfare to Kinshasa. Prime Minister Kengo wa Dondo had vowed that that city would never be taken, but there you had it: the rebels overran it without a hitch. The characteristic images of the AFDL’s advance showed two long rows of child soldiers in black rubber boots, moving down both sides of the road in silence on their way to a town or city. They were foot soldiers in the most literal sense: children moving on foot. By the time they arrived, Mobutu’s army had already fled, often after a bit of plundering. In Kikwit the inhabitants paid the government soldiers to leave without sacking the town.51 Once they were gone, the local citizens welcomed their liberators from the east with banners and singing. The democratic opposition was pleased with the military liberation. “The UDPS welcomes the AFDL,” some banners read.52 The young soldiers who came from so far away and who marched through the streets in such great earnestness were admired for their courage and patriotism.53 Everywhere they came, new recruits signed up. The Katangan Tigers, whose invasion of Shaba had failed in 1978, joined as well. The AFDL was engaged in a truly triumphal procession.
During grand rallies, Kabila spoke to the newly liberated crowds. For the first time the masses saw the man about whom they had heard so much on the radio. He usually went dressed in black and wore a cowboy hat on his huge, bald dome. Kabila was a robust figure, a man with meat on his bones who laughed broadly and, with one hand in his pocket, exuded an air of ease, even nonchalance. In a firm voice he told overblown stories about his liberation army, spoke of the need for popular militias and urged parents to donate a child to the cause. His charisma was undeniable. Compared to the grumpy old man in Gbadolite, he was a breath of fresh air. He exuded power, but also conviviality. Everything was going to be different now. Rwanda vehemently denied all involvement, but many inhabitants of the interior still suspected that Kabila’s cakewalk had been no purely domestic affair. But all was allowed, as long as it meant being rid of the vieux léopard (old leopard). “A drowning man will clutch at any piece of driftwood he can find, even at a snake if need be,” the people in Kikwit told each other.54
KABILA’S AFDL WON THE SUPPORT not only of the people, who were tired of Mobutu, and that of Rwanda and Uganda, but also of the United States. Since the end of the genocide, Kagame’s Tutsi regime—thanks to its carefully cultivated role of victim—had gained credit with the American authorities. Embarrassed by a genocide they had not succeeded in preventing, new partner countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands began providing Kigali with lavish support. With Bill Clinton, furthermore, a president had been elected who wanted to force a definitive break with his predecessors’ old, cynical Zaïre policies.55 He believed in new African leaders, men like Mandela and Museveni—heads of state who in no way resembled the Mobutus, Bokassas, and Idi Amins of yore, he thought—a new generation: might Kabila perhaps be one of those? Although there was no internationally orchestrated approach, the Rwandan army in any event met with no obstruction in carrying out its plans. Just as the French had continued to support the Hutu regime, despite the rumors of genocide, so too did various American services provide logistical and material support for the invading army’s offensive, despite the rumors of massacres.56 The old-fangled cynicism that the Clinton administration wanted to do away with made way for a new-fangled cynicism: humanitarian in its intentions, h
ighly naive in its analyses and therefore disastrous in its consequences. There was no long-term vision. The confusion was great, the policy off the cuff. The backing for Rwanda and the rebels would unleash years of misery. Kabila must have found it rather amusing: thirty years after being assisted by Che Guevara, he was now suddenly receiving support from the Satan of Imperialism itself.
Mobutu, though, had lost his allies. France briefly tried to help him with a detachment of soldiers, but without any particularly great enthusiasm. He then hoped to turn the tide with a few European mercenaries, but that was no more successful than it had been in 1964. The only ones who showed up were Bosnian Serbs who had fought in the Yugoslav wars, but they were no match for Kabila’s troops.
MAP 8: THE FIRST CONGO WAR: KABILA’S ADVANCE (OCTOBER 1996 – MAY 1997)
Throughout the AFDL offensive, Mobutu spent most of his time in Europe, where he was operated on for prostate cancer (giving rise to a new name for the new batch of worthless Zairian banknotes: les prostates). He resided in Lausanne and at his villa in Cap-Martin. When he finally did return to Kinshasa it was as a deathly ill man who could barely walk. Nevertheless, he was welcomed by a enormous crowd of cheering compatriots. The chief had come back! He was going to save the country! Everything was going to be all right! But it didn’t turn out that way. In the capital the bickering between Mobutu and Tshisekedi went on unabated, as though no massive invasionary force was approaching. They continued to squabble as before over who was allowed to be the prime minister and who was allowed to appoint him, even though half of the country they were squabbling over had already fallen into the hands of others.
YOUNG RUFFIN, MEANWHILE, was on his way to Lubumbashi. He and his crew carried their guns and bazookas on their backs. “Everything went by foot. We followed the railroad tracks for long stretches. My feet hurt a lot. We used to pour water into our boots, that eased the pain a little, it let you walk easily again. But it also made your feet sweat terribly. When you took off your boots, your feet stank like a three-day-old corpse!” Soldiers’ tricks and the humor of the trenches.
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