Congo

by David Van Reybrouck

  On April 9, 1997, Lubumbashi—the country’s economic capital—fell to the rebels. Mzee Kabila settled in and immediately received visits from international mining companies like De Beers and Tenke Mining, who knew that from then on he would be the one to do business with. The first concessionary mining contracts were signed even before Mobutu was ousted.57 It was already clear that the scales had tipped. After thirty-two years of dictatorship, a new age was dawning.

  For Ruffin, a new phase in the war began. Commander James Kabarebe no longer needed him as his bodyguard. “James said: ‘This is the end for us. I’m going to Kisangani, but you people are staying here with Mzee.’ It was the first time I was around Mzee. His son, Joseph, was there too.” Father and son stayed in Lubumbashi while the Rwandan Kabarebe led the fighting elsewhere. The victory was within arm’s reach, and that allowed a certain amount of relaxation. Ruffin had fond memories of those days with the president-to-be. “With Mzee, the good life started. I’m your father, he said, but never forget your natural parents. He asked where I came from. Bukavu, I said, I was kidnapped by Bugera. Ha, he said, then there’s no more playing priest for you! He liked to tease us. One day we plundered the some storehouses that belonged to the FAZ. I dressed up in a government soldier’s uniform, with leather boots and everything. Is that you, kadogo? Mzee asked. Yes, I said, it’s me. We stole the enemy’s supplies. You did? He laughed. He shook my hand and said: very good, stay with me.”

  With that pat on the head, Ruffin’s incredible youth took another unexpected turn: now he was one of of Kabila’s bodyguards. Within a year he had been transformed from a naive, soccer-playing boy into a worldly-wise young man who stayed on his toes and experienced history live, as it happened. The price he paid for that was fear and the loss of innocence, but each phase brought with it new forms of appreciation. “Kabila liked me. He entrusted his money to me. Ten thousand dollars! He often used to eat with us, right out of his mess tin. Afterward we would arm wrestle and he would be the referee. It was a sport we’d taken part in a lot out in the maquis. We never went to nightclubs or brothels: the only lives I knew were those of the seminarian and the soldier. We lived in Hotel Karavia, the best hotel in Lubumbashi. Mzee had room 114. The diamond hunters would make appointments to come and see him. He gave me a Motorola.”

  In that same hotel room, Kabila regularly received phone calls from his chief of staff, Kabarebe, who was approaching the capital on seven-league boots. Coming down the Congo River, he had seen the two capital cities on their opposite shores and had to ask some local fishermen which one was Kinshasa; otherwise he might have accidentally liberated Brazzaville.58 Kinshasa was about to fall, Kabila heard in his hotel room. He had never dreamed that things would go so quickly. Two weeks earlier he had flown to Congo-Brazzaville for direct negotiations with Mobutu. Nelson Mandela had called them both to meet on neutral ground, aboard a South African ship in the harbor of Pointe-Noire, but those nocturnal talks had led nowhere. Mobutu was unwilling to budge and Kabila saw no reason why he should add any water to the wine; after all, he had the upper hand. No, Kinshasa would be freed by force of arms and Ruffin would be there to see it happen.

  “Mzee told us: ‘Get going, all of you! And lots of luck! We’ll see each other again in Kinshasa!’ And we said: ‘At your service!’” Kabila, that much is clear, was only the rebellion’s front man: it was Kabarebe who did all the work. And the kadogos of course. Ruffin: “I was on the first plane that landed at Kin, a private plane from Scibe-Air. I’d never flown before. Our people had already taken the airport. Jeeps took us to the borough of Limete, we went on foot from there.”

  The lack of a peace agreement, of course, entailed major risks. Everyone was afraid that a violent confrontation was coming in Kinshasa. Mobutu had just appointed General Marc Mahele as his new chief of staff, a dyed-in-the-wool soldier who had earned his stripes during the Shaba wars and relentlessly crushed the plundering in 1991 and 1993. Mahele was, without a doubt, the most capable officer in the Zaïrian army at that moment. His integrity made him popular with the people, but he was feared for his toughness. Now it was up to him to defend Kinshasa against the rebel advance. On Friday, May 16, 1997, however, Mobutu fled at the crack of dawn to his palace in Gbadolite. The capital ran the risk of all-out anarchy; the next twenty-four hours would prove decisive. In Kinshasa, a city of millions, what everyone feared was a total free-for-all. The Kinois were more afraid of their own soldiers than of the rebels and shuddered at the thought of a new and devastating wave of plundering. General Mahele saw the hopelessness of the situation and decided not to offer up a megalopolis to the madness of one old man on the lam. To spare the civilian population, therefore, he contacted the AFDL and went late that evening to the camp at Tshatshi where Mobutu’s last supporters had entrenched themselves. Among them was the president’s eldest son, nicknamed “Saddam Hussein” for his legendary cruelty. Mahele tried to convince them to forgo all plundering; they, in turn, saw him as a turncoat officer. He was murdered in the early hours of Saturday morning.

  A few hours later Ruffin walked in his black rubber boots down Avenue Lumumba in Limete. The arrival of the AFDL resulted in a festive frenzy. In the distance you could still hear the roar of heavy artillery, but he and his companions no longer had to fight. “We received an incredible welcome. The men shouted “Libérateurs! Libérateurs!”; the women spread their pagnes on the ground for us to walk over. The people gave us water. They spoke Lingala, we couldn’t understand them. We were looking for the home of Prime Minister Kengo wa Dondo, and the people showed us the way. We didn’t know our way around the city. We had orders to take the offices of the RTNC and Mobutu’s Palais de Marbre.”

  In one of the houses they searched, Ruffin pocketed a solid gold ashtray. It was May 17, 1997, and within hours the AFDL held all key positions in the city. The Beach, the Hotel Intercontinental, the Memling . . . Some government soldiers began plundering, but the majority slipped into people’s homes and begged for civilian clothing: to walk around in uniform now was to sign one’s own death sentence. Highly placed women who owed their management positions to Mobutu hastily burned their pagnes printed with the MPR logo or the Great Steersman’s portrait.59 As accounts were settled, some two hundred people were killed in isolated incidents; very few compared to the way things might have been. In Lubumbashi, Kabila received a call from Kabarebe. “Kinshasa has fallen!” Kabila shrieked with pleasure and rolled laughing over the carpet of his hotel room.60 He was coming, right away.

  And once again, Ruffin was there: “That day I went back to the airport to meet Mzee. ‘See, I was telling the truth!’ he shouted to me. He held a press conference. I’m in all the pictures and film footage with him, along with Joseph and Masasu, another of the AFDL founders.”

  At that press conference, Kabila pronounced himself the new head of state of a new country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That “democratic” was a bit strange, for no one had voted for him and the nonviolent opposition of Tshesekedi and his followers had been completely ignored. The only thing Kabila adopted from the Sovereign National Conference was the idea to change Zaïre’s name back to Congo. The struggle for a civil society carried out by people like Régine Mutjima had been passed in the fast lane by the military conquest in which Ruffin had taken part. She was now forty-two, he was fourteen. When Kabila was sworn in as president a few days later, on May 29, 1997, that did not take place in the houses of parliament where the conference had met, but just down the road, in the big new soccer stadium. His lieges, the heads of state of Rwanda and Uganda, were there, as were those of Angola and Zambia. But the impressive stadium was not jammed with cheering Kinois. In a city of millions, at least a third of the seats remained empty. The words of Kabila’s inauguration rolled from the loudspeakers and echoed against the half-empty, concrete grandstands.

  But Kabila kept a tight hold on the reins. By way of Togo, Mobutu fled to Morocco and went into permanent exile. Aware that the end was near, he
had had the bones of his mother and a few other loved ones exhumed so he could take them with him. Barely four months later, surrounded by a few friends and family and the bones of his ancestors, beaten and bitter, he breathed his last.

  IT WAS A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER and the waters of Lake Kivu rippled imperturbably. For Ruffin Luliba, however, it was an emotional day. When Kabila went back to Bukavu for the first time, Ruffin went with him. He hadn’t seen his parents in years. “It was five o’clock in the evening and I walked back to my parents’ home. I saw my mother outside, pounding pundu, and I fired three times in the air. She was startled and ran inside, and my father ran after her. Then I shouted: Papa, it’s me! My mother came outside and wept. I had left as a seminarian and came back as a soldier. They had already held a wake for me a long time ago. Everyone cried, even my brother.” For the family, it was as though Ruffin had returned from the dead. It was a fond reunion. But Ruffin also visited the mother of his roommate, Roderick, the boy who had been kidnapped along with him and who had died of dysentery after a few days in Rwanda. “I told Roderick’s mother the sad news. I was staying then with Mzee, at the Hotel Résidence. He told me to bring my parents along. When I introduced them, the first thing he did was hand my father two thousand dollars. He said: ‘Please accept my apologies, but I’m going to take him with me again. Your son is a patriot.’”

  CHAPTER 12

  COMPASSION, WHAT IS THAT?

  The Great War of Africa

  1997–2002

  A NEW REGIME, A NEW SOUND. THE INHABITANTS OF KINSHASA must have thought their ears were playing tricks on them. The post-Mobutu era began with a low, metallic tone that rose to a high, shrill note and then back down again, before rising again, and again. It was a noise that cut through everything, splitting the traffic in two and echoing in the alleyways. Children stopped their soccer games and covered their ears. They grimaced and looked around for the red truck. Up and down, up and down went the hellish blare of the siren. For the first time in decades, Kinshasa, a city of millions with its endless slums, its tattered electrical networks, exposed cables and hundreds of thousands of little coal fires, had an indispensable “priority” vehicle: a fire truck.1

  And that was only the beginning. Laurent-Désiré Kabila indeed seemed to be bringing about changes. The garbage that lay in huge, steaming piles all around the cité was picked up for the first time in years. The sewers were cleaned. The hallways of the ministries smelled of bleach. Even the airport at Ndjili, the world’s most chaotic terminal with its tangle of passengers, customs men, immigration officials, policemen, soldiers and “protocols” who pushed and shoved to gain control of your passport and baggage receipts, even that anthill was gradually become well-ordered. Soldiers and policemen received their pay; they didn’t get much, but at least they got it regularly. For the first time in decades, teachers and civil servants could start saving up again for a bicycle. The towering four-digit inflation receded to two digits, partly as a result of the strong dollar. Additional banknotes were no longer being printed, which made cash scarcer again and therefore more valuable. During the first half of 1998, inflation amounted to only 5 percent.2 In June 1998 the nouveau zaïre was replaced by a new currency: the franc congolais. One Congolese franc equaled one hundred thousand new zaïres, which in turn equaled fourteen million old zaïres. The currency was stable, at least at first, and quickly became accepted all over the country. The bills did not bear the likeness of Kabila, but of neutral objects like a Chokwe mask or the Inga Dam. When the new currency was introduced, all the greats of Congolese music—from ancient Wendo Kolosoyi to Papa Wemba to the young star J. B. Mpiana—sang its praises, like a sort of Band-Aid for a banknote.3

  But appearances were deceiving; the enthusiasm for Kabila quickly dwindled. As euphorically as he had been received, just as quickly did the people grow tired of him again. Making friends is an art, but Kabila mastered the even rarer art of rapidly turning friends into archenemies. Not just some of them, which could have been a sign of cunning—no, all of them, which was more a sign of ineptitude. It started with the democratic opposition from the Mobutu era. The many thousands of citizens who had courageously struggled against the dictatorship gave Kabila, at the very least, the benefit of the doubt. Many hoped that the resolutions of the Soveriegn National Conference would now truly be given the force of law and that Kabila would keep the promises Mobutu had broken. But that was the last thing Kabila intended to do. For him, his conquest was the start of a new story. After all, what did he—the perennial maquisard—have to do with the five-year-old blather of a hall full of starry-eyed idealists? The constitution, the parliament, the government, and the electoral committee of the transitional years all landed in the trashcan.4 Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS) supporters ended up in prison and were beaten.5 Only two months after the “liberation” of Kinshasa, Étienne Tshisekediwas arrested. He was interrogated, placed under house arrest, and then disappeared into exile in his native region. One of Kabila’s ministers said: “We gave him seeds and a little tractor, so that he can start a farm.”6

  No, rather than instate full-blown democracy, the new government reverted to an extremely authoritarian regime in which everything revolved around the person of Kabila himself. The multiparty system was abolished; only his Alliance des Forces Démocratique pour la Libération (AFDL) was allowed to continue, even though it was merely an alliance of convenience set up at Rwanda’s instigation a few days after the invasion of Zaïre. At first Kabila had merely been its spokesman, but he neutralized his three cofounders one by one. André Kisase Ngandu, the only one with military power, he had had murdered during the war itself. After being sworn in as president, he made sure Anselme Masasu was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, while Déogratias Bugera, Ruffin’s kidnapper, was promoted out of the picture. The military alliance was transformed into a national party, but without much flesh on its bones. Congo became the AFDL, but the AFDL was, in actual practice, Kabila himself. The people were allowed to organize themselves politically only in the form of Comités du Pouvoir Populaire (people’s power committees). No one knew exactly what that was supposed to mean, but it smacked of badly digested maquis Marxism. A new constitution came into effect on May 28, 1997, and essentially placed all power in the hands of the president. From then on, Kabila stood at the head of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and of the army, the administration, and the diplomatic corps. When it came to cabinet ministers, he preferred to surround himself with fellow Katangans or with former political exiles. Opponents who had for years been counting on receiving a political mandate saw strangers walk away with them. Just for the fun of it, Kabila granted ministerial posts to the by-then grown-up daughters of Joseph Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba—a historical reference that lent him an air of legitimacy, but was in fact a farce.

  “I graduated in 1994 from Lubumbashi University with a degree in international affairs,” Bertin Punga, a leader of the later anti-Kabila protest movement, told me. “I was politically engaged and I had been against Mobutu. At the time of the campus killings in 1990, I saw three dead bodies. I was from Kasai and I remembered how the governor had chased us out of Katanga. So when the AFDL came along, I joined up. Before that, politics had been a matter of caste, but after that revolution it seemed open to everyone. I have a university education, I told myself, I should really go into politics. But when I got to Kinshasa I saw that the jobs were being handed out to poorly educated people from Katanga, while I, with my university diploma, was demoted to a much lower diplomé d’État [state-certified graduate]. When I saw how many Katangan ministers there were, I knew that Kabila was just another Mobutu. No, he was even worse, when you think that Mobutu spread his abuses out over a period of thirty-two years. There were summary executions, the multiparty system was abolished, the single-party state made a comeback. That business with the Comités du Pouvoir Populaire, that was really just a repeat of the MPR as far as I was concerned.”7
/>
  During his first year in office, Kabila seemed to be aiming for a strong, authoritarian, and extremely personalized state, but in practice that state remained quite feeble. There was no real policy, no vision, no government apparatus. Even the army was a joke. Mobutu’s Forces Armées Zaïroises (FAZ) was disbanded and replaced by the Forces Armées Congolaises (FAC). It sounded official, but was in fact a hodgepodge of former FAZ soldiers, former Katangan Tigers, kadogos, Banyamulenge, and Rwandan Tutsis. The chief of staff was the Rwandan James Kabarebe. Kabila oversaw his country the way he had once overseen his rebel territory: laxly, very laxly. The only thing about which he was conscientious was maintaining control over the channels of information. It was no mistake, therefore, that his adviser for all things communications-related was once again Dominique Sakombi Inongo, the propagandist-turned-prophet. Kabila must have learned that from Mobutu: a strong regime needs to keep the media in an iron grip. The radio journalist Zizi Kabongo found out about that himself one night at 2 A.M., when the army came pounding on his door.

  “Kabila had a very cool relationship with the public broadcasting organization,” Kabongo told me.

  He saw the entire staff as a clutch of Mobutists. One evening we rebroadcast one of his meetings. Kabila didn’t sleep much and he heard the broadcast. Ever since Mobutu we’d had no money for equipment, so we always had to erase our tapes and use them over again. But this one tape was badly erased. After the recording of Kabila’s meeting, there was a section of tape that still contained the tail end of a report on Mobutu. The technician on duty fell asleep, but at the end the listeners heard papa Maréchal’s voice again. “Oyé! Oyé! Papa ndeko. Our friend!” you heard the people shouting. Mobutu has returned, the listeners thought. That same night the army rounded up all the journalists to throw them into prison. They knocked on my door at two o’clock. In the prison, I ended up among men who had been sentenced to death and revolutionaries. The situation was quite grim. Kabila was out to eliminate all his enemies.