All indications were that Kinshasa would soon fall. Kabila’s army was no match for Kabarebe’s troops. Still, things took a different turn. Kabila was saved in the nick of time by foreign troops: on August 19, 1998, four hundred Zimbabwean soldiers entered Congo; on August 22, the Angolan army began the liberation of Bas-Congo. Angola’s role was particularly decisive. During the First Congo War it had remained neutral: no one in Luanda mourned the imminent departure of Mobutu, whose support for the right-wing UNITA rebels had caused so much suffering. During the Second Congo War, however, the cards were reshuffled. There was a distinct possibility that, in order to bring down Kabila, Rwanda would this time support UNITA. That could not be allowed to happen. Zimbabwe, on the other hand, had interests in Katangan mining operations and therefore more economic motives. In addition, a sort of ideological brotherhood existed between presidents Robert Mugabe, José Eduardo Dos Santos, and Kabila; all three had flirted with what is referred to in Africa so exquisitely as le marxisme tropicalisé (tropicalized Marxism). Fidel Castro had supported Angola for years, just as he had Kabila with the visit from Che Guevara. During his time as President Kabila’s bodyguard, Ruffin Luliba had noticed those close ties. “Mzee liked revolutionaries. Men like Mugabe and Castro, he thought they were wonderful. His personal physician was a Cuban. I went with him to Cuba a few times. There were four of us kadogos, and we went to see Castro; I even shook his hand. We had dinner with him in Havana.”18 It was probably Castro who urged President Dos Santos of Angola to send his army into Congo.19
Kabila’s coalition grew. After Zimbabwe and Angola, Namibia joined in as well. Northern allies were found in Sudan, Chad, and Libya, each of which had its own reasons for preventing Kabila’s fall. Sudan offered its services because of a perennial conflict with Uganda over its support for rebels in southern Sudan. Libya provided a few planes in order to break out of its international isolation. Chad sent two thousand soldiers as a gesture of solidarity with Sudan and Libya. In the end, Kabila had a seven-nation army at his disposal: in addition to his own forces, there were troops from three countries to the north and three to the south. This was the coalition that stood up to the three countries from the east and operated behind the blind of the RCD: Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, with Rwanda as leading player and America’s undisputed favorite. Once again, Congo’s central location played a crucial role in the course of history. The armies now facing off were large: Kabila’s coalition had approximately eighty-five thousand troops, the rebels some fifty-five thousand.20 This impressive military presence led to a complete stalemate. Western Congo was soon back in Kabila’s hands, but the east was still held by the RCD. There was no real front, only clearly defined zones, often divided by a very broad stretch of no-man’s-land. Kabila’s authority extended only as far as Bas-Congo, Bandundu, western Kasai, and a large part of Katanga; Kigali and Kampala controlled northern Katanga, North and South Kivu, Maniema, and Orientale province. When Chad withdrew from Équateur in 1998, that part of the country fell into rebel hands as well. The occupying force this time, however, was not the RCD but a new rebel army supported exclusively by Uganda: the Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo (MLC). Its commander was Jean-Pierre Bemba, son of the wealthiest businessman of the Mobutu era. His troops consisted largely of veterans of the Division Spéciale Présidentielle (DSP), Mobutu’s remorseless private army.21
Rwanda’s second invasion was intended to be a repeat of that in 1996, but this was not the case. Due in part to the sentiments of the local population, the situation in Congo had become intractable. If the AFDL had once been welcomed as a liberation army, the RCD was seen right away as an invasionary force. In a city like Goma, Kabila was still extremely popular. When Wamba dia Wamba tried to recruit local boys for his RCD, Jeanine Mukanirwa mobilized her influential association of rural women. She had helped found the women’s movement in Kivu at the end of the Mobutu era. “There were five thousand of us women. Wamba dia Wamba came by to try and win us over for his rebellion. He called it a war of rectification, but we knew that Rwanda was behind it. We said: ‘In 1996 you people took away our children to fight. Now you come to take the rest of them to fight against their own brothers. Your war has no justification!’ Yes, we women were courageous back then.”22
Wamba’s RCD was hated outright. Even the Banyamulenge hesitated about whether to go along with Rwanda this time; compared to two years earlier, their enthusiasm had dwindled considerably.23 People from Goma told me about how their entire municipal administration had passed in Rwandan hands. The tax office, the immigration service, the intelligence service . . . There was no fighting when the city was captured, but once the new authorities were installed there began an endless series of kidnappings and disappearances.24 Intellectuals, journalists, civil-society activists, and church leaders met with intimidation and arrest. Hundreds of dissidents and counterinsurgents from the interior lost their lives.25
In the garden of the Caritas guesthouse in Goma, on the shore of lovely Lake Kivu, I interviewed someone who referred to himself as “Muhindu.” He walked with a limp and had a huge scar on his right arm. He had served for five years as truck driver for an RCD commander. He chose his words carefully. “A lot of young people were kidnapped back then. I always had three soldiers with me when I drove to a house. All the able-bodied boys and men were picked up and tossed into the back of the truck. The door was closed. Then I would drive to Kinyogote, close to Mugunga, at the edge of the lake. There was a garage there, where they used to keep speedboats. That was the prison. We threw them in there. After a few days they were killed. With ropes. I would take a motorboat out onto Lake Kivu. You have to tie big rocks to the bodies.” The waves on the lake splashed against the shore, but he wasn’t hearing them. It was quite cold there in the eastern highlands, but he was wearing only a T-shirt. He took a sip of beer and went on. “If you had a problem with someone, you went to see a friend in the RCD. You gave him some money and he made sure your enemy was killed. I took about sixteen people in my truck every day, and I drove for the RCD for five years. Sometimes there were a hundred of them in that garage. They died from the cold and the wind. The waves crashed in too.”26
The RCD operated quite brazenly in the towns. Those were under their control, but the countryside was not. That was the territory of the Interahamwe and other Hutu forces, who received support from Kinshasa. It was an improbable reversal of history: in 1996 Kabila had led a rebellion that carried out massacres among the Hutu refugees; two years later he was giving those same refugees weapons to fight against Rwanda . . . . In Congo, nothing was what it seemed. Alliances came and went, depending on the situation. Ideological conformity? Political affinity? Those were of no importance. The only thing that mattered was military (and later, pecuniary) opportunism. Your enemy’s enemies were your friends; they were the ones you hooked up with. In eastern Congo that logic kept the struggle between Rwandan Hutus and Rwandan Tutsis going for a long time. The echoes of the genocide did not die out.
The Mai-mai, too, received supplies from Kinshasa. Kabila no longer had troops in the east, but by way of the Mai-mai he could still keep the RCD from gaining total control over the interior. And so he farmed out the war there to two subcontractors who were extremely strange bedfellows: the Interahamwe and the Mai-mai. The one group consisted of Rwandan Hutus who had committed the original genocide, the other of Congolese hypernationalists who swore by their superstitions. In Bukavu, in June of 2007, I had dinner in deepest secrecy with four Mai-mai. Leery as they were of the city, they appeared only long after darkness had fallen, at the anonymous private home of a mutual friend. The atmosphere was edgy at first. Their “colonel,” a man in his thirties with bloodshot eyes, loudly related endless stories about the history of the Mai-mai, heroic tales that spoke of both rage and combativeness but went on for so long that his cohorts fell asleep. Later in the evening, though, once they had woken up, they talked at length about the war and their rituals. After a while, with the consumption o
f food and beer, they even showed me their magic leather armbands, their grigris. They rolled up their pants legs to point to where they had been struck by bullets that didn’t kill them (“And this is where it came back out!”). They invited me to feel their upper arms where, now that you mentioned it, there really was a bullet still under the skin (“No doctor, nothing like that: I just put a plant on it”). At our next meeting, they promised me, they would apply all their immunization rituals to one of their comrades, then shoot him. I would see that the bullets slid off his chest like water. Or wait, they had an even better idea. Because I was clearly so fond of Congo, that made me a potential Mai-mai too, they felt. They would apply all their rituals to me, that’s right, that was more like it, and one of them would shoot me. Wouldn’t that be an unforgettable experience!?27
The Mai-mai were never too particular about your ethnic origins, as long as you loved Congo with a passion. Yves van Winden knew all about that. He was a Belgian who had run a small airline in Congo for years, a sport pilot who had made his hobby his profession and who had made Congo his fatherland. During the war he acted as contact person between Kabila and the Mai-mai. We met at a nightclub in Goma. The other patrons included Russian pilots who had a sideline in gold smuggling and some seedy types in military uniforms I couldn’t quite identify. A few young prostitutes sat around the pool table, sipping their cola through straws. “They called me the ‘white Mai-mai,’” Yves van Winden said, “I brought them weapons from Kabila. I carried out more than four hundred solo flights, five or six hours each. That’s a very long flight. Most of the time I flew my Cessna, but sometimes a DC-3 or a little Antonov 26. I took six hundred kilos [1,320 pounds] of cargo on each flight. Probably about twenty-thousand Kalashnikovs, three to five hundred bazookas, two hundred 60-caliber mortars, twenty 90-caliber mortars, and ten 120s. And also two SAM-7 missiles, anti-aircraft.” Why would anyone take 240 metric tons (about 265 U.S. tons) of weapons to rebel territory? “Patriotism. Arming the Mai-mai was what stopped the RCD. The government still owes me a lot for all those flight hours. One time my Cessna was shot at during takeoff, the bullet flew right past my seat. I wasn’t touched. The Mai-mai weren’t surprised at all. After all, they had baptized my plane!”28
The map of Congo was frozen in place: to the west and south there was Kabila with his Angolan and Zimbabwean allies; to the north Bemba with his Ugandan-supported MLC; and to the east Wamba dia Wamba with his Rwandan-supported RCD, which fought against the Kinshasa-backed Interahamwe and Mai-mai. Peace talks had already started in early 1999, but it was not until July of that year, under pressure from France and the United States, that an agreement was reached in the Zambian capital of Lusaka. The foreign armies promised to withdraw their troops, the United Nations would send five hundred observers by way of a peacekeeping force, and Congo was to initiate a national dialogue about the arrangements for a postwar transitional period. Yet another transition. Ever since Mobutu had allowed the start of a democratization process in 1990, the country had lived in a permanent state of provisionality.
BUT THE WAR WAS NOT OVER. After Lusaka it merely entered a new phase, a messy, dirty phase. All wars are dirty, but when the political motive makes way for a pecuniary one, things go completely sour. And that is precisely what happened. The RCD no longer aimed for Kinshasa, but ensconced itself in a state of rebellion and noted that there was good money to be made in eastern Congo. Westerners have become used to seeing wars as exorbitantly expensive, money-guzzling enterprises that are disastrous to the economy. But in Central Africa, exactly the opposite was true: fighting a war was relatively cheap, especially in light of the magnificent profits to be made from raw materials. And this was no high-tech war. The oversupply of light, secondhand firearms, often from the post-Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, pushed prices down, and (child) soldiers who were allowed to plunder their own salaries cost nothing at all. They kept the population cowering, while the ore was there for the taking. War, in other words, became a worthwhile economic alternative. Why would one want to call a halt to such a lucrative business? Under pressure from the people themselves? But that’s what the guns were for, right? And what if a part of that impoverished population profited from the mineral wealth as well?
When I first met Dr. Soki, he was sitting alone in a Greek cafeteria in Kisangani, eating an omelet. It was a blisteringly hot day, but the air-conditioning kept things bearable inside. I had heard about him and we soon entered into conversation. He was originally from Bukavu and had been one of the many Congolese who fled to Kisangani in 1996, at the time of the first Rwandan invasion. A mortar had destroyed his house. He and his family trudged through the jungle for three weeks. But a few years later the war would reach his new place of residence too.
The most important event during the second phase of the war, Dr. Soki would find out soon enough, was the breaking of ties between Rwanda and Uganda. Now that profit had taken precedence over victory, the friendship between Kagame and Museveni hit the rocks. They no longer fought together to gain Kinshasa, but against each other to seize Kisangani. The rebels had already taken Dr. Soki’s town in 1998. Kisangani was the main regional trading center for diamonds. All over the city there were comptoirs du diamant (exchange offices), often Lebanese-operated, where prospectors and couriers from the interior came to cash in their stones. Uganda ruled the roost at first, but Rwanda was also interested in the proceeds and decided to dislodge its northern neighbor. On at least three occasions, gun battles broke out in the streets of Congo’s third largest city. Even today the inhabitants of Kisangani speak of “the one-day war”(August 1999), the “three-day war”(May 2000), and the “six-day war” (June 2000). The latter conflict was particularly violent, Dr. Soki recalled. Officially, the city was supposed to be demilitarized. Jeeps were already leaving, but both parties were afraid that the other would rush in to fill the vacuum.29 The troop strength of the UN peacekeeping force, the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC) had increased significantly, but not enough to keep things on an even keel. The Ugandans were camped to the north of the city, close to the Tshopo River and on the grounds of the Sotexki textile plant. The Rwandans were in the south, along the Congo River. It is unclear who provoked whom, but the planned withdrawal escalated instead into a full-blown firefight with heavy artillery. Within the next six days more than a thousand shells flew over the residential neighborhoods of the city with the most modernistic architecture in all of Congo.30 The people moved into their basements and had nothing to eat for days. At night the sky was filled with roaring, falling stars. There was neither water nor electricity. The people drank stagnant water from puddles and cisterns and endured a war that was not their own.31 Uganda and Rwanda were fighting over crippled-but-wealthy Congo, the way a jackal and a hyena might tug at the same carcass.
A makeshift cemetery was set up behind the public hospital. During the final, six-day war alone more than four hundred civilians were killed. There were countless wounded and innumerable houses were destroyed. “The war broke out on a Monday morning at ten o’clock, I was talking to a client about some building plans,” said Utshudi, an engineer, was not at home when one of the first shells landed on his house. “We lived at Deuxième Avenue 11, in the borough of Tshopo. When I returned, not a house was standing. It was a wasteland. Just bodies everywhere. They lay there for six days. We had to run away. The soldiers even shot at the people digging graves. When the war was over we went back to collect the corpses. We put them in bags and buried them in the cemetery behind the hospital. At one go I lost my wife, my younger sister, my sister-in-law, and my four children: seven family members. These days I pray to God to let me forget.”32
The break between Rwanda and Uganda ran parallel to a schism within the RCD: the rebel movement fell apart into a pro-Rwandan faction (the RCD-G, for Goma, led by Émile Ilunga and later largely by Azarias Ruberwa) and a pro-Ugandan faction (the RCD-K, for Kisangani, led by Wamba dia Wamba and later by Antipas Mbusa Nyam
wisi, also referred to as the RCD-ML, for Mouvement de Libération, or RCD-K/ML).33 Congo was rich not only in raw materials, but also in abbreviations. Dr. Soki viewed it all with a certain distance: “I didn’t think about politics much. We knew nothing about the motives behind the war.” When the six-day conflict began, the international aid organizations withdrew their personnel. Dr. Soki remained behind in a besieged city of half a million inhabitants. Like the physician in Albert Camus’s La Peste, he simply tried to sustain human dignity in an inhumane world.
For six days I worked alone at the Kisangani public hospital. There were three nurses and fifteen interns. An American surgeon from the Red Cross arrived only later. The people slept on the floor, on mats they’d woven themselves. It took a long time for blankets and medicine to get there. We worked from seven in the morning till eight at night. We treated two thousand people, people who had been shot in the stomach, in the chest, in a limb, or even in the head, people whose stomachs had been torn open by shrapnel. We removed blood from their lungs, shrapnel from their bladders. We performed amputations. It was real wartime surgery, but we had almost no trouble with infections. At first, though, there wasn’t enough diesel fuel to run the generators. We had to sterilize our instruments over a coal fire. And then a shell actually hit the hospital. One of the two operating rooms was destroyed and our five-thousand-liter reservoir burst and all the water ran out. That caused a lot of panic among the patients and personnel. We weren’t safe, not even there.
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