In a country where the educational system had been destroyed, where there were no jobs, where dowries were unaffordable and the average life expectancy was only forty-two, the war provided not only profits but also a sense of purpose. Children with no future suddenly had an ideal and an identity.54 “My brothers are fishermen now, they work on the lake in their canoes,” another young man told me. “In the war they were with the PUSIC [another Hema militia]. They were twelve and fourteen in 2002. When they came back from the war, they spoke laughingly of their pillaging and raping. The war was a joke, perhaps a joke that brought death along with it, but still a joke.”55 Veterans among themselves bantered stories back and forth, like students after a drunken night on the town. The fighting had been a bacchanal of blood and beer, a Dionysian ritual of running, grabbing, and biting, a blowout with roasted goat meat, smooth female flesh, screaming voices, gun smoke, female flesh that grew moist anyway, there you go, a rush, a curse, a carnival, a temporary upending of all values, a conscious transgression, a forbidden pleasure smothered in a sauce of fear, goose flesh, and humor, lots of humor. A gruesome feast of life’s brittleness.
At a certain point, as I sat drinking beer on the waterfront with Muhindu, the man who had dumped bodies into Lake Kivu, he said something disconcerting. “A soldier is like a dog. If you open the gate, he causes damage. In the morning, before we were sent out, our leader would say: ‘Go out and do something foolish.’ We ransacked houses. We took cell phones, money, and gold necklaces from people. We raped. If you give someone permission to kill, after all, what difference does a rape make?”
I WAS SITTING IN A HALF-DARKENED OFFICE IN GOMA. You could hear the noise from the street. There were no banners of international NGOs in front of the door, no logos, no air-conditioning. This was the anonymous, discreet workplace of La Synergie des Femmes, the city’s only shelter for Congolese women, run by the women themselves. Across the wooden table from me is Masika Katsua, a forty-one-year-old Nande woman. She used to live in the interior. The Nande were successful traders in places like Beni and Butembo, and that had created a lot of bad blood. “It was in 2000. We were at our own home. My husband imported goods from Dubai. The soldiers came in. They were Tutsis. They spoke Rwandan. They sacked everything and wanted to kill my husband. ‘I’ve already given you everything,’ he told them, ‘so why do you want to kill me?’ But they said: ‘We kill big traders with the knife, not with a gun.’ They had machetes. They started hacking at his arm. ‘We have to chop hard,’ they said, ‘the Nande are strong.’ Then they butchered him, like in a slaughterhouse. They took out his intestines and his heart.”
While she spoke, she never looked up. She scratched incessantly with the plastic cap from a ballpoint pen in the grain of the wooden table.
I had pick up all the pieces. They held a gun to my head. I wept. All the pieces of my husband’s body. I had to gather them together. They cut me with a knife, that’s how I got this scar. I have another one on my thigh. I had to lie down on his body parts, to sleep on them. I did that, there was blood everywhere. I wept and they started raping me. There were twelve of them. And then my two daughters in the next room. I lost consciousness and ended up in the hospital. After six months I still wasn’t healed. I was still bleeding and gave off terrible smells. My daughters were pregnant. A boy and girl were born, but my daughters refused to have them. I took those children under my wing. When I came back, it turned out that my in-laws had sold everything, the house, the land, everything. They said it was my fault that my husband was dead. I had no sons and therefore no right to stay. The family turned me away. When my grandchildren ask me now about that scar, I can’t tell them. It was their fathers who did it.
In 2006 Masika was once again beaten and raped, this time by Nkunda’s men. They had come looking for her because, after fleeing on her own to the interior, she had started organizing classes for other rape victims. New victims came to her each day, girls who didn’t dare to press charges. “I want to kill Nkunda. God forgive me. If I die for doing that, at least I will have done something that gives me release. I’m still alone. The men don’t want me anymore, and I hate all men. I want to help other women. My home is open to them. I pray a lot. I hope for nothing. I try to forget. But when I think back . . . on how my husband and I lived together . . . all that sadness.”56
And the waters of Lake Kivu slap against the docks. The top of the Nyiragongo volcano vanishes amid the clouds. Jeeps with tinted windows drive slowly over the roundabout. Two boys are pushing a big wooden bicycle through the mud. The bike groans beneath a man-sized bag of colorful flip-flops. And inside a half-darkened office a woman rubs the cap of a ballpoint pen slowly back and forth over the wood, as through trying to scratch something out.
CHAPTER 13
LA BIÈRE ET LA PRIÈRE
(SUDS AND SANCTITY)
New Players in a Wasted Land
2002–2006
ASK ALMOST ANY CONGOLESE WHERE HE WOULD REALLY like to live, and there’s a good chance that he will say “na Poto,” in Europe. Poto in Lingala comes from Portugal, the first European country with which Central Africa became acquainted. In more concrete terms, Poto means Brussels or Paris, because the rest of Europe—with the possible exception of London—doesn’t count. Jamais Kolonga, the first Congolese man to dance with a white woman in the 1950s, proudly told me that all eight of his children now live in Europe. Poto means success. Ask the same Congolese where he definitely does not want to go, and you will be sure to hear “na Makala.” Makala means charcoal, but it is also an outlying district of Kinshasa where charcoal was once made, and where today Kinshasa’s Centre Pénitentiaire et de Rééducation is located, the central prison. In the popular imagination, the word makala stands for everything the Congolese fear and hate. Ever since the days of Mobutu, that horrible word summons up images of starvation, torture and murder. Makala is where the state shows its fangs, a gloomy, pitch-black place dripping with blood and death. Taxi drivers often refuse to take you there.
“And you must absolutely, absolutely not lose this little blue slip,” the guard says to me before opening the gates. In a chaotic entrance hall where everyone shouts that he is responsible for la sécurité, I am frisked a number of times and have to turn in my cell phone and my money. In exchange for my phone I am handed a crumpled piece of cardboard with a number on it; I had taken out the SIM card beforehand. My cash—twenty dollars, I brought no more than that on purpose—disappeared into a drawer. An official tore off a scrap of paper and wrote on it that I, Monsieur David, had turned in twenty dollars. But even more important than these two hat-check stubs, it seems, is the little slip of blue paper that I hadn’t asked for. Smaller than a cigarette paper, it nevertheless turns out to be essential to my future well-being. “When you come out later on, you have to hand this in. If you don’t have it, we can’t let you through. Then you’ll have to wait for evening roll call, to see if everyone is still here.” My questioning look receives a reply. “We have to make sure you didn’t give it to a prisoner who’s taken off, you see.” And what if a prisoner happens to be missing? “Then you’re the prime suspect.” And what if I really don’t have it anymore? “Then you stay here.” Welcome to Makala.
The bolt is slid aside. I cross a patch of dry lawn and arrive at a building with turnstiles, where I nod to a few apathetic-looking guards. “Pavilion 1?” I ask as casually as possible, as though it were something I did every week, pay a visit to death row. One of them raises his chin slowly to indicate a door. I find myself in a narrow corridor between two high concrete walls. The realm of the guards ends here, this is where the realm of the criminals begins. The guards haven’t been paid for years, which means they’re on something like permanent strike. They still show up, but they don’t do diddly-squat. They drape themselves listlessly over their plastic lawn chairs and fiddle with their broken walkie-talkies. The warden has therefore farmed out the upholding of intramural discipline to the prisoners themselves—with all that
obviously entails. The sky is a blue strip far above. In the corridor, hundreds of eyes stare at me. Raucous noise. No one is wearing a prison uniform. Basketball jerseys. Tank tops. Muscular bodies. Shaven heads. Makala was originally built for fifteen hundred prisoners; today it holds six thousand.
Standing still is a sign of weakness, so I worm my way through a row of young men who ask for, no, who demand, money and cigarettes. A little farther along I arrive at the notorious pavilion. The bright daylight is suddenly cut off. The long, gloomy corridor with cells on both sides is plunged in darkness. A few of the cell doors are open; there is laundry hanging out to dry. Hubbub. Here and there in the darkness I see the faces of prisoners sitting around little coal fires. It reminds me of a Russian Orthodox church just before midnight liturgy, but these are not icons illuminated by flickering candlelight. These are condemned men, preparing their meal on primitive stoves, for there is no official prison grub distributed in Makala. If your family doesn’t bring you something, you eat grass or gravel.
“I’ve been here for eight years,” Antoine Vumilia tells me in his barebones cell. I look around: the entire cell seems to measure about seven by three-and-a-half feet, narrower than a good-sized twin bed in Europe. “I share this cell with two other people.” He has me sit down on his cot. There are a few books on the nightstand: Celine’s Voyage to the End of the Night, A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, books by Abdourahman Waberi, Zadie Smith, Colette Braeckman . . . . It is a good thing for him that he has them, the books. “The most hardened prisoners are lord and master around here. The warden’s office lets them do whatever they want. They run the drug trade, money changing, the trade in mobile-phone vouchers.” And then, in a whisper: “Last year they ‘executed’ three prisoners.” With a gun? “No, they just kicked them to death.”
IT WAS JANUARY 16, 2001. Antoine Vumilia was employed by the Conseil National de Sécurité, Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s intelligence service. His office was right beside the Palais de Marbre, the residence of the head of state. Only a single wall separated him from the presidential quarters. A little after noon he was startled by an infernal racket. “I heard shots,” Vumilia told me there on death row, “three of them. And a couple of minutes later, eight or ten more.”
On the far side of that wall, Kabila was meeting with an adviser when a kadogo came up to him. Mzee’s guard still consisted of faithful child soldiers from Kivu. Although Ruffin had been demobilized by UNICEF a year earlier—he was seventeen and had to go back to school in short pants, amid city kids of twelve who didn’t even know how to take apart an AK-47—Rashidi, one of his former comrades in arms, was still in service. It was Rashidi who walked up to the president now. It looked like he meant to whisper something in his ear, but then he drew an automatic pistol and fired three times. One of the bullets went through the back of the president’s colossal head. Kabila died immediately, forty years less a day after Lumumba was murdered. A few minutes later, young Rashidi was riddled by bullets fired by a colonel in the palace.
Vumilia had heard that gun battle. One week later he was arrested on suspicion of conspiring in the murder. As a security officer, Vumilia had written a report in which he warned of irritation among the child soldiers from Kivu. The kadogos were Kabila’s most loyal followers, but it seemed as though they too were starting to feel passed over. Vumilia himself came from Kivu; he knew what was going on there, but because he was personally acquainted with the ones involved he had decided not to tell everything he knew. “I was in a dilemma: I had to protect the regime, but these were my friends. They were extremely dissatisfied. What do you expect? Masasu had been murdered in November 2000.” Young Anselme Masasu Nindaga was their hero: a street fighter like themselves, a man of verve and daring, one of the founding fathers of the AFDL.1 After Kinshasa was taken in May 1997, however, Kabila shoved him aside and had him thrown in prison. When he was released in fall 2000, he dreamt aloud of Kivu’s secession and won a large following. Soon after that, he was shot. In the violent protests that followed among the child soldiers in Kinshasa, dozens of people were killed. The love affair with Mzee was over for good. Kabila had now even blown up the bridge connecting him to the ones he called “my children.” Bitterly, the children began plotting. Revenge, blood, murder. Vumilia tried to talk them out of it: “These were really young boys. All they wanted was to show that they were fed up. I told them it was pure suicide, that there was no future in.” But he was arrested along with them and refused to testify against them in a trial that was no trial at all. “They wanted me to testify against people I knew, people I ate with every day in prison.”
Besides, wasn’t it possible that Kabila had been murdered for very different reasons?2 Could one really be sure that the plot came from Kivu? What if Angola was involved? Couldn’t it perhaps all have been about diamonds? There were rumors that Kabila, who owed so much to Angola, had entered into cahoots with the hated UNITA rebels who controlled northern Angola with its wealth of diamonds. Hadn’t there been Lebanese men who acted as mediators between Kabila and UNITA? And weren’t eleven Lebanese diamond dealers murdered in Kinshasa right after Kabila’s assassination? Yes, that was all true. But it was all so vague, so shadowy. No one could get to the heart of the matter, especially not Vumilia. “I tried to get the boys off the hook, but that made people conclude that I must be one of them.” Along with thirty others, Vumilia was sentenced to death with no chance of appeal. International human rights organizations called the trial a miscarriage of justice.3
For the thousandth time, Vumilia’s eyes traced the walls of his cell. “I’ve been here for eight years already. It’s unspeakable, it’s incredibly hypocritical. The leaders of the regime know the truth, but all they wanted was to keep the public quiet by quickly giving them a scapegoat.”4
KABILA’S DEATH WAS A TURNING POINT in the Second Congo War. His son, Joseph Kabila, was quickly appointed to replace him. With his wavering voice and extreme youth (he was only twenty-nine), he at first cut a rather feeble figure. The Congolese barely knew him; the West figured he was a marionette. But less than one month later, he met his Rwandan counterpart and archenemy Paul Kagame in New York and delivered a number of striking speeches. He spoke of peace, national unity, and the role of the international community. Could this mean that a new era was dawning? Yes, it could. After a number of United Nations reports had clearly shown how Rwanda and Uganda were pillaging the country’s raw materials, Kagame and Yoweri Museveni could no longer claim that they were in Congo only for national security reasons. This resulted in a long series of peace talks in Gabarone (August 2001), Sun City (April 2002), Pretoria (July 2002), Luanda (September 2002), Gbadolite (December 2002), and again in Pretoria (December 2002). At this final meeting, thanks to brilliant negotiations by Senegalese UN negotiator Moustapha Niasse and considerable pressure from South Africa and the African Union, the crucial agreement to put a complete stop to the war was signed at 3 A.M. on December 17, 2002: the Accord Global et Inclusif. Rwanda and Uganda had already agreed to a withdrawal, but this time the agreement also applied to their domestic militias. The signatories included the government in Kinshasa, a few representatives of Congolese civil society, Tshisekedi’s UDPS, Jean-Pierre Bemba’s MLC, Azarias Ruberwa’s RCD-G, Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi’s RCD-ML, Roger Lumbala’s RCD-N, and the Mai-mai. The term inclusif was apt enough. In fact, the agreement was so all-inclusive that war criminals, to keep the peace, were not prosecuted but promoted to the office of vice president.
The accord allowed for a two-year transitional period, during which power was to be distributed according to the formula “1 + 4”: beside President Kabila there were to be four vice presidents, two from among the rebels (Bemba and Ruberwa), one from Kabila’s entourage (Abdoulaye Yerodia) and one from the peaceful opposition (surprisingly enough, not Étienne Tshisekedi, who had been carrying out a nonviolent struggle for the last ten years, but Arthur Z’Ahidi Ngoma). Within that two-year period all existing militias were t
o be combined into a new national army and preparations were to be made for democratic elections. The term could be extended by two six-month periods. In anticipation of the long-awaited popular vote, an interim parliament and cabinet were installed.
The agreement was absolutely historic. Now, after years of despair, there was a major chance of achieving peace and reconstruction. The new Congo therefore received the international community’s concerted support: the troop strength of MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force, was raised to 8,700 blue helmets and rose in subsequent years to 16,700, making it the biggest UN operation in history (and, with an annual budget of around $1 billion, also the most expensive).5 Led by the always-optimistic American William Swing, the soldiers were to safeguard the ceasefire and supervise disarmament. “Ça va swing!” a popular song on Congolese radio in those days, parodied his pronounced Anglo-Saxon accent. The new regime was assisted in policy matters by the the Comité International d’Accompagnement à la Transition (CIAT), a unique instance of bilateral and multilateral diplomacy in which the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with those from Belgium, Canada, Angola, Gabon, Zambia, and South Africa, and representatives from the African Union, the European Union, and the MONUC, actually helped to run the country. The CIAT was no external advisory body, but a formal transitional institution.6 “We were, in fact, a supervisory committee,” said Johan Swinnen, Belgium’s ambassador in Kinshasa at the time. “We had no legislative power, but we served to provide momentum and to stimulate. We supplied expertise. We didn’t want to be busybodies, but partners. Still, there were frictions between the CIAT and the 1 + 4. When the process was over, we issued a few highly critical and outspoken communiqués. We had abuse heaped on us. After that, they didn’t like us anymore.”7 There was talk of “monitored sovereignty”; the country, however, was at least partly in de facto receivership. The MONUC and the CIAT were more than just the training wheels of the new Congo.8
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