At the wheel of his 4 × 4, Mirnas was driving mechanically, seeing nothing. Not merely because it was one in the morning but mainly because he was fiendishly preoccupied. Along Lumumba Boulevard music was playing on a few terraces to cheer up the lingering drinkers. Kerosene lamps shining here and there showed a few vending women still busy keeping the drunkards going with grilled chicken thighs and hot pili-pili sauce.2
Mirnas fretted as if jinxed by the little lights that enchanted the Kinshasa nights. He had other things to worry about. By chance he’d passed by the airport to take a look at a load of munitions and transmission gear leaving for Bunia. He was very surprised to note the presence of another plane he knew well, one that was used during delicate UN missions. The aircraft was waiting, standing slightly apart from the other planes. The Lithuanian had grabbed his phone and made a few calls. Apparently, no one in his department knew that one of their jets had just landed. They should have told him: he was in charge of everything that had to do with the logistics of MONUSCO.
His mind began to race. The flight was obviously trying to be as discreet as possible. As a MONUSCO officer, Waldemar Mirnas had certain prerogatives. He called the tower and was told that the plane’s final destination was Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. So a prisoner transfer shouldn’t be ruled out, and the only one who might be the object of a careful investigation recently was Bizimungu.
Things weren’t looking good for Mirnas. Thanks to Congo he had managed to collect a nice little nest egg; the anticipation of the former rebel under lock and key meant he, too, needed to be concerned about being arrested, sent back to Lithuania, forced to face trial and be disgraced, and in the gray gloom of his homeland contribute to the unemployment statistics for all time. There went the endless beaches of Rio, the Bay of Phuket, and the Manila sidewalks.
Next he had phoned his Congolese contacts and from them found out the worst. The military was about to arrest Bizimungu at home that very night. They expected a scramble to occur during the changing of his guards. Those who were expected for the night wouldn’t appear, having been rendered harmless long before. While Waldemar Mirnas was driving around like a lunatic, unaware of all that was awaiting him, the trap was tightening around Kiro Bizimungu, also known as Commander Kobra Zulu.
For the hundredth time Waldemar Mirnas tapped his telephone: Bizimungu was still not answering. “Damn, what’s he doing? How can he sleep with that conscience of his?” the Blue Beret wondered. He tried again. Just before the answering machine started, Bizimungu’s voice was heard. “Hello?”
“This is Mirnas. Get a move on; they’re coming for you!”
“What are you saying? You know that’s impossible. And why should they?”
“Why?” Mirnas was stuttering with rage. “You’re done for, Bizimungu! And I tell you, I’m the only one throwing you a lifeline right now. Take it, there’s still time. It’s all over, everyone has dropped you. If you don’t believe me, take a look outside and see if your bodyguards are there. There’ll be nobody to protect you tonight. They’ve already been neutralized. I’m coming from the airport; there’s a plane waiting to take you to The Hague. I’d be far away by now if I were you, but it’s up to you. Good night, Commander.”
Phone in hand, Bizimungu tried to come down to earth. Like a robot he went to the door and called his men. “Déo!”
Indeed, no one was there. What had Mirnas said? That the military was coming to break down his door and grab him? That a plane was waiting at this very moment to take him to The Hague, to the International Criminal Court?
Bizimungu should move, but an immense weight kept him from doing so. It seemed as if his warrior’s reflexes were no longer functioning. He knew the syndrome. His instructors had warned him about it long ago. He had seen it in the eyes of his enemies during the different wars he’d lived through. Kiro Bizimungu was aware that fear had entered him and that he needed to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Many before him had felt it and he hadn’t liked the deplorable display.
He should flee, now, as his Tutsi brothers had always done these past decades. First, when still a young boy, he had had to flee Rwanda with his parents during the umpteenth slaughter and find refuge in Congo. They’d settled in the Masisi Territory. The serene life in the green hills, like those in their own country, had lasted a few years until 1994, the year of the genocide. Bizimungu didn’t have time to finish his first year at the University of Kisangani.
In neighboring Rwanda, the Tutsis were once again in danger, and the dead were already being counted by the hundreds of thousands. Since April, for three months a genocide had been in progress. They needed men over there and declared that Kiro Bizimungu was capable of delivering those who’d been seized inside the circles of hell. The accounts of the survivors who had managed to flee to Zaire were straight out of Dante. The Hutus had abandoned their reserve and decided to apply a final solution to the Hutu-Tutsi problem. A blood pact was made. Then, under the false pretext that the glittering bird that had exploded in the sky was a heavenly sign, an entire people had turned on one another, and the inhabitants of the hills began to systematically kill their neighbors, their spouses, their children, everything that could possibly be likened to a Mututsi.
People were hounded and slaughtered with machetes as if they were cattle. They were chased into the deepest marshes. Every surface of the territory was swept to drive them out and exterminate them. They were compared to something even more foul than vermin. Their dismembered corpses were tossed into latrines. In the churches flesh and blood grew to be plentiful enough for diabolic libations. Not a single one was to be left. Those among the Hutus who didn’t want to share the cup of blood with their brothers were killed on the spot—tens of thousands of them. The entire country had become an immense slaughterhouse, where the object of the holocaust was human flesh, preferably Tutsi flesh. They had to be eliminated to the last one. And it was going to be easy.
Dashing down a hill after a few days walking across Burundi, Bizimungu and those with him had come upon a squad of uniformed men in rubber boots. The soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. They quickly taught Bizimungu how to handle an automatic rifle. Retaliation was on the march; it was a matter of life and death and reigned supreme in a country that was no more than a vast field of corpses. The counteroffensive was merciless. The RPF moved ahead like a steamroller. Bizimungu might have been paralyzed by what he’d seen along the way, but the hate that rained down on him there was such that, despite everything, his body and his Kalashnikov managed to vent themselves. With rage and violence. Preceded by unrelenting firepower, he and the others crisscrossed the country like exterminating angels.
Ahead of them the population fled by the hundreds of thousands. With women, children, weapons, munitions, central bank, administration, and all of those who had shattered skulls with bludgeons, torn flesh apart with grenades, slaughtered entire families with machetes, cut shins to prevent anyone from fleeing, and disemboweled pregnant women, in order to confirm their willingness to go as far as they could, all of those who had wanted to purify the country with Tutsi blood, suddenly realized that the sign Imana3 had sent them in the very beginning didn’t mean what they had thought it meant. That he had revealed the falcon’s prophecy to them only to curse them better. Like Cain, they then began to flee, straight ahead—toward a hypothetical salvation and toward a frontier that now demarcated heaven and hell. They hastily sped straight to the Zairian border. Hoping that there, at least, they would reach some sort of purgatory.
Bizimungu, too, wanted to leave the Rwandan soil where he had been forced to walk over corpses to keep moving. The images he’d put up with during this death march told him to leave the country. With his battalion, they pursued the Hutus to the rampart the Zairian forces had built at the border. The Rwandan armed forces and the Interhamwe,4 their backs up against the wall, were forced to counterattack. Lost in his memories, Bizimungu remembered that night very clearly: mortars, never-ending cannons, Kat
yusha rockets, surface-to-surface missiles began to roar, and in a hellish racket the sky was set ablaze. Both sides deployed all the firepower they had, and tons of white-hot metal traversed the firmament, which turned scarlet. Many came very close to going mad because of the continuously thundering cannons, mercilessly churning up the hills together with the men on them. A tropical Armageddon but with no redemption this time.
Telephone calls flew back and forth between Paris and New York. At that moment, the magic of the Whites intervened. One could see a cloud of turquoise hue envelop the assassins to protect them, and the border suddenly opened up like a gate.5 Surrounded by the bloodthirsty Rwandan armed forces, more than a million Hutu refugees poured into Kivu like a flow of toxic sludge. At the frontier, demobilized and dressed in civvies, Bizimungu was nevertheless identified as an RPF combatant and arrested. He told the Zairian military that he was from Masisi and that he had nothing to do with what was happening on the other side, that he wanted to go home. He offered them his services.
To gain their leniency and try to halt the looming epidemic, young Kiro had had to help the soldiers retrieve the hundreds of corpses that were drifting on Lake Kivu during the night. In the morning he brought out the bodies of his brothers who’d been killed in Rwanda. What weighed little arrived first. At dawn the young man was forced to plunge his hands into the lake to pull out the placentas floating in the water. Soon after came the newborns and the fetuses, forced from women’s bellies with daggers. Only then did the adult bodies appear, whitened because they’d been in the water so long. When he pulled them out, they disintegrated in his hands. Even the soldiers felt sorry for him then. They gave him back his freedom and without stopping he ran all the way home to North Kivu.
When the question arose of establishing the AFDL to bring down President Mobutu in Zaire and introduce themselves into the country’s machinery through the Banyamulenge concept,6 they came looking for him again. But not only that. That season under the ancestral canopy, shielded from the objectives of surveillance satellites, the forest was secretly filled with the sound of skulls being bludgeoned, with the death rattles of victims of decapitation, and with the screams of those on whom they now took vengeance: men, women, children, all of them. For they had to hunt down and eliminate the Hutus, who had kept on doing their filthy work on Congolese soil and who might return to Rwanda to pursue the never-ending cycle of revenge. Next came the rebellion of the RCD, the CNDP,7 and more blood, more carnage, always more. They would go through several other acronyms—those weren’t in short supply—making Kiro dizzy.
The algorithm Congo Inc. had been created at the moment that Africa was being chopped up in Berlin between November 1884 and February 1885. Under Leopold II’s sharecropping, they had hastily developed it so they could supply the whole world with rubber from the equator, without which the industrial era wouldn’t have expanded as rapidly as it needed to at the time. Subsequently, its contribution to the First World War effort had been crucial, even if that war—most of it—could have been fought on horseback, without Congo, even if things had changed since the Germans had further developed synthetic rubber in 1914. The involvement of Congo Inc. in the Second World War proved decisive.
The final point had come with the concept of putting the uranium of Shinkolobwe at the disposal of the United States of America, which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki once and for all, launching the theory of nuclear deterrence at the same time, and for all time. It contributed vastly to the devastation of Vietnam by allowing the Bell UH1-Huey helicopters, sides gaping wide, to spit millions of sprays of the copper from Likasi and Kolwezi from high in the sky over towns and countryside from Danang to Hanoi, via Huế, Vinh, Lao Cai, Lang Son, and the port of Haiphong.
During the so-called Cold War, the algorithm had remained red-hot. The fuel that guaranteed proper functioning could also be made up of men. Warriors such as the Ngwaka, Mbunza, Luba, Basakata, and Lokele of Mobutu Sese Seko, like spearheads on Africa’s battlefields, went to shed their blood from Biafra to Aouzou, passing through the Front Line—in front of Angola and Cuba—through Rwanda on the Byumba end in 1990. Disposable humans could also participate in the dirty work and in coups d’état. Loyal to Bismarck’s testament,8 Congo Inc. more recently had been appointed as the accredited supplier of internationalism, responsible for the delivery of strategic minerals for the conquest of space, the manufacturing of sophisticated armaments, the oil industry, and the production of high-tech telecommunications material.
While Commander Kobra Zulu was cornered, they had continued to perfect the algorithm somewhere between Washington, London, Brussels, and Kigali. Kiro Bizimungu, now stigmatized in the international community as a Monyamulenge,9 had become a simple active coefficient, an ordinary strategic datum, a mechanism of the most common sort.
The man was feeling tired but this was not the time for fatigue. He went to his room.
“Adeïto, wake up, we’re leaving!”
“What are you talking about?”
“They just alerted me: UN soldiers and the FARDC10 will be here in a few minutes. They’re coming to arrest me. Move!”
Adeïto jumped out of bed and quickly stuffed two or three things in a bag. She hurriedly threw on a skirt and a red silk blouse, babouches—Moroccan slippers—on her feet. Bizimungu also grabbed a bag and crammed it with banknotes he kept in his wardrobe and a pistol. They went out. The ex-commander had to open the gate himself. They got into the 4 × 4 and drove off immediately.
Neither of them spoke a word. The only sounds were the purring of the motor and the friction of the tires on the asphalt. They were each absorbed in their own thoughts. The landscape slipped by. Bizimungu hadn’t thought of any specific place to go; they had to get out of town first. His instinct quite naturally led him toward the east. They took Lumumba Boulevard.
“We’ll go to the church,” Adeïto announced.
“Listen, this is not the right moment.”
“Yes, it’s exactly the right moment. That’s where we’ll take refuge. Nobody will think of looking for you there. If they don’t find you at home, they’ll watch every road. We’ll wait at the pastor’s house until things settle down.”
Kiro Bizimungu clearly loathed the Church of Divine Multiplication, but he had no choice and Adeïto was right, of course.
The night had actually begun well. Bizimungu’s body had miraculously regained stamina that evening. Adeïto’s prayers hadn’t had the same effect as usual. His skin had barely touched hers when his strength came back. He hadn’t heard the phone ring when Mirnas called. Desperately focusing on his pleasure, the only things he had noticed were his own blood pounding in his head and the sudden sensation of emptying out from below into her body.
“Take a right here,” she said.
Bizimungu turned the wheel onto a shabby little street. It was dark. Garbage and stones were strewn over the ground. The 4 × 4 began to sway.
“Go straight,” Adeïto ordered.
The former rebel was driving carefully, trying hard to go as fast as possible. They rolled on for a moment. Suddenly, there was a dull knocking followed by the characteristic brief hiss of a flat tire.
“Shit!” Bizimungu swore as he braked. “We have a flat. Is the church far?”
At that very moment, without any warning Adeïto opened the car door and started running straight ahead down the winding alleyway.
“Hey there, wait!” Bizimungu yelled, jumping out to follow her.
Adeïto only heard the wild beating of her heart. She had hiked up her skirt, dropped her babouches, and made off so fast she could hardly breathe, in bare feet, with tousled hair.
“Moyibi,”11 she shouted into the night. “Moyibi!”
She ran as fast as she could, ripping the blouse she was wearing with her hands. In the outlying neighborhoods the police were rarely present. Throughout the country they never did what they were expected to do. And so, instead of patiently waiting for the law to take over, people would ta
ke care of matters themselves. Lights were turned on, doors opened in the darkness. They picked up manioc pestles and iron bars, rubble and worn-out tires. When Adeïto suddenly turned up at an intersection just before the church, the number of onlookers was already large. The young woman stopped amid the people. They were all looking at her as if she were an apparition. She spread her legs, slipped a hand under her skirt, pulled it out, and held it up, shimmering with a gelatinous substance.
“Botala eloko asali ngai!”12 she screamed, showing her fingers tainted by Kiro Bizimungu’s sperm. “Auti ko violer ngai!”13
Dripping with sweat, the offender had reached the intersection as well. At the woman’s words the people froze. The word “rape” she uttered had long since branded the Congolese conscience, and they no longer tolerated it. They threw themselves on Kiro Bizimungu. When he understood what was going to happen to him, it was too late. Everyone wanted to make him pay for his hideous crime.
“She’s my wife,” he managed to get out.
But his voice was no more than a whisper. He was overcome with fear. It had settled down in him, and he could no longer react; his body and his mind simply no longer obeyed him.
Bizimungu’s entreaties didn’t seem to impress the crowd. They were vying for the honor of placing a tire around his neck and setting it on fire. Many had come out of mere curiosity but weren’t averse to lending a hand should it be needed. Trying to arouse some compassion from a possible compatriot, Bizimungu tried to speak in Kiswahili, but no one in the elbowing crowd seemed to pay any attention to what he was saying. On the contrary, it only intensified the anger and hate of those who didn’t speak that language. Kiro Bizimungu was all too familiar with that situation and fully cognizant of the necklace torture. He’d heard people talk of it. Apparently, what nobody ever forgets are the screams of the tortured begging for water and the appalling smell of burning flesh.
Congo Inc. Page 22