Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Amid the mayhem, I was separated from my colleagues and jumped over a wall into someone’s garden. I raised Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, a reporter and close friend from the BBC, on my cell phone. We had been standing together moments before. She was okay, and we agreed on a meeting place. Other friends called to say they had taken refuge inside people’s houses. Robert, already injured and without cameras, had returned briefly to the hotel.

  Later we learned that Tshisekedi had been placed under house arrest. He was not seriously hurt. The hope of civilian transition in Zaire was dead, however. And the American Embassy was silent.

  In his hour of greatest need, Mobutu turned to another powerful man he held in high distrust. Dictators whose primary mode of operation involves slithering tend, it seems, to feel most comfortable with other reptiles.

  In Mobutu’s entourage, reptiles were in great supply, and he named one, General Likulia Bolongo, to replace Etienne Tshisekedi. The nomination was at best legally questionable, because the parliament was bypassed, but Kabila’s forces had reportedly reached Bandundu Province, whose capital, Kikwit, 370 miles southeast of Kinshasa, was where the Ebola outbreak had occurred not long before, and with the democracy movement broken, few were in the mood for arguing.

  “The accent of this government is particularly on patriotism,” Likulia said, dressed in full four-star uniform and straining to put a brave face on things as he introduced his government on the steps of the prime minister’s office, surrounded by other senior officers. “One of the prime missions of these ministers, outside of peace and the defense of territory, is the restructuring of the army. Please note the presence of generals from great military academies and professors and researchers from different university disciplines.”

  Men of valor were practically unheard of in the senior ranks of the Zairian armed forces. Mobutu, who counted on foreign powers for security and feared being overthrown by his own aides more than he feared attack from abroad, had always wanted it that way. So as Likulia spoke, all eyes were on General Marc Mahélé Lièko Bokungu, who after being kept out of action for most of the war was now being made deputy prime minister and defense minister, along with his previous title, army chief of staff.

  Mahélé was that rarest of Zairian species, a professional soldier who had earned his stripes. He had proved his bona fides during the two brief secession wars in Shaba, where he was the only commander who could be counted on not to steal, and again during the pillages in Kinshasa, when he ordered his men to fire on rioting troops. Distinctions like these would have made him a national hero in most countries. In Mobutu’s Zaire, though, where he had the further demerit of not belonging to the president’s Ngbandi ethnic group, they made him a marked man.

  As the regime cracked, Zaire was opening up like a crocus. Suddenly, it seemed as if everybody, from the innermost insiders to the foreign powers who still wielded tremendous influence from the shadows, wanted to reveal their most closely held secrets to me— everybody, that is, but Mobutu himself. I was selfishly pleased with Likulia’s nomination, because his aide-de-camp was already a valuable source, and had long ago given me details of the corrupt dealings of the army’s top generals, including his boss. Mobutu’s new interior minister, a former general named Ilunga, was also a good source, and he told me not to pay attention to any of the new government’s rhetoric. People in high places were already sending their families out of the country. Even Likulia knew the game was over, he told me, and had accepted the job only to steal what was left to be grabbed. Guy, who was in and out of the presidential palace every day, told me that Papa Mobutu, as he called him, knew about all of the stealing. Guy also said that Mobutu had taken precautions to prevent General Mahélé from ever enjoying a truly free hand, however many titles he accumulated.

  Mahélé knew what needed to be done to fix the Zairian army. But like Tshisekedi, he had been called upon too late to make a difference. Unlike Tshisekedi, though, he would not be easy to shake. Quite unexpectedly, the general summoned me to a private residence in Kinshasa one afternoon shortly after his “promotion” for the first of several secret meetings. The first key to getting the army to fight, he said, was surprisingly simple: Pay the soldiers. Even as Kabila’s fighters swept across the country, Mobutu’s relatives, Ngbandi generals like Baramoto and Eluki, were stealing the army payrolls.

  The worst of the general’s scorn, though, was reserved for Kengo wa Dondo, Mobutu’s prime minister for the last three years, and along with his contempt came a potent dose of suspicion of the West. “The more I think about things, the more I wonder if the West didn’t use Kengo to eliminate Mobutu,” Mahélé said, choosing his words slowly and with great care. “This calamity isn’t so much the reflection of Kabila’s achievements. Before Kengo we had one country. Now we have two or three. Before Kengo we had one national language, now we speak English and French. It is a complete disaster.”

  Mahélé reeled off financial figures as he recounted for me one dirty affair after another. “Kengo ran things during the best years of Gécamines [the world’s largest copper mine], a six-year period when the company’s revenues ran to a billion dollars,” he said. “His biggest coup was pocketing the surplus when the world price of copper sky-rocketed. The profit was in the order of four hundred million dollars, and the proceeds were split between Mobutu, Kengo, Seti Yalé [former chief of security and financial advisor to Mobutu] and a few others. When the president visited Kengo’s villa, Le Refuge, in Marbella, [Spain,] even Mobutu was impressed. With a smile, he told Kengo, ‘You have foreseen everything.’ ”

  The range of Mahélé’s knowledge and the resentment that burned in him proved that Mobutu was not altogether wrong to hold him in suspicion. Yet Mahélé had little interest in mounting a coup against his commander-in-chief. He was rather like a son who had never enjoyed his father’s favor, desperate to prove his worth. He would do his best to repulse the coming offensive on Kinshasa, he vowed, but his efforts were meant to buy time for a peaceful, orderly and hopefully negotiated transition that would spare Kinshasa violent destruction, secure a place for some elements of the elite in the new order and even assure a dignified departure from power of the great dictator.

  The long white Cadillac pulled up to Mobutu’s Camp Tshatshi residence surrounded by a large security entourage. At the steps of the slate gray two-story palace, out jumped Bill Richardson, President Bill Clinton’s personal envoy and representative to the United Nations. During seven months of civil war, through the savaging of refugee camps and massacres of their fleeing inhabitants, to the rout of Zaire’s third city, Kisangani, the United States had been content to remain offstage. American diplomacy was activated only to stop others, like Canada at the beginning of the war and France ever since, from impeding the rebellion’s progress. Now, with Kabila’s capture of Kinshasa only weeks or perhaps just days off, Washington decided it was time to jump in with both feet. Mobutu, dressed in a blue abacost and leopard-skin cap, looked as elegant as ever in his own distinctively outrageous way, but he was conspicuously frail and leaned heavily on his carved cane. His face was so drawn that it lent a cartoonist’s emphasis to his hooded eyes and pouty lips, but still he managed a weak smile to greet Clinton’s man of special missions. A few formalities were pronounced to the large press contingent gathered in the peacock garden, and then, just before 11 a.m., the two men disappeared inside.

  On his arrival in Kinshasa earlier that morning, Richardson had publicly announced his visit in these terms: “The United States strongly believes that there can be no military solution to the crisis, but rather a negotiated settlement leading to an inclusive transitional government, and fair and free elections. I am also here because of our grave concerns about the plight of several hundred thousand refugees and displaced Zairians.”

  Amid the high-sounding rhetoric, though, the one key objective was to engineer Mobutu’s departure and a “soft landing” of the capital. After the talks here, I was told, Richardson was flying off to Lubumb
ashi, Zaire’s second city, which was also now in rebel hands, where Kabila was waiting to meet him. Richardson’s aides said there was space in the plane for me and that I was welcome to come along.

  Nearly two and a half hours after they had begun, Richardson and Mobutu appeared on the terrace again. The American party looked nervous but visibly relieved, like little boys who had unexpectedly pulled off a prank without getting caught. Mobutu, on the other hand, wore a mournful look, and his entourage, composed mostly of immediate family, like Nzanga, the fleshy-faced son who bore the strongest likeness to his father, appeared stricken and utterly deflated.

  “President Mobutu assured me today that he is prepared to meet Mr. Kabila immediately under Organization of African Unity or UN auspices,” Richardson announced. Then he repeated much of his earlier language about the need for “an inclusive transitional government,” peace and reconciliation. Throughout the encounter, Ambassador Simpson had served as interpreter.

  Aboard the small State Department jet en route for Lubumbashi, Richardson described the discussions with Mobutu, dropping the sterile, lapidary formulae of diplomacy, which he had learned on the fly in his UN job, and lapsing into a more familiar guttural mode, part Bronx, part Santa Fe. “Mobutu,” he said, was “alert, but a bit frail, a little debilitated. I told him you are living in a dreamland, pal. You’ve got a bunch of advisors who are not telling you the truth. You are out. Do you want to leave with dignity or as a carcass?”

  The American team he headed had purposely included all the relevant agencies in order to leave no hope of a back channel to Washington for the wily old dictator, friend of American presidents, millionaires and spymasters. They informed him that Kenge, the last major town on the road to Kinshasa, was in rebel hands and had not been recaptured by his army, as Mobutu’s aides had assured him. Ashen-faced, Mobutu had lapsed into emotional pleas, reminding the Americans of loyal but long-past services in the war against communism, and complained to Richardson, “You guys have not been loyal to me.”

  “I said the mess you are in is not our mess,” Richardson said. “You didn’t govern your country.” Given the thick ropes of complicity that had tied Mobutu’s Zaire to Washington’s Cold War agenda in Africa, these were self-serving half-truths at best. Already, the superpower was writing history, and Richardson had crafted a bluntly effective epitaph for America’s longtime erstwhile ally.

  “You’ve got about a week,” Richardson told Mobutu, handing him a letter from Clinton asking him to bow out quickly, gracefully. There were oral assurances of a continuing role for the president’s political party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution. “I told him you are about to be overrun. What’s it going to be?”

  We landed in Lubumbashi late that afternoon, reveling in the cool, dry air and the golden and ruby tones of the high plateau that made the light magical just before sunset. Lubumbashi, situated deep in the south of this huge land, is as far from Kinshasa as Miami is from Baltimore, and one of the sublime pleasures at this African latitude is the gentle, lingering evening, so unlike the abrupt shift from day to night that one experiences near the equator.

  The last time I had been here I had spent the better part of my stay under interrogation by SNIP, the National Service for Intelligence and Protection. This time, in wild contrast, I was getting VIP treatment, and from the look of the apron at the airport, jammed with the corporate jets of the big mining companies and diamond merchants who had come to cut deals with Kabila even before he could grab power, the rebels were getting some practice in such treatment as well.

  On the flight down from Kinshasa, Richardson said he needed to convince Kabila to accept a face-to-face meeting with Mobutu. This, he hoped, would produce a ceasefire, along with the inclusive transition and free elections that he had announced in Kinshasa. “Kabila has to decide whether he wants to be accepted in the international community or he wants to be a renegade,” he said. Richardson also stressed that he would tell Kabila that the mounting reports of massacres of Hutu by the rebellion’s Tutsi forces were hurting him. “It will be very difficult for him to gain acceptance if those reports are true,” he said gravely.

  Just days before, the United Nations had reported the literal disappearance of 100,000 Hutu from several makeshift camps that had come under attack from Kabila’s army in the dense rain forest near Kisangani. “They are scattered. We found nobody,” said Carlos Haddad, a World Food Programme official who overflew the area on a UN reconnaissance mission and found nothing but billowing smoke and three clusters of about a hundred people each where large camps had once stood.

  Many of the victims of this rout in the forest near Kisangani were survivors of the group I had recently met in Ubundu. Lashing sections of bamboo together to build rafts or selling their last belongings to pay for passage on small boats, they had managed to cross the Congo River. Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others drowned.

  UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the Hutu appeared to be “victims of a policy of slow extermination.” Even if the Clinton administration remained much more guarded, politically it could not afford to appear to be indifferent, and State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the situation in the refugee camps was “bordering on humanitarian catastrophe.”

  In our conversation aboard the aircraft, however, Richardson was already polishing the flagstones for a diplomatic “out” should Washington decide it needed one. “We don’t really have a stick, to be honest. There is already some feeling [within the rebellion] that if the international community doesn’t want to work with us, that’s fine, because international business is lining up already,” he told me when I pressed him about what the United States would do to oblige the country’s incipient leader to respect his commitments with regard to democracy and the fate of the refugees. “Zaire is an important country and we are going to have to deal with whoever is ruling it. Obviously, we can be more or less cooperative.”

  I was left unsettled by the sudden talk about Hutu refugees. I was one of only a few reporters who had written frequently on the subject, and when I did so, the weight of the Times meant that other media could not ignore the issue completely. It disturbed me deeply to think that this belated flourish of attention might be more clever public relations than substance, part of a sophisticated effort to buy me off with extraordinary access and co-opt me by appearing to share my concerns.

  Other interpretations were readily available, but they were equally troubling. Kabila had tremendous wind in his sails, provided by a broad coalition of African powers—Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Angola, Eritrea and others. Investors were indeed rushing in. Perhaps, just perhaps, Washington was wielding the human rights card to maintain its leverage and remind Kabila who keeps the keys to the club.

  Together with the other members of Richardson’s traveling party, I had been picked up at my hotel in Lubumbashi by Dennis Hankins, an American diplomat whom I had previously known as a political officer at the embassy in Kinshasa. For weeks now, Hankins had been quietly acting as Washington’s liaison to the rebellion. We pulled up to a Dutch-style mansion to meet Kabila just as the last light was failing. Appropriately, given the rebellion leaders’ early zeal to trade on the country’s vast mineral wealth, the residence had belonged to the director of Gécamines.

  We were made to wait for a while in a green-carpeted room that looked out onto a columned atrium. The diplomats fidgeted like sleepless kids on Christmas Eve dying to see their new toys. Finally, a smiling Kabila emerged, looking jaunty and relaxed in a white sports shirt that contrasted sharply with the business suits of the men he was greeting. “You are welcome in Congo-Zaire,” he blustered, speaking in a booming voice in English heavily tinged with an East African accent, picked up during years of exile. Richardson’s face, and those of his party, spoke volumes at their first sight of Kabila. The moment of truth in this blind date had arrived, and they were yearning to be alone, to finally get to know each other. The party disappeared into an ornately chandelie
red dining room furnished with a large round table, and someone shut the door. I waited outside, together with a handful of local reporters.

  Three hours later, the American team reemerged, looking as if they had gotten well beyond first base. Judging from the anxious, slightly guilty smiles, perhaps they felt they had even hit a home run. Looking far more sober, Kabila chose not to address the press. He no longer seemed to have any use for the easy, swaggering charm that he had exploited, together with the ambient sympathy for Rwanda’s Tutsi, to win generally uncritical coverage from the international press through nearly seven months of war.

  That task was left instead to the rebellion’s foreign minister in waiting, Bizima Karaha, a rail-thin man whose grim, toothy face, which never evinced a smile, recalled Dracula. Kabila would meet Mobutu, Karaha announced, to discuss the dictator’s departure, and that alone. By training, Karaha was a medical doctor; by countenance, he was a humorless and edgy man of Tutsi ancestry, who appeared to be in his early thirties. He spoke in a reedy, almost adolescent voice that strained for gravity but managed only to grate. “The end of the war can only come when the person who is its cause has gone.”

  Karaha then tried to explain away the ongoing atrocities against the Hutu refugees. “As the numbers of people who want to be repatriated has diminished, the ex-FAR10 and Interahamwe, who don’t want to be repatriated, are growing desperate. They are creating these incidents to block the orderly return of others to Rwanda.”

  At this point, Dennis Hankins whispered to me, “I’ve been telling them they should say this all along.”