There were 3,500 Western troops just across the river in Brazzaville. Most were from France, but the United States had sent 1,150 soldiers, and there was a smattering from other countries as well. Rumors began to circulate among usually well informed Zairians that Mobutu was secretly hoping for—or perhaps even planning—another grand bout of pillaging and that that, combined with the murder of a few white people, would draw the troops across the river to stabilize Kinshasa, at which point Kabila would not dare attack.
Whatever he had promised aboard the Outeniqua, Kabila’s forces never stopped their advance into positions around Kinshasa. The Zairian army had blown up a major bridge just south of Mbandaka, three hundred miles to the north, upriver from Kinshasa, to slow the AFDL’s approach along the river. The rebels had long ago become adept at fording rivers, though, and the only thing that detained them at Mbandaka was the need to dispose of a large population of Hutu stragglers, who by that point had walked a thousand miles, traversing the entire breadth of Zaire on foot, and were now hoping to cross into the Congo Republic next door.
Mbandaka became the next scene of the horrible, rolling massacres. The city was a major river port and border crossing, and, unlike places like Ubundu and Kilometer 42, was not entirely lost to time or smothered amid impassable roads and forests of elephant grass and bamboo. Local Zairians who had initially applauded the rebels’ arrival were soon horrified by the scale of the killings by Tutsi troops, and word of the atrocities spread quickly.
While Washington remained low-key, in Lubumbashi Kabila brushed off questions about the fate of the Hutu, calling it a “petit problème.” But Emma Bonino, the European Union’s humanitarian aid commissioner, qualified, saying that the zones under Kabila’s control had become a “slaughterhouse,” and international human rights networks were already beginning to insist that whoever came to power in Zaire must address what had happened at Mbandaka.
In Kinshasa, people were too concerned with their own survival to think about something as distant and abstract as massacres of foreign refugees. This was the fall of Saigon brought to Central Africa, and scenarios of disaster and dread played in everyone’s mind. Few thought that Mobutu’s army would actually make a last stand in the capital, turning it into a battlefield. Most people were fixated, instead, on the random danger and sheer chaos that another bout of pillaging would surely bring.
Hearing Elie Noël, a forty-five-year-old carpenter whose heavily varnished beds and other furniture he made cluttered the Matongé sidewalk in front of his shop, recall the last pillage, it was easy to understand the horror people feared would be repeated. “It began at six a.m. with the sound of bullets penetrating the rooftop and walls,” he said. “I heard the soldiers enter my neighbor’s house and then they were beating on my door. They took everything of value they could find, even my clothing. I was lucky that my wife and daughter had slept somewhere else the night before. Next door they raped my friend’s daughters, ten years old and twelve years old, and they made him watch.
“People denounce our soldiers as savages, but this was all done on Mobutu’s orders. The rapes and the pillaging were meant to punish us for supporting the opposition. They say he wants another round now to save himself.”
The diplomats were still pushing the idea of talks to avoid this kind of scene from transpiring. Mobutu and Kabila were to meet aboard the Outeniqua one more time, and with people in the president’s entourage sending their families out of the country, talk was spreading that if no agreement could be reached between the two men Mobutu would opt to fly off into exile. Kabila, sure of victory, chose to stand everyone up.
Mobutu took a short flight back to Kinshasa the next morning, cutting short the speculation about whether he would return. In the meantime, I had again spoken to General Mahélé. He was furious that Kabila had not shown up, and equally frustrated that Mobutu was showing no sign of leaving. His priority, he said, was to negotiate a peaceful handover of Kinshasa. “If I make contact with the other side I will be regarded as a traitor. But otherwise, what will tomorrow be like?” he asked, agonizing over his predicament. “Make contacts today in order to spare the city and you risk being executed. If you do nothing, there will be a great tragedy here, and you will be marginalized in the end, and perhaps executed anyway.”
I thought Mahélé was merely rehearsing his thoughts aloud for me, but the coming hours showed how far and how fast things had moved. The following day, on May 15, I was summoned to army headquarters along with a group of colleagues, ostensibly to meet with General Mahélé. Clearly, everything was in play, but we were to be given only the narrowest, most sanitized version. Mahélé’s aide, Colette Tshomba, a woman whose conspicuous elegance suggested other special missions on the general’s behalf, sternly warned us that the moment was grave, and told us to be responsible in our handling of information. “We in the government are doing the best we can do to give negotiation a chance. We do not believe in war for war’s sake. That is nonsense. We can all imagine what would happen if fighting broke out in Kinshasa.” Later I learned that Ambassador Simpson had urged Mahélé to speak directly with Kabila in order to negotiate the so-called soft landing for the city, and making use of the telephone numbers he had obtained in Lubumbashi, the ambassador was proposing to personally broker the telephone call.
The next day, Mahélé and the other top generals jointly petitioned for an urgent meeting with Mobutu to tell him bluntly and for the first time that the situation on the ground was hopeless. In a scene that brought to mind the meeting of Dorothy, the Lion and the rest of their merry band with the Wizard of Oz, Mobutu’s top generals, many of them his in-laws, and most of them perfectly useless figures, were ushered in to meet the badly diminished president at 5 p.m. The group promptly lost its nerve, or perhaps, as some suggest more skeptically, they strategically deferred to Mahélé, allowing him and him alone to stick his neck out, deliberately leaving their rival, a man Mobutu had always distrusted, way out on a limb.
Mahélé spoke forcefully, even raising his voice on occasion, straining to convince Mobutu that his survival depended upon his abandonment of power. “Vous devez partir,” you must leave now, he pronounced boldly, but with an air of loyalty. “We can no longer assure your security.” Mobutu fumed, listening silently throughout, and when Mahélé finished his soliloquy, Mobutu curtly pronounced, “Give me an hour and you will have my reply.”
One hour later the generals were summoned anew, and Mobutu intoned gravely, “I will not leave.” At that point, and for the very first time, Mahélé lost his composure, and as the generals filed out, he slammed the door. At 4 a.m., Mobutu called his generals and told them that he had changed his mind and would leave that morning. He ordered a plane to be readied for a 10 a.m. departure.
I had taken to sleeping with my cell phones by my pillow, and received first word of the second generals’ meeting with Mobutu in a late-night phone call from the aide-de-camp of General Likulia, the prime minister. He told me Mobutu would fly off the next morning for Gbadolité.
A few minutes later my phone rang again, and the news was confirmed, mournfully, by Guy Vanda. It would keep ringing through the night, as the rumor of the Leopard’s departure swept the city. There would be no public announcement, Guy told me, but if I wished to witness the president’s final flight from Kinshasa, I should be at Ndjili airport at dawn.
I shared what I knew of the situation with my friend Ofeibea, who had heard as much from a foreign airline manager who seemed to be in the know whenever something important was about to happen. The airline man generously offered us a ride to Ndjili in one of his company vans. It was about the only sure way to get near the airport on a day when anything else moving was likely to be shot at.
A half dozen or so of us crammed into the van and drove the sixteen miles through Kinshasa’s dusty, potholed streets. Zairians knew better than to be out and about, and the route was absolutely deserted. Soldiers had already been stationed at regular intervals along the r
oute, and we could see a few photographers being attacked and arrested as they attempted to stake out positions to capture Mobutu’s motorcade on film.
Ndjili airport was deserted. There would be no pomp for Mobutu today. Our airline van deposited us at a side building a hundred yards away from the VIP entrance that the president would surely use, and as the BBC-TV people I had shared the ride with began setting up their equipment, we heard the wail of sirens, faint at first, but clearly drawing near. At the very moment Mobutu’s motorcade wheeled into view— identical black Cadillacs, a bleating ambulance and scores of outriders—a handful of soldiers who had been posted at the VIP entrance came to life and began waving at us, signaling that we should put away all of our cameras. Then some of them began running in our direction. There had been all too many moments like these during the last seven months of war in Zaire, when I did not know whether my face was going to be smashed in or indeed if there would be a tomorrow.
The streets had been absolutely clear of vehicles during our entire drive to the airport, but at that instant, as if by magic, a lone, shabby taxi appeared, and with the soldiers closing in on us, I managed to discreetly wave him to a halt. “Ofeibea, Ofeibea, come on, let’s go,” I urged my friend, but she was too valiant to allow herself to be separated from her BBC colleagues, and I jumped in the car and drove away, not knowing what would become of them.
On the long ride back to town I worked my telephones, calling Guy, who had often saved me from the SNIP and the DSP in the past. I called the British Embassy and the American Embassy, too, and told them that a news crew at the airport was in peril.
Mobutu had fled, and in a final act of vanity he had prevented anyone from filming it. The war was all but over. All that remained now was to await the rebels, whose forward positions were said to be scarcely a few miles beyond Ndjili.
Guy called me back at the hotel that afternoon to tell me that Ofeibea and her crew had been released unharmed.
Late that Friday evening, as I sat in the Memling Hotel writing about the final day of Mobutu’s thirty-two-year rule, my telephones started to light up again. Likulia’s aide-de-camp told me to expect the general/prime minister to go on television at 11:30 that night to announce an agreement stipulating in part that the ten thousand theoretically loyal troops who remained in Kinshasa would lay down their arms. Another confidant, General Ilunga, Mobutu’s interior minister, told me that Mahélé had urged Likulia to cross the river to Brazzaville, to wait there in safety; in case of a foreign intervention, Likulia could then be called upon to rule as an interim leader. “Both of us will be marked for death; at least one of us must remain alive,” Mahélé is reported to have said.
In the instance, neither man was leveling with the other, but Mahélé’s objectives, at least, had a partial purchase on honor. Likulia had already been selling himself to the French as an eleventh-hour alternative to Kabila, whom Paris, paranoid as ever, imagined to be an American battering ram wielded to shatter the last vestiges of French influence in Central Africa. Mahélé had taken Ambassador Simpson up on his invitation to place a call to Kabila’s satellite phone, and may have envisioned himself as a future commander of the army or perhaps one day even president. The bottom line, though, was that Mahélé truly wanted to avert a catastrophe in Kinshasa, while Likulia’s only hope for advancement depended on one.
Yet another call came. The caller, who was with Mahélé, said that Mobutu’s son and dreaded enforcer Kongulu had called the general from Camp Tshatshi. Few words were spoken, but the air of emergency was unmistakable. “We have a situation here,” Kongulu said. “I need you to come right away.”
Mahélé understood this to mean that a revolt was spreading through Camp Tshatshi among the troops from Equatoria Province, who were Mobutu’s ethnic relatives and the final rampart against the rebels. With the AFDL closing in and Mobutu gone, the troops from the Division Spéciale Présidentielle feared for their lives. It was as if Mahélé’s worst nightmare were coming true. All that remained was for the men at Tshatshi to break out of the barracks with their weapons and rampage through the town, looting while the looting was good.
In fact, it was another of Mahélé’s nightmares, the fear of his own assassination, which he had confided to me a few days before, that was coming to pass. Mobutu’s generals had spread the word that he was a traitor, and the word of an uprising at Tshatshi was little more than a trap, one that the general, true to himself and to his uniform, fatally could not resist.
Not long after his first call to my informant, who even today insists on remaining unnamed, Kongulu called again. “Mahélé is dead,” he announced starkly. “The situation is extremely dangerous. Tell me where you are.” Alarm bells were going off in my informant’s mind, but for some reason he answered truthfully. “I’m at the Intercontinental.” My informant then fled the hotel, taking refuge in a mansion nearby, in the ritzy Gombé district.
Next came a call from Guy. “Howard, Mahélé is dead. I saw the whole thing. They killed him while he was trying to address the troops. Soldiers from the DSP began denouncing him as a traitor and tried to arrest him. Mahélé’s bodyguards tried to push him into a car and rush him away from there, but somebody ran up to him and shot him in the head, point blank.”
I told Guy that I felt sure that Kongulu was the killer, but he insisted that was not the case. “We had arrived when this happened. It happened before my eyes. We could have been killed ourselves.”
The early editions of the New York Times were already coming off the presses with the news of Mobutu’s departure emblazoned across the front page. I needed to update my story with this latest drama, but by the rules of the trade, in order to state Mahélé’s death as a fact, one eyewitness was not enough. I required a second source.
I called Ambassador Simpson on his private number and insisted that he come to the phone. “I have it from eyewitnesses that Mahélé has just been murdered,” I told him. There was a long silence. “Mr. Ambassador, can you confirm that?” Simpson told me to call back in a few minutes. When I reached him the second time, he told me that all he could confirm was that Mahélé “had been detained” at Camp Tshatshi. Hours later, the U.S. military attaché confirmed the news of his death.
Dawn came after a brief and fitful sleep. Artillery could be heard far away, its low and muffled boom like the slamming of a distant door. Soon my phones were ringing again, and with the calls came details of Kongulu’s marauding all-night rampage through the city, culminating with a visit to the Intercontinental Hotel, where he searched for traitors, real and imagined.
Word came of an SUV abandoned in the middle of the road that ran alongside the river in Gombé. A small, clandestine pier sat half hidden in the overgrowth nearby. By all accounts, Mobutu’s most dangerous son, the one who had nicknamed himself Saddam Hussein, had fled into the neighboring Congo Republic.
Nervous and excited, the press gathered by the hundreds downtown to share impressions and exchange snippets of information in the lobby of the Memling Hotel. A carload of Mobutu’s generals had stopped by and urged the reporters not to wander the streets. Then they zoomed off with a loud screech.
I returned to my room on one of the upper floors, and within minutes a call came from Guy. “Stay in your room because a death squad is going to pull up to the hotel and spray it with machine-gun fire, and maybe launch a grenade or two,” he warned. This was the last gasp of the regime, the long-dreamed-of scenario whereby death or danger to foreigners draws the French army, and perhaps the Americans, too, across the river from Brazzaville, preventing a Kabila takeover of Kinshasa.
The elevators crawled with traffic, so I ran downstairs to the lobby as fast as I could and shouted to my colleagues to clear the area and go to their rooms. Someone asked what I was talking about, and breathlessly, I explained the substance of the telephone call. For a moment, it was absolute pandemonium as the lobby cleared.
I waited in my room for over half an hour, and nothing happened. The onl
y noises were the rumbling of the artillery, which had grown steadily closer, and the occasional clatter of small-arms fire. Ofeibea and I then summoned our nerve and set out onto the streets, against the advice of our colleagues, who were now warning me of the danger. Sticking close to the walls of buildings for cover, in almost comical mockery of a police movie, we headed for Avenue 30 Juin, the city’s weed-filled Champs-Elysées. The only other people about were glue-addicted street children, a scruffy young teenage boy and a couple of little girls, perhaps child prostitutes, their barely formed breasts half exposed in their grimy, tattered clothes.
At 5 p.m. the first Kabila troops came marching into the city center, in parade fashion: neat and orderly. Conspicuously, they were not,
for the most part, Rwandan. The columns seemed to stretch without end as the troops marched, dripping sweat and visibly fatigued, chanting in the humid late-afternoon air, kicking up dust from the fine riverine soil they trod underfoot.
Once it became clear that the shooting was over, huge crowds began descending into the streets and leaning from the balconies of the central city buildings, cheering, “Congo! We are free! Congo! We are free!” as they watched the would-be liberators file by.
Bantus love a spectacle, and now it fell to Laurent Désiré Kabila to provide it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Le Roi Est Mort (Long Live the King)
Mobutu’s homecoming in Gbadolité turned out to be little more than a hasty stopover. Neglecting to pay the troops can be a costly mistake, even if they are from your own ethnic group. Knowing the game was up, the Ngbandi garrison in the city heeded Mobutu’s old watchword—pay yourselves—and commenced looting. In better days, Mobutu had flown off to vacation from here with his large clan in tow aboard specially chartered Concordes. For his final departure from Gbadolité, only his innermost circle would clamber aboard the Soviet-built Ilyushin cargo plane loaned to him by his longtime protégé, the leader of Angola’s UNITA rebellion, Jonas Savimbi.
Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa Page 29