Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  As Mobutu’s plane gained altitude, though, even these rudely downgraded travel plans went sour when members of the Division Spéciale Présidentielle, irate at being left behind to face advancing rebel armies, opened fire on the jet. Thus went the departure of Mobutu, molder of nations and tamer of men.

  Laurent Kabila’s very first act as president, on May 17, 1997, would be to restore the name Congo to the country—Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Washington wasted no time in recognizing the new reality. “We will no longer be calling this country Zaire,” State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns announced. “Zaire went away on Friday afternoon with Mobutu. That country has vanished.”

  Mobutu had changed the name from Congo to Zaire in 1971 in a bid to overcome Lumumba’s enduring legacy, but only with time would I realize how carefully Kabila was stealing from Mobutu’s playbook, although sometimes, as with the name change, he was doing things in reverse. It was not long, too, before extracting criticism of the new regime from the American Embassy would become as difficult as it had once been under Mobutu and his serviceable prime minister, Kengo wa Dondo—that is, before Washington designated them, respectively, a “has-been” and a “big crook.”

  With the change in regimes, I moved across town to the Intercontinental to watch the new elite as it settled into residence in this ritzy hotel, built by Mobutu in the 1970s as one of the proudest monuments to his own glory. Breakfast and cocktail hour were the best times to observe this motley crowd—Kabila’s ethnic allies from Katanga Province, who formed his inner circle, and the Tutsi officers from Rwanda who eyed them carefully from beneath ten-gallon hats, or as some observers already whispered, pulled the real strings. Exempted from paying any bills, the Congolese piled their plates high, and wined and dined a parade of mistresses new and old, who grew ever more gaudily dressed as the weeks went by. The Rwandans, for their part, affected fatigues or sober business suits and were far more modest in their tastes, or at least more discreet. This cast was filled out by the kadogo, the pint-sized boy soldiers with AK-47s, who would crowd into the elevators, excited to be riding in them for the first time, and the carpetbagging foreign businessmen, here to cut quick and sleazy deals with a government in need of cash.

  As I said, when Kabila and his sponsors entered the city, they had been careful to keep the Rwandan forces who constituted the brunt of the rebel army out of the picture. But when it came to taking charge of the country, and of the sprawling city of Kinshasa, there was no hiding the identity of the men who owned the guns. The first signs of trouble came early in the new regime, when Tutsi soldiers launched an ill-advised crackdown on moral laxity and roughed up some downtown streetwalkers. The new government then issued an edict banning miniskirts, and began rounding up women—including my driver Pierre’s girlfriend, Nounou—who had failed to comply.

  The rebels may have won some good press early on by straightening out the bedlam at border crossings in the east, but we were in a city that lived on beer and soukous and reveled in its Gomorrah-like image. All it took to realize this was to listen for one hour to the hip-churning tunes that played on the radio. But the Rwandans and their handpicked new president, with his long years in the bush, were way out of touch.

  I had no idea of its importance at the time, but the flap over miniskirts helped seal Kabila’s image as a man totally out of sync with “his people” and, even worse, in the eyes of the Kinois, residents of Kinshasa, who soon invented a zombie-like dance in mockery of Kabila, known as the “dombolo,” a man held prisoner by his sponsors. The warning signs multiplied steadily. Severe-looking Tutsi agents took over security at Ndjili airport. Kabila’s son, Joseph, a shy, boyish man in his late twenties,12 was named to lead the army, but everyone answered to a Rwandan officer named James Kabarebe. Though burly and mightily prepossessed, Kabila himself soon appeared to be imprisoned by a wiry phalanx of Tutsi bodyguards.

  Kabila and his minions contented themselves with the illusion of power, dividing up the spoils from regimes past by setting up a Bureau de Biens Mal Acquis, or Office of Ill-gotten Gains, to parcel out the spacious villas built by the Belgians in the breeze-conditioned hills of Binza. Meanwhile, schools and health clinics were not yet opened, and Congo, a vast and proud, albeit disheveled, country of 45 million, was being reduced to a satrapy by Rwanda, a tiny and cramped land of 7 million.

  The first serious headaches, though, came from the United Nations, which was demanding access to Mbandaka to investigate reports of mass killings of Hutu refugees there. Kabila had been toying with the organization for a long time, as the United States ran interference in the Security Council, just as it had done at the outset of the war, when Washington had blocked calls by Canada and France for humanitarian intervention.

  Here again, Philip Gourevitch, the chronicler of the Rwandan genocide whose writings had deeply influenced the Clinton administration’s thinking on Central Africa, helped supply the rationale. Gourevitch’s marked sympathies for Rwanda’s Tutsi often led him astray on the Congo, and he played an important role in selling Laurent Kabila in Washington, ironically by restoring him to the Lumumbaist tradition of respectable nationalism. In his writings, Gourevitch curiously airbrushed the old Congolese highwayman and mountebank, minimizing his ideology and avoiding unpleasant details of his dodgy past.

  “Oddly, a number of recent reports have called Kabila’s qualifications for leadership into question by noting that Che Guevara, who visited the Congo in 1965, found him wanting in Marxist-Leninist fervor—as if Che’s regard had suddenly become a credential for statesmanship,” Gourevitch wrote in one of a series of articles on the fall of Mobutu. Subsequently, he downplayed the importance of the massacre of Hutu during Congo’s civil war, accusing the United Nations of “cavalier, imperial irresponsibility” in Central Africa, and ridiculing its demands to be allowed to investigate and account for the dead.

  “For weeks now, the U.N. sleuths have been stuck in Kinshasa, waiting for government travel approval, which appears more unlikely each day,” Gourevitch wrote in The New Yorker. Rwandan Hutu, he said, had formed the core of Mobutu’s defenders, and were perceived as “future génocidaires by Kabila’s forces, and this population was the main target of the massacres that Kabila’s government is denying ever happened.” A bit later, Gourevitch said of international calls for an investigation of the alleged atrocities: “It’s hard to imagine that anybody in the Congo stands to benefit from this test of wills.”

  With a new strategic vision wheeling into position in Washington—one based on fighting Islamic radicalism in Sudan, securing the lion’s share of Angola’s petroleum reserves for American oil companies and atoning for its criminal negligence during the Rwandan genocide—the White House anointing of Kabila as one of its newly designated group of African renaissance leaders was an act of expiation meant to soothe Tutsi-led Rwanda. Long rumored, Gourevitch’s influence in Washington became explicit during the visit of Madeleine Albright to Kinshasa on December 12, 1997, and for Kabila, a man who had lived a life of such little consequence, it was an undreamt-of consecration.

  Kabila’s breaking out in Mobutu’s leopard’s spots had accelerated alarmingly in the weeks before the Albright trip. His government had banned opposition parties and begun ruling by decree. It had successfully forced the United Nations to replace the head of its forensic investigation team, effectively sacking Roberto Garreton, a renowned Chilean lawyer and human rights investigator, after he produced a preliminary sixteen-page report that identified forty sites where Kabila’s AFDL was suspected of having committed atrocities. The worst stories centered around Mbandaka, where the government had banned visits by journalists, and had repeatedly disrupted UN attempts to commence field work, as Gourevitch wrote.

  Etienne Tshisekedi had been silenced by house arrest, and anyone else who challenged the government was being thrown into prison. “We thought we were getting a sweet orange and we ended up with a bitter lemon,” one of the streetcorner parliamenta
rians told me in Matongé, speaking with the deft and playful allusiveness typical of Kinois. “Maybe our country is just cursed.”

  But if the Congo was cursed with dictators, it was also blessed with a resilient civil society, and articulate new opposition figures willing to risk their freedom to fight for democracy were sprouting up as fast as Kabila could eliminate them. One of them was Arthur Zahidi Ngoma, a former UNESCO official, whom I first met in August 1997. “In our countries, dictators establish themselves by two methods, by creating fear, and when that no longer works, by corrupting people,” Ngoma told me. “We have seen it all before under Mobutu. Kabila has been jailing people. Now he is going to move to the next phase.”

  Pinned down in the capital covering Mobutu’s fall, I had been unable to get to Mbandaka or any other flashpoint during the final stages of the rebels’ advance. Thus I could not assess for myself the proliferating charges of the massacre of innocents. But Robert Block, a South Africa–based reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had somehow managed to visit Mbandaka in early June 1997, about two weeks after Kabila’s triumph, and the accounts of fresh atrocities by the Tutsi troops that he brought back were bone-chilling. “Townspeople say they little suspected what was in store when the rebel troops strolled into town on May 13, virtually unopposed,” Block wrote. “The people of Mbandaka were on the streets eager to welcome the soldiers of Kabila’s army as liberators. . . . As soon as they arrived [the soldiers] said they were looking for the place where the refugees were kept. . . . They said that their first enemy were these refugees from Rwanda, not the population and not even the Zairian soldiers of Mobutu’s army.

  “What happened next beggared belief, say those who were there,” Block continued. “The soldiers approached the refugees near the harbor. When they arrived, says Justin, a local Red Cross worker from the nearby village of Wendji, the soldiers had someone shout in Lingala, the local language, ‘Zairians get down.’ The Zairians dropped to the ground, Justin says, while the Rwandans remained standing. ‘They shot them. They shot them. They shot them,’ Justin says, trembling.”

  In the end, the UN human rights team was never allowed to do its work in Mbandaka, where two thousand or so people were gunned down or beaten to death, and given testimony like that quoted by Block, it is little wonder why. I never made it to Mbandaka, either, but with Madeleine Albright’s visit to Kinshasa approaching I came very close to the truth of the killing fields there nonetheless.

  By August 1997, the stalemated UN investigation had become the biggest story in the Congo. All around, Central Africa was coming apart at the seams, and Kinshasa’s most interesting diversion, as depressing as it was, was an invitation to dine on the balcony of a tony downtown high-rise to watch the fireworks across the river. Brazzaville could be reliably counted upon to deliver a breathtaking sound-and-light show every evening, as militias loyal to the present and former presidents slugged it out savagely with heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and anti-aircraft batteries. Just a few miles and a monster of a river away from wherever we might gather by evening over Chardonnay and canapés, a half million refugees were on the march, almost completely ignored by the world.

  “You have the French ambassador living in his bunker, protected by thirty gendarmes, and you have the oilmen who work in Pointe Noire, who live in a heavily protected enclave, and you have us watching from up here,” a diplomat remarked to me over cocktails at a UN dinner party in early September. “Other than that, this is a war without witnesses.”

  With that, someone asked if I was interested in going into the “other” Congo with a UN human rights team to visit a refugee camp a day’s boat ride downriver from Mbandaka, where 4,800 Hutu lived more or less stranded. I answered yes.

  I showed up at Kinshasa’s junk-strewn, inner-city airfield early on the appointed morning. It was the same place I had flown to Kikwit from to report on the Ebola epidemic two years earlier, but that already seemed like a lifetime ago. There was a small crew of UN refugee officials, yet another banged-up old DC-3 and a hold full of food and medicines. With minimal fuss we were airborne, and after a short flight that followed the course of the river northward, until it reached a great fork—the junction with the Sangha, a huge river in its own right—we put down. I expected to spend two nights in Loukolela, the little town where the refugee camp was located, and had brought a minimal kit: my briefcase-sized satellite phone, a laptop, my Sony shortwave radio, one change of clothing, spiral notebooks, a novel and some magazines. There was also a medicine kit stuffed with something for almost any tropical eventuality.

  The resident staff in the camp wore the hardships they endured like badges of honor. In their neat little tent city, temperatures soared to well over 100 degrees every day, and the humidity seemed to surpass saturation. In greeting me, their eyes appeared to be saying, We’re just waiting to watch you wither.

  I headed out almost immediately for the nearby camp. Within a few minutes I was sweating heavily as I made my way along a trail, but soon enough I came upon the little Hutu refugee city that I was looking for. The camp was draped across an expanse of hillocks and lush green vales, and was spacious and orderly—a world apart from the besieged settlements I had seen in Tingi-Tingi and Ubundu. But just as in those forsaken places, in an instant I was surrounded by young camp denizens who wanted to know who I was and what I had come for.

  We enacted a little impromptu skit that on my part conveyed, “Take me to your leader,” and in no time, I was introduced to a man who enjoyed some kind of special standing in the camp. He agreed to give me a tour. As we descended a hill into a little depression where women were washing clothes in a stream, someone yelled out, “French! Monsieur French!” I turned to see a man running toward me with a broad grin and a look of disbelief that matched the one that was now on my face.

  It was Camille, the doctor who had accompanied me so enthusiastically as I strolled through the camp at Tingi-Tingi during my visit there with Sadako Ogata of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He grabbed me by both hands and shook me, disbelieving his eyes, wanting to confirm that this was for real. I too felt as if I had stepped into a dream. How had he survived the string of massacres that had laid a trail of blood, tears and bones across Zaire? How had he ever survived the walk—more than a thousand miles had it been in a straight line but certainly far more since the route had wound through some of the world’s densest rain forest?

  This was no surprise reunion of old friends, but the improbable way that fate had linked us made the experience just as powerful. We stood there in the deathly mid-afternoon heat and exchanged pleasantries. Finally he got around to asking me why I had come, and I told him I had come for the same reason that had brought me to Tingi-Tingi months before: to see what had become of these people.

  I was beginning to feel unbearably hot, and became aware that I was sweating profusely. I toted it up to the fact that I had risen so early to get to the airport, and had not had a real meal yet that day. Camille brought me to the camp’s medical clinic, where he said I could sit in the shade and interview people who came for care, or simply passersby.

  The first person to come along was a twenty-year-old woman named Odette Mporayonzi, who said that on May 13, 1997, she had been in Wendji, the scene of some of the worst massacres from the end of the war, judging from the stories that were being told. “My husband had gone to fetch firewood, so I was all alone when it began,” said Odette, who was seven months pregnant and had come to the little clinic—nothing more than a clapboard shack, really—for a checkup. “The bullets were falling on us like the rain in a storm. I ran until I fell, and then I just watched what happened.

  “Two soldiers summoned me to halt. They grabbed me, and I just pretended I was deaf and mute, and when they let go of me, I just continued walking. The soldiers kept shooting and shooting, and so many people were dying. When a Zairian soldier stopped to rummage through the belongings of people who had been killed, an officer shout
ed to him in our language, ‘That stuff can wait until our mission has been accomplished.’ ”

  Odette never saw her husband again. She wandered the forests after the gunfire finally died down, and was eventually taken in by a Zairian family, who told her that she looked enough like the local people not to arouse too much suspicion. They told her to wear a white bandana, just as the local townsfolk were doing, in a show of support for Kabila and his rebellion. And they warned her not to talk to strangers.

  The next day, while she stood outside the house where she had taken refuge, Odette said a truckload of troops rumbled up and stopped nearby. This, she thought, would surely be the end of her, but instead the soldiers grabbed a teenage Hutu boy who happened to be walking by. As they began beating him, Odette said the soldiers yelled, “Here is another son of Habyarimana,” invoking the name of the former Hutu president of Rwanda. “Right there in the road the soldiers swung the boy by his feet and beat his head against a tree trunk until he was dead. I had to squeeze my eyes shut to keep from screaming.”

  As Odette spoke I began to feel ill. My stomach was queasy. I felt faint. Her story was one of the most disturbing I had ever heard, and yet by now I was struggling to keep my eyes open. Although I was sitting in the shade, the air felt as if it was coming straight from a furnace, only it was dead still. Sweat cascaded down my brow as if poured from a cup, and yet my skin felt incredibly clammy.

  Camille asked me if I was okay. He offered me a Coke, which I gladly drank as Odette’s story continued, thinking that the sugar would give me a lift. “A couple of days later, a sergeant and a young man from town came to eat dinner at the house where I was staying. They had just participated in a mass burial, and one of them said, ‘Ah, Kabila has really killed a lot of people here, hasn’t he?’ The other man replied, ‘Yeah, but the worst thing is that they are burying people twenty to a grave, and all they can think to tell us is to work faster.’ ”