Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Albright’s press conference got off to a bad start when a Congolese reporter, picking up on Kabila’s own bitter comments in an interview published a few days before, asked why the United States was pledging “only” $35 to $45 million for the country’s reconstruction, “because we need billions and not millions of dollars.” Before Albright could respond, he put an equally plucky question to Kabila, asking him to explain the massacre the day before of “more than 200 DRC13 citizens on Rwandan soil.”

  “I believe that the package that we have proposed was actually quite a generous package that has a number of positive aspects to it,” Albright said, arching her hawkish eyebrows, immediately on the defensive. “We believe that rather than dispensing large sums of money through that kind of assistance, we should supplement our assistance with trade and investment.”

  Kabila had glowered impatiently throughout Albright’s answer, as if he had just emerged from his twenty years in the bush and was getting his first real taste of the spotlight. “I will answer the two questions that I was asked,” he said, his chest puffing with eagerness. “In Bukavu, I can say it was a rearguard fighting of those who still believe—in the name of Congolese revolutionaries—in the management of the republic. . . . The killing of refugees—they are not two hundred; they are over eight hundred, and we have heard nothing from the international community. When we kill one Interahamwe, an assassin, people cry out for a commission of inquiry. I don’t have anything more to say on this.”

  A few moments later, another Congolese reporter ventured farther onto controversial ground, asking, “Mr. President, there are reports that this morning the UN mission of the massacre of Rwandan refugees was blocked at the entrance to Mbandaka. How credible is this information?” For the space of a single answer, Kabila recovered his poise, even if what he was saying was an outright lie. “I should be informed of this issue before I can answer the question correctly. I am not aware that they were barred from doing their work. I do not know what happened there, because I was not there. I will wait until the minister of rehabilitation, who is in charge of this issue, makes a report to me. I know that they are in the field. We must know what is happening in the field; if they were barred or not.”

  Kabila knew how tough African journalists could be, which is why he had been locking them up. Now it was Albright’s turn on the hot seat. “Ms. Albright, your government regrets having created and supported President Mobutu,” began Mwamba Wambumulamba, an editor from the Kinshasa newspaper Le Potentiel. “During your visit to Kampala, you showered praise on Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. Some media reports even said that you presented him as the strongman of the subregion. Since Uganda is not an example of democracy and respect for human rights, is it possible that you are in the process of creating another Mobutu, just to regret it later?”

  I fought to repress a smile, and felt a deep professional pride—joy, even—to hear such a foreceful question about America’s relationship with African democracy being asked. “First of all,” responded Albright, “let me say that there are many people here who are responsible for the existence and the development of Mr. Mobutu, and who still share the responsibility for that.” She was arch and seemed so surprised by the challenge that the best she could do was to recycle some stale tidbits from her OAU speech and from other “talking points.” She was rambling, almost incoherent. “I do not exactly know what comments people have been making about what I said about President Museveni. I made it quite clear, as I also did in Ethiopia with Prime Minister Meles, that Africa at this stage is fortunate to have a group of strong leaders who are interested in regional cooperation. I also spoke of the same subject in Rwanda during my visit there, and I am still speaking about it with President Kabila by telling him that he is one of these leaders. These presidents have the responsibility to work together and promote economic development, democratization and cooperation in this region of Africa.”

  Finally, the foreign press’s chance to ask a question arrived and the moderator chose my colleague from Newsday, who stepped forward a little bit uncertainly, carrying his notebook and a little piece of paper upon which he had written Zahidi Ngoma’s name. “Madam Secretary, since you said that you favor freedom of association of the political opposition, some of the political leaders you might have wanted to meet here are all in jail—they have been jailed in the past couple of weeks. Have you asked President Kabila to release anybody who is in jail now for political association? Has he given you any assurances there will be general freedom of political association? Is there any link between U.S. aid to Congo and the freedom of political association?”

  He had asked a tightly constructed series of questions, and had left Albright almost no wiggle room. “Yes, President Kabila and I had a lengthy discussion about the importance and effectiveness of elections and the importance of dealing with numerous different political groups,” she answered, shifting her body in a way that seemed to express both self-righteousness and annoyance. “And in fact, I think I can say that the bulk of our discussion was about the importance of building a civil society, freedom of association and, generally, the importance of building democratic institutions in a country that had been run in a dictatorial way and full of corruption for several years, and let me say that during the course of these discussions with President Kabila, we established what I believe to be an excellent relationship and I decided that we will give each other telephone numbers so that we could discuss problems that may come up.”

  Kabila looked as if he were going to rupture a blood vessel while he waited with visible anger for Albright’s long, errant answer to finally wind down. “With the permission of the U.S. secretary of state, I would like the journalist who asked the last question to mention the names of the politicians who were arrested for their political affiliations,” he said, with an air of challenge. My colleague shot a glance downward at his tiny note, and then pronounced the name Zahidi Ngoma.

  “He is not a politician,” Kabila said, furiously stabbing his finger in the air and nearly shouting. “He was writing pamphlets and calling on the people to take to the streets and kill people. How can someone who divides the people be a politician? Is this the work of a politician? He was writing pamphlets. Moreover, he was drafting them in the embassy of a foreign country just to divide the people, so that people would resort to force. Do you call this person a politician? Are such people not arrested in your countries? Are they left free? Ngoma is not a politician. I am sure he [referring to the correspondent] has seen the leaflets drafted by this notorious Ngoma. Well, there will be many of them to go to prison if they incite the people to resort to violence. Long live democracy. Ha-ha-ha!”

  My colleagues and I shared looks of astonishment. Albright was visibly embarrassed. Her eyebrows arched ever more severely as Kabila spoke, forming italicized question marks on her deeply knitted brow. Diplomatic moments like the one arranged for her were not meant to include such ugly surprises. As the press conference broke up hastily, I imagined the secretary of state was fuming that she had not known more about her Congolese counterpart in advance, starting with a curriculum vitae, which would have read like a rap sheet, before personally stamping him with Washington’s seal of approval.

  Back in my hotel room I received a call from Susan Rice, Albright’s thirty-two-year-old African-American assistant secretary of state for Africa. Her party was already on the road to the airport, and Rice seemed angry and rattled. The Clinton administration and its secretary of state were keenly image conscious, and their high-profile tour of Africa was suddenly turning into a public relations disaster. Rice’s voice had an accusatory tone even as she urged me to make haste to Ndjili airport to join them. I sensed she suspected I had somehow engineered all of this. But whatever my role, they had walked into this mess themselves. Indeed, it was of their own making.

  James Rubin, operating in deep damage-control mode, issued a statement after the news conference explaining that Albright was unfamiliar with Ngoma
’s case but intended to find out about it. “Obviously every government has the right to counter those who would incite violence,” Rubin said. “But basic to freedom of speech and freedom of association is the right of individuals to state their views freely and openly to others. On this issue, clearly the government of the Congo must improve its record.”

  Three years later, long after Rwanda had turned on Kabila, invading Congo a second time, this time with the hope of unseating him, Philip Gourevitch wrote in The New Yorker what Washington must have already known but chose to ignore. The Clinton administration had subordinated reason and principle to their wish to atone for their past sins in Rwanda by supporting that tiny country’s bid to impose a man under its control as president of a neighboring country ninetyfive times as large. “It was true that from 1967 to 1986 [Kabila] had managed, as a rebel warlord, to hold out against Mobutu’s forces in a tiny redoubt in the mountains of eastern Congo. But his record there was grim enough to make Mobutu look almost benign by comparison. Kabila, preaching a crude sort of Maoist doctrine, had ruled with an absolute hand, and what he called a ‘liberated’ zone rapidly descended into the sorriest state of dystopia.”

  Historians decide where the beginning of the end for any regime lies, but for my money the Kabila-Albright press conference was the high-water mark for Mobutu’s successor. After her trip, Albright aides and supporters lashed out at the human rights “establishment” for misunderstanding her African diplomacy, but Washington would never again show ardor for the new government in Kinshasa, though another couple of stabs at keeping Kabila in the fold were made over the next few months. Jesse Jackson showed up in Kinshasa a few weeks after Albright’s trip in his capacity as “special envoy for Africa.” The visit had an unmistakably remedial air, with Jackson meeting Etienne Tshisekedi and other opposition figures whom Albright had snubbed. In a fit of pique, Kabila declined to meet with Jackson, and after the special envoy’s departure, he sent Tshisekedi into internal exile “to till the land,” forcing the sixty-six-year-old lawyer to live in a village in his native East Kasai region.

  In March 1998, Clinton himself made a historic and carefully planned trip to Africa. The president wanted to hit all the right notes—democracy in South Africa, economic revival in Ghana, the emergence of a vibrant civil society in Senegal, where he would make a famous non-apology for slavery. At Entebbe, Uganda, the site of the famous 1976 raid by Israeli commandos on a hijacked airliner, Yoweri Museveni, America’s second-favorite African—after Mandela—hosted a summit involving Clinton and five other heads of state, including several of the continent’s so-called renaissance leaders. The summit’s conclusions, the grandly named Entebbe Principles, called for “genuine transparent partnership” and “long-term, meaningful engagement” by the West, to secure peace and prosperity and to prevent the recurrence of genocide.

  Three months later, Ethiopia and Eritrea, two severely impoverished dictatorships whose leaders were both charter members of the renaissance club, were at war over a dusty triangle of infertile land. When the shooting stopped, 100,000 people were dead. Two months after that, Rwanda and Uganda would invade Congo again, first aiming to knock off Kabila, by now judged an embarrassing leader whom they had been unable to control, and then taking deadly aim at each other. Six thousand high-explosive shells rained down on Kisangani, the scene of their most intense fighting, bleeding what was left of the twentieth century from the tragic city at the bend in the river. “The ‘new African leaders’ policy appeared to be a colossal failure,” wrote Peter Rosenblum, one of the United States’ best informed experts on Central Africa. “The Entebbe Principles and references to new African leaders were quietly dropped from official statements; those most closely associated with the promotion of the new leaders now say that it was little more than a turn of phrase that the press blew out of proportion.”

  Congo, too, was soon allowed to fade from view in Washington. No one had foreseen it, but soon the country itself would face outright disappearance.

  The time for me to leave Africa had arrived. My feelings were deeply mixed, but my body and spirit were telling me to move on. The movers were due to come to our home in Abidjan to pack our things and ship them off to Hawaii, an interim step in a shift of continents, of subject matter and lifestyle—in short, of everything. I had been given a year to study Japanese at the University of Hawaii, and an exciting new posting awaited me in Tokyo. I also looked at the move as a chance to get to know my family again. My two sons had done a lot of growing during my lengthy absences over the last four years, and I was desperate to reconnect with them while there was still time.

  My successor, Nori Onishi, was coming out from New York to spend a week or two with me in Abidjan for a handover before I left. With Nori scheduled to arrive a few days hence, war broke out in Congo with a startling coup de théâtre. There were deep tensions within the president’s cabinet and persistent rumors of a forthcoming coup against Kabila. The so-called Katanga mafia, Kabila’s kinsmen from the south of the country, were locked in an ever more public face-off against the Rwandan surrogates in the cabinet and in the security forces. That spring, there had even been a major shootout near the Palace of the Nation, in Gombé, in what everyone believed was a Tutsi-led attempt to eliminate Kabila. Central Africa buzzed with rumors that Kigali had turned into a virtual audition line for obscure Congolese opponents of Kabila and bigwigs from the Mobutu era alike. People like Kengo wa Dondo, the former prime minister, and two of Mobutu’s top generals, Kpama Baramoto Kata and Nzimbi Ngbale Kongo wa Bassa, were aggressively pushing their cases for anointment as the next president of Congo to the Rwandan leaders, who were forming a habit of colonization by remote control.

  From the start of his rule, Kabila had faced a dilemma. He could be neither legitimate nor popular as long as he leaned heavily on an army and advisors borrowed from Rwanda. But after thirty-two years under Mobutu, Congo was a thoroughly ruined country; without the Rwandans and Ugandans, the writ of Kabila’s government would not extend far beyond Kinshasa, and would almost certainly face a swift challenge by emboldened Congolese opponents.

  Kabila, meanwhile, had run out of friends outside of Africa. Carrying the water for Rwanda for so long in the cover-up of the massacres of Hutu committed during his seven-month civil war had turned yesterday’s “new leader” into an international pariah. For all of Kabila’s loyal services, Rwanda had lost patience with him. The heavy investment in overthrowing Mobutu had failed to deliver on its most important goal: security on the border with Congo. In the end Kabila decided to take his chances without Rwanda. In a gambit he later defended as a preemptive strike, late in July 1998 Kabila ordered all foreign forces to leave the country immediately, and began rounding up hundreds of Tutsi in the capital. Rwanda’s army initially made a great show of compliance, packing up and moving troops out with characteristic discipline. Then came the startling riposte.

  On August 3, Tutsi units began seizing cities in the east of the country, places like Bukavu and Uvira that had been early targets in Kabila’s own uprising less than two years before. Simultaneously, units loyal to Rwanda launched a revolt in the capital, which was quickly put down. For Kabila, the brief respite was illusory. The very next day, Tutsi units attacked Kisangani, and in an even bolder move, hijacked cargo planes to fly clear across the country from Goma in the east to Kitona, where they took control of an air force base near the mouth of the Congo River that was once used by the United States for its clandestine war in Angola.

  As I flew to Kinshasa for the last time, all I could think of was how the history of Congo seemed to have been rewound, like a movie, and was now being played back again in fast forward. It had taken Kabila seven months to overthrow Mobutu, which had seemed at the time like an amazing feat. Less than a week into the new war, a rebel force controlled most of the east, and was setting itself up to march on the capital from Bas-Zaire, the province at Kinshasa’s doorstep. The superlatives one tends to hear concerning Africa usu
ally relate to misery, corruption, humanitarian crises or some form of atrocity. But given the distances involved, given Rwanda’s small size and the modesty of its means, as the noose tightened on Kinshasa I thought the attack merited classification among the most audacious military offensives of a war-filled century.

  The Mobutu regime once promised a “terrifying offensive,” and Kabila was now threatening a “total war.” When things got tough, Mobutu would lay low in Gbadolité; Kabila now holed up in Lubumbashi, his own native fief. Similarly, each man had thought that by stoking ethnic hatred he could overcome his enemies and wriggle out of difficulty. But Kabila had little more than ragged militias at his disposal, and several days into the attack the few government-controlled radio stations in the east of the country began broadcasting appeals urging people to kill Rwandan Tutsi using any tools at their disposal, from machetes to barbed wire.

  My flight stopped in Lagos. Sani Abacha had recently been overthrown and replaced by a general who promised to—and later did— hand over power to an elected government. Law and order had not yet come to Lagos, though, and when a soldier boarded our flight with his automatic rifle and began demanding to see passengers’ passports, and then demanding bribes, I wondered if it ever would. We landed in Kinshasa late at night, and the eighteen-mile route to the center of town was as desolate as I could remember having seen it. Congo was under attack, but as we bounded over cratered streets it was eerie not to see any soldiers in the streets. “Kabila doesn’t have any soldiers,” Pierre said, chuckling. As I neared my hotel, rounding the big circle near the huge Stadium of Martyrs, the first streetlights I had noticed for miles had been left on to illuminate huge billboard-style advertisements for Kabila. “Laurent Désiré Kabila, the People’s Choice,” read one of them. I was reminded of the old tee shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Mobutu = Solution.”