Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Acronyms
Introduction
PART I - PREWAR
Chapter 1 - THE LEGACY OF GENOCIDE
GISENYI, RWANDA, JULY 17, 1994
Chapter 2 - AIDING AND ABETTING
INERA REFUGEE CAMP, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1994
Chapter 3 - A COUNTRY IN RUINS
KIGALI, RWANDA, JULY 1994–SEPTEMBER 1996
Chapter 4 - SIX DAYS
BUKAVU, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 8, 1996
Chapter 5 - ONION LAYERS
MUSHAKI, ZAIRE, AND KIGALI, RWANDA, OCTOBER 1993
Chapter 6 - MZEE
KIGALI, RWANDA, EARLY 1996; LUBUMBASHI, CONGO, 1960; FIZI, CONGO, 1965–1980
PART II - THE FIRST WAR
Chapter 7 - MANY WARS IN ONE
KIRINGYE, LWEBA, AND ABALA, ZAIRE, AUGUST–OCTOBER 1996
Chapter 8 - THE DOMINOES FALL
BUKAVU, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1996
Chapter 9 - A THOUSAND MILES THROUGH THE JUNGLE
BUKAVU, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1996
Chapter 10 - THIS IS HOW YOU FIGHT
BUKAVU AND LEMERA, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1996
Chapter 11 - A WOUNDED LEOPARD
KINSHASA, ZAIRE, DECEMBER 1996
Chapter 12 - THE KING IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE KING
KINSHASA, CONGO, MAY 1997
PART III - THE SECOND WAR
Chapter 13 - ONE WAR TOO MANY
RUHENGERI, RWANDA, AND KINSHASA, CONGO, AUGUST 1998
Chapter 14 - THE REBEL PROFESSOR
KIGALI, RWANDA, AUGUST 1998
Chapter 15 - THE REBEL START-UP
GBADOLITE, CONGO, JULY 1999
Chapter 16 - CAIN AND ABEL
KISANGANI, CONGO, MAY 1999
Chapter 17 - SORCERERS’ APPRENTICES
EASTERN CONGO, JUNE 2000
Chapter 18 - THE ASSASSINATION OF MZEE
KINSHASA, CONGO, JANUARY 17, 2001
Chapter 19 - PAYING FOR THE WAR
GOMA, ZAIRE, NOVEMBER 1996
PART IV - NEITHER WAR NOR PEACE
Chapter 20 - THE BEARER OF EGGS
KINSHASA, CONGO, JANUARY 2001
Conclusion: The Congo, On Its Own Terms
Notes
Index
Copyright Page
For Lusungu
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to the many Congolese, Rwandans, Burundians, and Ugandans who helped me write this book and whose names appear in these pages. They were generous enough to sit with me for many hours and explain their experiences. Others I could not name so as not to get them in trouble—you know who you are, asanteni.
I owe a special debt to Kizito Mushizi, Raphael Wakenge, Christian Mukosa, and their families, whose warm support since I first arrived in Bukavu made me appreciate the complexities and beauty of their country. I am also grateful for the help provided by Remy Ngabo, Gandy Rugemintore, Balzac Buzera, Pascal Kambale, Willy Nindorera, Noel Atama, Adelar Mivumba, James Habyarimana, Soraya Aziz, Tshivu Ntite, Thomas Ntiratimana, Mvemba Dizolele, Thomas Luhaka, and Michel Losembe in understanding the shifting sands of Congolese politics and in opening doors for me.
My research relied heavily on the hospitality of friends and strangers. To several generations of dedicated journalists in Kinshasa, thanks for the couch, the conspiracies, and insider advice—especially the Reuters crew of Dinesh Mahtani, David Lewis and Joe Bavier, but also Franz Wild, Arnaud Zajtman, Thomas Fessy, and Michael Kavanagh. James Astill and Marcos Lorenzana were important companions through the early stages of the book, and Wim Verbeken, Eddie Kariisa, and Jean-Jacques Simon provided wonderful hospitality. Federico Borello, Louazna Khalouta, Matt Green, Djo Munga, and Johan Peleman were also often on hand to help me out with support and expert advice.
Great Lakes politics is a minefield of stereotypes and misinformation. I was fortunate to have experienced scholars and researchers to help me navigate, including David and Catharine Newbury, Herbert Weiss, Peter Rosenblum, Anneke van Woudenberg, and Ida Sawyer. My friends Serge Maheshe and Alison Des Forges saw me begin this project and encouraged me along, but, sadly, neither could see it finished. They will be sorely missed.
This was my first experience of writing and publishing a book. Many people helped me through the process. Thanks to my parents, my wife, and my brother for so patiently reading the various drafts and providing comments. Michela Wrong believed in this project from the beginning and provided moral and literary support, as did my agent, Robert Guinsler, and editor, Clive Priddle.
This book benefited from the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, whose generous fellowship allowed me to enjoy peace and quiet at the Bellagio Center for a month so I could make sense of my notes.
Acronyms
ADF Allied Democratic Forces (Uganda)
ADM Allied Democratic Movement (Uganda)
AFDL Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo- Zaire
AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
COMIEX Mixed Import-Export Company
COPACO Collective of Congolese Patriots
DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo
FAR Rwandan Armed Forces
FAZ Zairian Armed Forces
FDD Forces for the Defense of Democracy (Burundi)
FDLR Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda
FLEC Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (Angola)
FNI National and Integrationist Front (Congo)
FNL National Liberation Forces (Burundi)
FRPI Patriotic Resistance Forces of Ituri (Congo)
ICHEC Catholic Institute of Higher Commercial Studies
IRC International Rescue Committee
LRA Lord’s Resistance Army (Uganda)
MLC Movement for the Liberation of the Congo
MPR Popular Revolutionary Movement
MRC Congolese Revolutionary Movement
NALU National Army for the Liberation of Uganda
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
NRM National Resistance Movement (Uganda)
OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
OSLEG Operation Sovereign Legitimacy
RCD Congolese Rally for Democracy
RCD-N Congolese Rally for Democracy-National
RPA Rwandan Patriotic Army (the armed wing of the RPF)
RPF Rwandan Patriotic Front
SADC South African Development Community
UMLA Uganda Muslim Liberation Army
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNITA National Union for the Total Independence of Angola
UNOSOM United Nations Operation in Somalia
UPC Union of Congolese Patriots (Congo)
UPDF Uganda People’s Defense Force
WNBLF West Nile Bank Liberation Front (Uganda)
Introduction
Understanding the Violence
Power is Eaten Whole.
—CONGOLESE SAYING
This is how it usually worked: I would call up one of the people whose names I had written down in my notebook, and I’d tell him I was writing a book on the war in the Congo and that I wanted to hear his story. Most people like to talk about their lives, and almost everybody—Congolese ministers, army commanders, former child soldiers, diplomats—accepted. We would typically meet in a public place, as they wouldn’t feel comfortable talk
ing about sensitive matters in their offices or homes, and they would size me up: a thirty-year-old white American. Many asked me, “Why are you writing this book?” When I told them that I wanted to understand the roots of the violence that has engulfed the country since 1996, they often replied with a question, “Who are you to understand what I am telling you?”
The look of bemusement would frequently appear in the eyes of interviewees. An army commander spent most of our meeting asking me what I thought of the Congo, trying to pry my prejudices out of me before he told me his story. “Everybody has an agenda,” he told me. “What’s yours?” A local, illiterate warlord with an amulet of cowries, colonial-era coins, and monkey skulls around his neck shook his head at me when I took his picture, telling me to erase it: “You’re going to take my picture to Europe and show it to other white people. What do they know about my life?” He was afraid, he told me, that they would laugh at him, think he was a macaque, some forest monkey.
He had good reason to be skeptical. There is a long history of taking pictures and stories from Central Africa out of context. In 1904, an American missionary brought Ota Benga, a pygmy from the central Congo, to the United States. He was placed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, where his filed teeth, disproportionate limbs and tricks helped attract 40,000 visitors a day. He was exhibited alongside an orangutan, with whom he performed tricks, in order to emphasize Africans’ similarities with apes. An editorial in the New York Times, rejecting calls for his release, remarked that “pygmies are very low in the human scale.... The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.”
While not as shockingly racist, news reports from the Congo still usually reduce the conflict to a simplistic drama. An array of caricatures is often presented: the corrupt, brutal African warlord with his savage soldiers, raping and looting the country. Pictures of child soldiers high on amphetamines and marijuana—sometimes from Liberia and Sierra Leone, a thousand miles from the Congo. Poor, black victims: children with shiny snot dried on their faces, flies buzzing around them, often in camps for refugees or internally displaced. Between these images of killers and victims, there is little room to challenge the clichés, let alone try to offer a rational explanation for a truly chaotic conflict.
The Congo wars are not stories that can be explained through such stereotypes. They are the product of a deep history, often unknown to outside observers. The principal actors are far from just savages, mindlessly killing and being killed, but thinking, breathing Homo sapiens, whose actions, however abhorrent, are underpinned by political rationales and motives.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast country, the size of western Europe and home to sixty million people. For decades it was known for its rich geology, which includes large reserves of cobalt, copper, and diamonds, and for the extravagance of its dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but not for violence or depravity.
Then, in 1996, a conflict began that has thus far cost the lives of over five million people.
The Congolese war must be put among the other great human cataclysms of our time: the World Wars, the Great Leap Forward in China, the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides. And yet, despite its epic proportions, the war has received little sustained attention from the rest of the world. The mortality figures are so immense that they become absurd, almost meaningless. From the outside, the war seems to possess no overarching narrative or ideology to explain it, no easy tribal conflict or socialist revolution to use as a peg in a news piece. In Cambodia, there was the despotic Khmer Rouge; in Rwanda one could cast the genocidal Hutu militias as the villains. In the Congo these roles are more difficult to fill. There is no Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. Instead it is a war of the ordinary person, with many combatants unknown and unnamed, who fight for complex reasons that are difficult to distill in a few sentences—much to the frustration of the international media. How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective? How do you put a human face on a figure like “four million” when most of the casualties perish unsensationally, as a result of disease, far away from television cameras?
The conflict is a conceptual mess that eludes simple definition, with many interlocking narrative strands. The New York Times, one of the few American newspapers with extensive foreign coverage, gave Darfur nearly four times the coverage it gave the Congo in 2006, when Congolese were dying of war-related causes at nearly ten times the rate of those in Darfur.1 Even Nicholas Kristof, the Times columnist who has campaigned vigorously for humanitarian crises around the world, initially used the confusion of the Congo as a justification for reporting on it less—it is less evil because it is less ideologically defined. He writes:Darfur is a case of genocide, while Congo is a tragedy of war and poverty.... Militias slaughter each other, but it’s not about an ethnic group in the government using its military force to kill other groups. And that is what Darfur has been about: An Arab government in Khartoum arming Arab militias to kill members of black African tribes. We all have within us a moral compass, and that is moved partly by the level of human suffering. I grant that the suffering is greater in Congo. But our compass is also moved by human evil, and that is greater in Darfur. There’s no greater crime than genocide, and that is Sudan’s specialty.2
What is the evil in the Congo? How can we explain the millions of deaths?
In 1961, the philosopher Hannah Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to witness the trial of a great Nazi war criminal, Adolph Eichmann, who had been in charge of sending hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths. Herself a Jewish escapee from the Holocaust, Arendt was above all interested in the nature of evil. For her, the mass killing of Jews had been possible through a massive bureaucracy that dehumanized the victims and dispersed responsibility through the administrative apparatus. Eichmann was not a psychopath but a conformist. “I was just doing my job,” he told the court in Jerusalem. This, Arendt argued, was the banality of evil.
This book takes Arendt’s insight as its starting point. The Congo obviously does not have the anonymous bureaucracy that the Third Reich did. Most of the killing and rape have been carried out at short range, often with hatchets, knives, and machetes. It is difficult not to attribute personal responsibility to the killers and leaders of the wars.
It is not, however, helpful to personalize the evil and suggest that somehow those involved in the war harbored a superhuman capacity for evil. It is more useful to ask what political system produced this kind of violence. This book tries to see the conflict through the eyes of its protagonists and understand why war made more sense than peace, why the regional political elites seem to be so rich in opportunism and so lacking in virtue.
The answers to these questions lie deeply embedded in the region’s history. But instead of being a story of a brutal bureaucratic machine, the Congo is a story of the opposite: a country in which the state has been eroded over centuries and where once the fighting began, each community seemed to have its own militia, fighting brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies with each other. It was more like seventeenth-century Europe and the Thirty Years’ War than Nazi Germany.
For centuries the Congo has held a fascination for outsiders. Lying at the heart of the African continent, and encompassing some of the continent’s most impenetrable jungles, it has long been associated with violence and injustice. In 1885, during the scramble to divide Africa among colonial powers, King Leopold II of Belgium claimed the country as his personal fiefdom. He set up the Congo Free State, a private enterprise, and during the rubber boom of the 1890s the country became a key source of latex for car and bicycle tires. Colonial officers created a draconian system of forced labor during which they killed or mutilated hundreds of thousands and pushed millions of others to starvation or death from disease.
This brutality prompted the first international huma
n rights campaign, led by missionaries and activists, including Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle. Under pressure, King Leopold capitulated and handed the country over to the Belgian government in 1908. Although they established a much more elaborate administration with extensive primary education, the Belgians still focused on extracting resources and did little to encourage Congolese development. The upper echelons of the military and civil service were entirely white, pass laws kept Congolese from living in upper-class neighborhoods, and education was limited to the bare minimum.
By the time they were forced to hand over power, the Belgians had set the new nation up to fail. As the novelist Achille Ngoye vents through one of his characters: “I don’t like these uncles mayonnaise-fries3 for their responsibility in the debacle of our country: seventy-five years of colonization, one [Congolese] priest by 1917, five [Congolese] warrant officers in an army of sergeants and corporals in 1960, plus five pseudo-university graduates at independence; a privileged few chosen based on questionable criteria to receive a hasty training to become managers of the country. And who made a mess of it.”4
One of those sergeants, Joseph Mobutu, a typist and army journalist by training, went on to rule the country for thirty-two years, fostering national unity and culture and renaming the nation Zaire5 in 1971, but also running state institutions into the ground. Mobutu’s rule, although initially popular, paved the ground for Zaire’s collapse. By the 1980s, Mobutu (by then he had changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko) was increasingly paranoid and distrustful of his government and army; fearing dissent from within the ranks of his single-party state, he cannibalized his own institutions and infrastructures. Political interference and corruption eroded the justice system, administration, and security services; Mobutu was only able to ward off military challenges by resorting to dependence on his cold war allies and mercenaries. With the end of the cold war, even those resources had become more difficult to muster.
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