Back in the Congo, Kabila’s activities were hardly more popular. In the late 1970s, Kabila tried to consolidate his power by launching a campaign against witch doctors, whom he considered a bad influence and a challenge to his rule. He ordered a strong herbal drink to be concocted, a sort of truth potion that would trigger dizziness and nausea in wizards. Of course, the herbs themselves were so strong that they elicited this response from almost anybody. According to eyewitnesses, hundreds of elderly men and women were tied to stakes and burned.9
With his prospects of rebellion dwindling and his reputation tarnished, Kabila retreated to Dar es Salaam, where he had good contacts with the Tanzanian intelligence service. They provided him with a house and a diplomatic passport and allowed him to take on a more laid-back lifestyle. He had a vintage typewriter, on which he would bang out letters to regional leaders and his commanders in the field. The few writings that remain from this time indicate his attempts to establish himself as a revolutionary intellectual, using ornate prose and Marxist jargon.
It was this role of political operative that he felt most comfortable in, traveling throughout the region, exaggerating his military exploits and prowess, writing letters to friendly leftist governments in Africa and abroad. He spent little time in the bush, preferring to hopscotch through the socialist world in search of support for his rebellion. He traveled to China for seven months and made visits to Cairo, Nairobi, and Belgrade.
At home, his family life was complicated by his fondness for women. He had affairs with his two live-in Congolese maids, Vumilia and Kessia, who “were promoted” to wives, and squabbles between them and his first wife, Sifa, sparked tensions in the household. In total, Kabila would have at least twenty-four children with six women, creating endless family intrigue and drama, especially after he became president. He had behaved similarly in the field. According to accounts that filtered out from his commanders, Kabila would resort to a Mobutist subterfuge, regularly sleeping with his commanders’ wives as a display of power and humiliation.10
In the summer of 1995, Kabila’s stars aligned. He was restless, following the BBC news broadcasts from Rwanda and eastern Zaire several times a day and pestering his friends in the Tanzanian intelligence service with phone calls about what they might know. No Congolese rebellion could ever succeed without outside help, he often told these friends. The last such support had come from the Chinese and the Cubans in the 1960s. Now it seemed that Rwanda and others were gearing up to make the push.
Then, one afternoon, the Rwandan intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, turned up at Kabila’s house in the leafy Oyster Bay neighborhood of Dar es Salaam in the company of several Tanzanian officials. The veteran Congolese rebel was in a talkative mood, his spirits lifted by the possibility of renewed support. He explained that he still had several thousand troops he could mobilize in the Fizi area of South Kivu. “He was just happy that somebody was visiting him and asking him about his ideas,” Karegeya remembered. The aging rebel, perhaps thinking he was speaking to someone from the same bloodline, invoked his anti-imperialist struggle and lambasted Mobutu’s links to the west. He dug among his chest of papers to come up with some of his revolutionary pamphlets, and he even talked military strategy, proposing flanking maneuvers of the refugee camps and tactical feints.
To Karegeya, who, like most of his RPF colleagues, had by then endorsed the maxims of free-market capitalism, the “old man seemed like a relic of the past.” Kabila didn’t convince Karegeya, but then again, “we weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.”
Karegeya later sent emissaries to Fizi to find Kabila’s rebels. His men spent weeks climbing mountains and trekking through forests on promises by their guides that the following day the rebels would appear. After several months, they gave up. And yet Karegeya persisted with Kabila. Many Congolese, especially those close to veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, now accuse Rwanda of having deliberately chosen a weak and marginal figure in order to manipulate him. The Rwandan government did, however, try to reach out to other leaders, including Tshisekedi, without much luck.11
Karegeya laughed at me when I questioned their choice of a rebel leader. “You act like we had a lot of options! By 1996, Mobutu had co-opted or locked up almost all of his opposition, with the possible exception of Tshisekedi. Kabila might have been old-school, but he had not been bought off. We gave him some credit for that.”
Kabila arrived in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, from Dar es Salaam in July 1996 with almost nothing. He shacked up in a safe house in the affluent Kiyovu neighborhood of downtown Kigali, with a couple of suitcases. His only companions were his son, Joseph Kabila, who followed him everywhere, and several of his old rebel commanders, who “came in and out of the house, looking like janitors who had lost their brooms,” as one Rwandan officer commented.
The Rwandans had picked four strange bedfellows to lead the rebellion. Besides Kabila, there was Deo Bugera, the architect from North Kivu; Andre Kisase Ngandu, a bearded and aging commander who was leading a rebellion in the Ruwenzori Mountains, on Congo’s border with Uganda, and like Kabila traced his roots back to the rebellions of the 1960s, although he at least could still count several hundred active rebels under his command; and Anselme Masasu, a taciturn twenty-some-year-old from Bukavu who had a Rwandan mother and at the time was a sergeant in the Rwandan army. Years later, Bugera laughed when he heard Masasu’s name. “You know he ended up being a popular commander, very popular. But then, he was a kid! They said he had a political party, but he was the only member in it.”
Bugera remembered his first meeting with Kabila: “He was wearing sandals and one of those safari suits. He had uncut, blackened—I tell you, blackened!—toenails that stuck out over the end of his sandals. What a strange man, I thought! He didn’t look you in the eyes when he talked.” Bugera, who seemed privately to have hoped to become the rebellion’s leader, had heard about Kabila in the 1980s but nothing about him since then. According to Bugera, Kabila was so cash-strapped that Bugera bought him some shoes and a safari suit at the local market.
These four men—two overhauled, aging guerrilla commanders, a twentysomething sergeant, and an architect—were meant to lift the Congo up out of its political morass.
In Kigali, the Rwandans embarked on some much-needed bonding exercises with their newly recruited rebel leaders.
“The Rwandans are weird,” Bugera said. “They made us stay in a house together for three or four whole days, sleeping there, eating there, and preparing the war. They wanted us to become a team.”
It must have been a strange few days. Bugera remembered Kabila as a largely silent man, listening to and observing his new comrades. Like an outmoded professor, Kabila distributed green pamphlets printed on cheap paper with his seven lessons of revolutionary ideology. Masasu skulked about in his neatly pressed fatigues, speaking mostly with the Rwandan officers who came in and out of the house, and keeping his distance from the two rebels thirty years his senior. Bugera huddled with other Tutsi leaders, who muttered bitterly about Kabila’s massacres of Banyamulenge in the 1960s. The alliance had gotten off to a shaky start.
After several days, they finally came up with the one-page founding document the Rwandans had asked them to draft. They shared it with Colonel James Kabarebe, the commander of the Rwandan presidential guard who was preparing the Congo mission. He helped them polish it and added a Congolese dateline to mask Rwanda’s involvement in their movement; the paper became known as the Lemera Agreement.12 Kabila’s outdated verbosity shines through the text: It speaks of the “imperious necessity” for their four political parties to come together to liberate Zaire and names Laurent Kabila as their spokesman. It laments the economic situation, marked by “doldrums, financial muddle, corruption and the destruction of the means of production.”
The four leaders met three times with Vice President Kagame, who was constantly involved in the war preparations and se
emed well-informed of the complexities of Congolese politics. The RPF strongman seemed more enthusiastic about the rebellion than the leaders themselves, exhorting the Congolese to understand their responsibilities in the struggle, but also to understand that the RPF and others were helping them liberate their country. He said, “If we win the war, we will all win! It’s our victory!”
Thus was born the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL). A grandiose name for a group that initially had little political or military significance other than providing a smoke screen for Rwandan and Ugandan involvement.
At the beginning, Kabila felt awkward and marginalized. He had worked with Tutsi rebels in the 1960s, when some had fled the pogroms in Rwanda into the Congo, but he had not been in touch with this new, younger, cosmopolitan generation of rebels. They worked with laptop computers and satellite phones and organized their soldiers on the model of the British army. Even their marching style was different, he noticed.
He also felt a sense of entitlement. After all, he was at least twenty years older than the Rwandan officers milling about; he had been a guerrilla leader in the Congo when they were still in diapers.
Kabila was also smarter than most gave him credit for. He realized there was little he could do at the moment other than bide his time and try to position himself. After all, the Rwandans’ ambitions were initially strictly military, and they had given little thought to the government they would set up once they controlled the conquered territory. Given Kabila’s seniority, the Rwandans allowed him to become the movement’s spokesperson and to begin setting up a political directorate for it.
He got his hands on a satellite phone himself and began calling members of the Congolese diaspora whom he had worked with in the past. Without his own soldiers on the battlefield, he would need to rally loyal advisors around him. He contacted one of his former comrades from the 1960s, who was a nightclub owner in Madrid. Another one was a lawyer in Belgium, while a third had been with him in Tanzania. As the rebellion became more visible, and Kabila began making appearances on radio and television, other diaspora figures contacted him, and his political clout grew.
Laurent Kabila emerged as an accidental leader of the AFDL movement and eventually as the president of a liberated Congo. In an example of Rwandan hubris, the RPF planners desperately tried to foist ideology and sincerity upon the Congolese they had handpicked. As ingenious as Kagame’s military planners were, their political strategy ended up being simplistic and short-sighted. For many Congolese who had labored long—and ultimately unsuccessfully—to overthrow Mobutu peacefully, Kabila was a living symbol of foreign meddling in their country. It is one of the Congo’s historical ironies that the same man came to be seen as a bulwark of patriotism and resistance against Rwandan aggression.
PART II
THE FIRST WAR
7
MANY WARS IN ONE
KIRINGYE, LWEBA, AND ABALA, ZAIRE, AUGUST–OCTOBER 1996
On August 30, 1996, the first battle of the Zaire war took place. Leaving their training camps in Rwanda, a small group of seventy Banyamulenge soldiers crossed the river into Zaire just south of the customs post where Burundi, Zaire, and Rwanda meet. It hadn’t rained in weeks—the short dry season was the perfect time to launch the assault, as the roads were in decent shape—and the group made its way quietly through the waist-high elephant grass. On the other side of the plains, they could see the outline of the Itombwe Mountains rising into the clouds, cradling the highland pastures where they had grown up.
At dawn, they hid in a banana grove close to the small village of Kiringye. As they were resting, a woman on her way to farm her cassava field stumbled into their makeshift camp and began screaming at the sight of Tutsi soldiers armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. They were tempted to kill her, but then let her go. She ran to the nearby military base, where she alerted Mobutu’s army. They surrounded the rebels and opened fire, killing ten and capturing five others. It was one of the few battles of the war that Mobutu would win. The war, still at the planning stage in Kigali, had been jump-started.1
The army’s ambush accelerated the spiral into outright conflict. The captured soldiers were paraded in front of television screens across the country. Five haggard-looking young men in military uniforms were placed under spotlights, with camera flashes illuminating their sunken eyes. This was the enemy. For many Zairians, it was the first time they put the Tutsi name to their distinctive features. “Rwanda invades!” read the September 1 headline in Le Potentiel, Kinshasa’s most read daily newspaper.
In Bukavu, the state radio read out an editorial titled “A Historic Chance for Zaire.” The broadcaster exhorted listeners not to believe the Tutsi’s lies about citizenship, using a metaphor that has since become routine when arguing that the Banyamulenge can never become Zairian: “A tree trunk does not turn itself into a crocodile because it has spent some time in the water. In the same way, a Tutsi will forever remain a Tutsi, with his or her perfidy, craftiness and dishonesty.”2
By now, it was obvious that more and more Banyamulenge troops were infiltrating into the high plateau, where the rebels began stockpiling weapons and preparing for another attack. Farmers and traders hid in the bushes by the side of mountain paths, as bands of rebels with metal boxes of ammunition on their heads climbed up the mountainside. A movement in the other direction was also visible: More and more Banyamulenge youths began crossing the Rusizi River into Burundi at night, where they were met by guides who would take them to training camps in Rwanda.
Most Congolese refer to the 1996 invasion as the War of Liberation. The population had had enough of Mobutu; despite the suspicions regarding Rwanda’s involvement, crowds across the country welcomed the rebels as liberators. At the local level, however, this image of heroic patriots does not hold water. In the east, the advancing rebels became embroiled in bitter feuds between communities over power, land, and identity. Anti-Tutsi demagogues whipped up mobs to kill innocent civilians; the Banyamulenge rebels retaliated, blaming entire communities for their victimization. Thousands were killed.
A prime example of this was Anzuluni Bembe, the vice president of Zaire’s national assembly, who had created a youth militia called, modestly, Group to Support Anzuluni Bembe. The short, pudgy firebrand held rallies along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, calling on people to take up arms against the invaders. At a meeting at a local school in Fizi, he called out: “Children of Fizi, are you sleeping? The Banyamulenge are taking our country! I want you to get weapons and attack them, attack the Banyamulenge!”3
In Uvira, Banyamulenge leaders were rounded up and put in jail, while the mayor mustered gangs of youths to kick their families out of their houses. Several days after the first clashes with the infiltrators, local authorities told the Banyamulenge to regroup in camps “for their own safety.” A local Banyamulenge leader later wrote about the experience of being arrested: “They beat us up and took us to jail.... Minute after minute, they brought in more Banyamulenge in that minuscule cell where there was a hellish stench due to the urine and feces and no oxygen. [Several days later] they took out the late Rukenurwa who they beat like a snake. His sobs made us all cry.”4
Hundreds of Tutsi in eastern Zaire, but also in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, were harassed and beaten. The hysteria reached a fever pitch, in which anyone who had a thinnish, hooked nose and high cheekbones was targeted. At a border post with Rwanda, youths attacked and hacked to death a Malian businessman.5
By 1996, social conditions in Zaire were ripe for youth-led violence. Due to Mobutu’s predation and disastrous economic policies, the country’s infrastructure and industry had collapsed. By 1996, the country had been through seven years of economic contraction. Zairians earned just over half of what they had been making in 1990. According to the United Nations, a full 27 million people, or 60 percent of the population, were undernourished. Even when people were paid, the money was worth little: Inflation soared to 5,0
00 percent in 1996.
This misery provided fertile terrain for ethnic prejudice. In the crowds, youths were able to channel their anger against a visible, known enemy. Leaders like Anzuluni provided added incentives, such as free alcohol and modest wages for some of their organizers. The Banyamulenge, while poor, had attractive and inflation-free assets: cows. Soldiers and youths rustled thousands of head of cattle in the early days of the war.
How can we explain this kind of brutality? It is difficult to describe the impact of abuse and dysfunctional government on the psyche of people in war-torn areas.
In March 2008, I traveled to various massacre sites in the region. Everywhere I stopped, people eyed me suspiciously, and local officials demanded to see my papers. Even though the war had officially come to an end years earlier, the region was still very tense; Rwanda and the Congo continued to fight a proxy war in the Kivus, each supporting different militia groups.
One morning, I was packing to leave for Makobola, perhaps the most notorious massacre site, when a friend from a local human rights group called me on my cell phone.
“Stop packing and turn on the radio,” he said.
I quickly tuned into a debate show on a local Protestant radio station to hear the member of a local political party say, “I wanted to draw your attention to President George Bush’s visit to Rwanda.” Bush was visiting Kigali as part of his whirlwind Africa tour. “Is it a coincidence that his visit comes at the same time as Nkunda withdraws from the peace process? At the same time as there is an American mercenary by the name of Johnson who is here in Bukavu, recruiting youths for the next Rwandan invasion?” He got my name wrong, but it was clear by his following description that he meant me. He said he had proof of my activity and that he would provide it.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 11