We drove into his compound late on a Friday afternoon, as the sun was going down through the palm trees that sprout everywhere in Baraka’s sandy soil. The community’s villages are identical to each other, each built after a common blueprint. Matching houses, made out of mud bricks and then whitewashed, line a long avenue that leads up to the prophet’s house, which forms the center of the community. Behind the houses, communal vegetable plots stretch out into the surrounding palms.
The Prophet, as Wahi Seleelwa likes to be called, greeted us on the steps of his house wearing a white T-shirt with an imprint of his own picture and a black felt Stetson hat. Three large glass doors took up the front of the house, set into whitewashed walls and underneath a corrugated iron roof. The house seemed very open; in contrast with most buildings in the region, there were no bars on the windows or doors.
The prophet formed the physical and spiritual center of the community. Their founding belief is that Wahi Seleelwa is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, a distinction he inherited from his predecessor. As Seleelwa explained, after the death of their previous leader, whose picture hung on the wall behind him as he spoke to us, he was possessed by the spirit of Christ. Over the following years, he received the revelations of Christ, which his followers wrote down in their drably named “Communication Notebook,” which contains the main teachings of the church. Some of the passages would raise eyebrows among mainstream Christians: They allow polygamy (the prophet has three wives), have their own calendar with twelve-day months, and are governed by a conclave of elders dubbed the Four Living Beings.
Seleelwa was eager to speak with us about the beginning of the war. “Nobody has ever come to hear our story,” he lamented. “Not the United Nations, not our own government, nobody.” He pulled out sheaths of handwritten letters he had sent to various presidents and UN secretaries-general. “Nobody ever answers,” he said, shaking the papers.
On the wall behind him hung a black-and-white picture of a group of people posing together in front of a white church with thatched roofing. In the middle of the group of around sixty people is a smiling Seleelwa, his Stetson hat tipped backwards, looking like a halo; many other men are also wearing the hats, a sign of “the coming kingdom,” Seleelwa said. Children make up around half the congregation, kneeling and peering sullenly into the camera from the bottom of the picture.
“Of all the members of that church there,” he said, pointing at the picture, “only a dozen survived. I’ll show you the survivors.” Seleelwa called for an assistant and gave him the names of several people.
There was no doubt that Seleelwa commanded respect from his congregation. Minutes later, we heard the voices of a dozen people milling around on the steps outside. Three males and eight females, some of them still children, had gathered to talk to us. The prophet grinned: “Here they are!”
The leader of the group was a forty-eight-year-old man called Neno Lundila. He was wearing an oversized green blazer and felt hat that was considerably shabbier than Seleelwa’s.
Neno’s church had been located in Abala, a town in the foothills of the Itombwe Mountains, a two-day walk away. It was a corn- and cassava-farming village inhabited mostly by Bembe who had moved down to the main road that linked the lakeshore with the high plateau. Before the war, Banyamulenge had sent their children to primary school in Abala, and the lively trade had brought the two communities together in markets, churches, weddings, and funerals.
By the end of October 1996, the war that had begun two months before had reached Abala. Ragtag local militias skirmished with Banyamulenge troops, who advanced steadily down the road toward Baraka, prompting a mass exodus of the local population. In Abala, the entire village fled, except for the Malkia wa Ubembe congregation. “We weren’t involved in politics,” Neno said. “We were preaching the good word, nothing else. Why leave?”
On October 28, the congregation gathered in their church for morning prayers. As usual, they brought their whole families with them. The aisles were more crammed than usual that morning. “The troubled situation had given us good reason to pray,” Neno recalled. After an hour, just before dawn, as they were singing the last song—“We will not run, we will not be afraid, we are with Prophet”—they saw soldiers surround the church. Their preacher told them to stop singing and went outside to talk to the soldiers. Through the windows, in the half-light, Neno could see the features of a Munyamulenge who had grown up just two hours away from Abala and was well-known to the community as a courteous, polite man. That day, however, he was aggressive.
“Why didn’t you leave, like everybody else?” he barked at the preacher.
“We are people of God,” Neno remembered the preacher saying. “We didn’t have anywhere to go.”
“Then you have to come away with us!”
The preacher refused, saying they didn’t know anybody where the Banyamulenge lived and didn’t have a church there.
The commander lost patience. Words were exchanged, and a scuffle ensued. Through the narrow window, Neno saw another soldier pull out his rifle, shove it into the preacher’s nostril, and pull the trigger. In the church, people started screaming as the soldiers advanced on the doors and windows and opened fire. A grenade hit the ground not far from where Neno was, ripping into several people’s bodies. Women took babies off their backs and huddled over them, praying. They tried to hide between the benches and under the altar, and Neno felt bodies falling on top of him. “They saved my life: I felt bullets going into their bodies; they shielded me.” After several minutes, the soldiers stopped shooting. Neno could hear them debating outside. Then, the sound of tinder crackling broke the silence. “It was still dark outside, but all of a sudden there was a bright light I could see between the bodies.”
The soldiers had set fire to the thatched roof, in order to kill survivors and get rid of evidence. When Neno heard the soldiers say, “Let’s go,” he climbed out from underneath the bodies. The whole roof was on fire, and clumps of burning thatch and crossbeams were falling down. Neno managed to drag himself and seventeen other survivors out of the burning church. A hundred and three others died, including Neno’s two wives and six children.
We went back outside to the front steps, where the other survivors were still sitting. The women were sullen but hitched up their worn kikwembe to show me their wounds. One of the girls, now around seventeen, had grabbed her baby brother and put him on her back to try to flee when a bullet went through both of them. Twelve years later, she has a shiny welt on her lower back, matching his scar across his stomach. “They are tied together by their injury,” Seleelwa told me. Blushing, the girl pulled up her T-shirt to show me. Another girl had had her leg amputated.
“The other bodies are still there, buried under the collapsed church,” Neno told me as we got ready to leave. “Nobody has even so much as put a memorial plaque there. You can still see the charred remains.” He shook his head. “We have nowhere to mourn our dead.”
I asked him if he had ever heard of Banyamulenge who had been massacred. He looked surprised. “Banyamulenge? No. Never.”9
It was not just in South Kivu that the war brought calamity. Throughout the country, the invading forces pillaged. The killing, however, was largely confined to the east, where the Tutsi communities had long-standing quarrels with other groups. In North Kivu, the invading Rwandan troops systematically rounded up and killed thousands of Hutu villagers, accusing them of supporting the génocidaires . Many prominent Hutu businessmen and traditional chiefs were also killed. Tutsi communities, of course, nurse their own memories of persecution and decimation at the hands of others.
None of the killings has led to prosecutions or even a truth commission that could ease the heavy burden of the past. Skeletons can still be found, stuffed into septic tanks, water cisterns, and toilets, reminders of the various tragedies. In Bukavu, mass graves dating back to this period are now covered with the cement of shopping centers. Every new bout of violence summons these spirits up and
manipulates the past into a story of victimization, ignoring the wounds of the other communities. Peace, many diplomats and locals say, is more important than justice, especially when the government is full of yesterday’s military leaders. Prosecute those leaders, and they will start the war again, the prevailing wisdom goes. Plus, some Congolese leaders say, war is nasty, and people die. One erudite politician reminded me:“Didn’t General Ulysses Grant give an amnesty for Confederate soldiers after the American Civil War? Didn’t the Spanish do the same for crimes committed under Franco? Why should it be different for us?” Unfortunately, the impunity has thus far brought little peace, and the criminals of yesterday become the recidivists of tomorrow.
8
THE DOMINOES FALL
Yo likaku, obebisi mbuma, bilei na ya moko!
You monkey, you are destroying the seeds, that will be your food!
—KOFFI OLOMIDE
BUKAVU, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1996
Lieutenant Colonel Prosper Nabyolwa was sent in October 1996 to Bukavu, on the border with Rwanda, to be the commander of operations for Mobutu’s army. “Naby,” as his friends called him, knew the town well: He had been born in the hills just outside of Bukavu and had gone to the Jesuit secondary school perched on a hill in the middle of the lakeside town. The provincial capital of half a million people was enjoying the end of its three-month dry season; for once, its hilly roads were not clogged with mud and puddles, although a slight haze of dust hung over the whitewashed buildings, getting into clothes and food. At a mile above sea level, the nights were cold, while the cloudless days were scorching hot.
The experienced paratroop commander, who had been trained at military academies in Belgium and Oklahoma, surveyed the situation. It didn’t look good. The Rwandan infiltrations across the Rusizi River south of Bukavu were continuing; intelligence reports told of Rwandan troops and their AFDL allies massing on the other side of the border to attack the refugee camps that sprawled out on either side of town. Naby had been taught how to deal with similar guerrilla threats during his training courses. His task would have been feasible for a disciplined army with adequate resources. But that was not what Naby had at his disposal.
Over the past twenty years, Mobutu had cannibalized his own state, particularly his army. Not surprisingly for a leader who had taken power through a coup, Mobutu feared his own officers the most, and he made sure that they would not have the wherewithal to contest his power. He gutted his regular army, depriving it of resources and salaries, while he invested millions in separate, paramilitary units—the presidential guard and the garde civile—which he then pitted against each other. Throughout these various units, he named close associates, often members of his own Ngbandi tribe, as commanders and allowed them to get rich off extortion rackets, gun-smuggling, and illegal taxation. A similar situation prevailed in the intelligence services, which proliferated and spied on each other. “We didn’t have an army; we had individuals,” Nabyolwa remembered.1
When he arrived in Bukavu, Nabyolwa took stock of the situation. There were 800 presidential guards, 1,000 guardes civiles, and 200 paratroopers in town who answered to different chains of command. The paratroopers had gone to seed, abandoning their positions to moonlight for private security companies in order to make a living. The presidential guards told Nabyolwa that they were deployed to protect the refugees under a deal they had negotiated with the United Nations. Despite Nabyolwa’s entreaties that they had sworn an oath to protect Zaire with their lives, they refused to send any of their troops to the front lines.
The lack of intelligence further confused matters. Commanders in Bukavu received exaggerated, contradictory information about the security situation to the south of town in the Rusizi plain and in the High Plateau, where Rwandan vanguard parties began skirmishing with Nabyolwa’s units in August and September. “I didn’t know whether it was it 300 or 3,000 enemy troops active there,” he remembered. He sent reports to the army command in Kinshasa but received little response. Politicians in the capital were too busy feuding with each other to pay much attention to the situation in Bukavu, a thousand miles away. When Nabyolwa radioed Kinshasa to tell them he urgently needed one battalion of special forces, the commander of the presidential guard answered, “We have problems in Kinshasa, too, you know. We need the soldiers here.” Mobutu had been in power for so long, Nabyolwa remembered, that no one could conceive of him failing, least of all to a Lilliputian neighbor like Rwanda.
The Rwandan attacks to the south of town sent thousands of refugees and Zairian civilians spilling into Bukavu, where they sparked alarm and protests. On September 18, the Catholic Church and civil society groups rallied tens of thousands of people in the streets of Bukavu in protest of the “aggression by the Tutsi invaders.” Waving banners and singing songs, they streamed down Avenue Lumumba, the main thoroughfare. They demanded that the government in Kinshasa “mobilize the means ... to kick the invaders out of the national territory and to resolve, once and for all, the issue of citizenship.”2
This firebrand rhetoric was, of course, not well received on the other side of the border. Thousands of Banyamulenge had been seeking refuge in Rwanda from the abuses of Mobutu’s army and armed gangs. A week after the demonstration, Nabyolwa tuned into Radio Rwanda to hear Prime Minister Pasteur Bizimungu give a speech. “There is no difference between the Interahamwe and the Zairian authorities,” he thundered. “Each time they mistreat us, Rwanda will get revenge.... If their gambit is to chase out those who have lived in the country for four hundred years, the only Banyamulenge we will welcome are the children and old women. The others must stay there to correct and give a lesson to those who want to chase them out.”3
It was not long before it became clear to Nabyolwa that he was in serious trouble. Perhaps the first sign was the Lemera hospital massacre. The clinic was perched on the steep hills overlooking the Rusizi plain, forming an ideal military outlook. It had been founded in the 1930s by Swedish Pentecostal missionaries and by the time of the war was the largest hospital in the province, with 230 beds, several foreign doctors, and advanced medical equipment. Given its proximity to the fighting, it had received dozens of wounded soldiers, both Hutu militiamen and Zairian troops. The hospital had asked the Zairian government for protection in exchange for providing treatment, and a company of around a hundred men had been deployed there.
At dawn on October 6, nurses at the hospital were woken by gunfire from the military camp. The generator had been switched off for the night, but the almost full moon provided some light. The Rwandans were known to infiltrate vanguard units while the rear guard shot volleys into the air; it was possible that the rebels had already reached the hospital. Nurses saw fleeting shadows moving through the nearby banana groves. Havoc broke out in the rows of hospital beds, as those wounded soldiers who could move tore intravenous tubes out of their arms and ran, hobbled, or crawled for safety. The nurses barricaded themselves into their rooms and waited.
A few villagers ventured down to the hospital the following afternoon. The scene they saw turned their stomachs. Seventeen patients, mostly soldiers, lay dead in their beds and sprawled on the floor in the wards, bayoneted and shot to death. Broken glass, Mercurochrome, and intravenous fluids lay spilled around them. The attackers had looted the stock of medicines, spilling cartons of syringes and bandages on the floor. In the private quarters, they found the bodies of three nurses—Kadaguza, Simbi, and Maganya—in their white aprons, all shot by AFDL and Rwandan troops. At the nearby Catholic parish, several bodies of Zairian soldiers lay twisted in the courtyard. Inside, they found the bodies of two Catholic priests in their habits, also shot dead.4
Similar attacks took place across the Rusizi plain, following the same pattern: infiltrators from Rwanda attacking army positions and refugee camps, scattering the Zairian army and Hutu militia and killing civilians. Soon, 220,000 cowering refugees were flooding into Bukavu, bringing with them word of more massacres and spreading panic.
Naby
olwa decided to go to the Rusizi plain himself to rally the troops. He drove his Land Rover pickup to Luvungi, the Zairian army’s most advanced position, only to find his soldiers piling into a truck, with their belongings and guns stacked up over the cabin. “Colonel,” one of the men told him, hurriedly saluting him, “You are on your own.”
Retreating back to town, he reported to his commanding officer, telling him they urgently needed reinforcements. “He couldn’t have agreed more,” Nabyolwa remembered, laughing. “When he heard what had happened, he succumbed to a sudden stomach ailment. He packed his suitcase and said he was going to Kinshasa to get more troops. He was on the next plane out.”
The following day, Nabyolwa’s mood was lifted briefly when he got word that a plane was arriving with the promised reinforcements. He hurried to the airport to receive the troops, only to see a cargo plane landing with a company of garde civile troops disembarking with their wives, children, and belongings. “There were two hundred shabbily dressed soldiers with pots and pans on their heads. Goats were running around the airstrip. They asked me where they could set up camp.” He moaned in dismay, holding his head in his hands. “Goats!”
Nabyolwa called headquarters in Kinshasa three times, urging it to deploy more troops and more resources. Nothing came. Finally, as the enemy troops were just a few miles from Bukavu, Naby rang the army chief of staff one final time: “General, if you wait any longer you will have to pick us up as prisoners of war from the Red Cross!”
If the Rwandan genocide and the exodus of the génocidaires and refugees to Zaire were the immediate causes of the Congo war, the decay of Mobutu’s state and army provided the equally important context. By 1996, Zaire was a teetering house of cards—as the Economist quipped, “They call it a country. In fact it is just a Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa.”5
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 13