Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  The army that Nabyolwa joined in 1973 was a jumble of contradictions. Like the rest of the state apparatus, it was present everywhere, harassing and taxing the population, but effective nowhere. On the one hand, the Zairian Armed Forces (FAZ) received hundreds of millions of dollars of military assistance from western countries in their effort to make Zaire a bulwark against the socialist states—Angola, the Republic of Congo, and Tanzania—that surrounded it. On the other hand, despite their partners’ profligacy, Mobutu’s army was rarely able to deal effectively with even the most amateurish challenge. On numerous occasions, Mobutu had to call on his foreign allies or mercenaries to prop up his floundering army.

  The roots of the army’s weakness lie in the Belgian colonial state. The Force Publique, as the army was then called, was formed to maintain law and order and suppress any challenge to colonial rule. It conflated military and policing functions, and control of military units was strongly decentralized to serve the needs of the territorial administrators, who used the army for civilian tasks as well as to suppress dissent. The Belgian authorities never thought to create a strong army; up until the late 1950s, they thought that independence was still decades away and that they would continue to control the state and its security forces. They did not allow Congolese to advance beyond the rank of noncommissioned officers, leaving a thousand white Belgians to make up the officer corps. Mobutu himself was a sergeant, a trained typist and journalist, at the time of independence. Within two months he was chief of staff of the newly independent Congo’s army.

  When the Belgians left, the brash and inexperienced new authorities sacked all Belgian officers, suspicious that they wanted to keep running the country even after independence. It would have been difficult to form a new army under the best of circumstances, but no one had expected the turmoil that followed. Almost immediately, parts of the provinces of Kasai and Katanga seceded, supported by western economic and political interests. When Belgium and the United States connived with Katangan secessionists to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, the postindependence government and army split, and a new rebellion broke out in the eastern Congo. To get these various uprisings under control, Colonel Mobutu relied on foreign assistance, first from 20,000 United Nations peacekeepers and then from white mercenaries, Belgian paratroopers, and the U.S. Air Force.

  Mobutu brought an end to this tumultuous period through a coup in November 1965 and set about reorganizing the army. The military became the centerpiece of his administration, and he consistently allocated over 10 percent of his budget to defense. Despite his meager training, he promoted himself to field marshall and minister of defense. He succeeded in attracting outside support by presenting himself as the bulwark against communism in the region. He hosted several Angolan rebel groups on his territory and allowed the United States to funnel money and weapons to them. Between 1960 and 1991, the United States provided $190 million in military assistance to Zaire and trained 1,356 officers.6 France, Israel, and Belgium also provided military aid to the autocrat, despite the evidence that he himself had done little to improve the performance of his security services. The dictator knew that he was too important to the west to be allowed to fail.

  As a result, there was no shortage of technically proficient and competent military officers. Nabyolwa was a good example of this. He was trained as a paratrooper by Belgians and then traveled to Brussels for artillery training at the royal military academy. Several years later, he studied for six months at Fort Seal in Oklahoma. At the same time, Zaire became a burgeoning African military power, with cadets from other countries undergoing paratroop, naval, and artillery training at various Zairian academies. Mobutu sent thousands of troops to help put down the Biafran secession in Nigeria, a Libyan-backed incursion in Chad, and rebel insurgencies in Burundi, Rwanda, and Togo.

  While he courted outside support, however, Mobutu was deeply afraid that his army would actually become a professional, cohesive fighting force. Paradoxically, it was Mobutu’s fear of dissent that weakened his security forces. Having risen through a coup, he knew the danger that independent poles of power represented, and he sidelined or eliminated competent officers he deemed to be a threat. The military’s decline began in 1975, when Mobutu court-martialed a slew of U.S.-trained officers, including three generals and his own military advisor, Colonel Omba Pene, accusing them of planning a putsch in connivance with the American embassy. Three years later it was the turn of officers trained at the Belgian Royal Military Academy. Despite scant evidence regarding the alleged Belgium-linked plot, the officers were quickly sentenced and executed by firing squad. At the same time, Mobutu dismissed all Kinshasa-based officers from ethnic communities deemed disloyal, in particular those from Kasai, Maniema, Bandundu, and Katanga provinces. The commander in chief reorganized the army, placing members of his own, small Ngbandi tribe in key command positions. Loyalty, in this case cemented by ethnicity, trumped competence.

  Nabyolwa, from the restive Kivu Province, was barred from important positions, despite his training abroad. “They thought people from the Kivus were rebels,” Nabyolwa remembered. He was forced to receive orders from officers who, in some cases, had never even graduated from military academy. “If you weren’t from Equateur, you were nobody.”

  Driven by his deeply paranoid fantasies, Mobutu proceeded to balkanize the army, creating a multitude of military units and intelligence services with different chains of command and overlapping mandates. He gave the command of most of these units to relatives. In 1982, he promoted his nephew Nzimbi Ngbale from captain to general and made him the command of his newly formed presidential guard. Several years later, General Philemon Baramoto, who had married Mobutu’s sister-in-law, was placed at the head of the garde civile, which was supposed to protect the country’s borders but ended up as a bloated paramilitary unit deployed throughout the country. Mobutu’s son Kongolo, who had the rank of captain but was not part of the official armed forces, set up his own private security company “Eagle Service” that he used to extort money from diamond traders and customs officials. The national security advisor Honoré Ngbanda, who was nicknamed “Terminator” for his brutality, created two private militias to target enemies of the regime.

  By the 1990s, half of the sixty-two generals in the armed forces came from Mobutu’s home province of Equateur and a third from his small Ngbandi ethnic group. In the ministry of defense, reportedly 90 percent of the staff was from Equateur.7 Instead of loyalty, however, these poorly thought-out promotions created discord in the army. The various military and paramilitary services spent much of their time fighting among each other and building mafia-like networks throughout the country. Mobutu’s own security advisor later described the farcical infighting among generals: “All the ministers of defense and army generals had, within the military or in Mobutu’s entourage, a rival that they had to fight or defend against. General Bumba suffered attacks from General Molongya; Singa battled with Lomponda; Likulia backstabbed Eluki; Mahele gave Eluki a hard time; meanwhile Singa, back at the ministry of defense, was subjected to Likulia’s plotting. The list is long.”8

  As loyalty was more important than probity, Mobutu allowed his protégés to enrich themselves. Officers competed for influence, juicy procurement deals, and patronage. Almost all high-ranking officers were involved in business, and the lines between public and private became completely blurred as they used state assets to further personal interests. The army’s chief of staff, General Eluki Monga, siphoned fuel from military stocks for his fleet of taxis; General Baramoto rented his soldiers out as private security guards in Kinshasa; General Nzimbi, the commander of the presidential guard, used army trucks to smuggle copper from Katanga to Zambia.9

  As Mobutu’s hold on state and economic power declined in the 1980s, his army, too, fell apart. Aside from the presidential guard, who were much better equipped, paid, and fed, most of the country’s 70,000 soldiers rarely or never received salaries. Mobutu famously de
clared in a speech to the army, “You have guns; you don’t need a salary.”10 It was another manifestation of his famous “Article 15,” a fictitious clause in an obsolete constitution that called for the population to do anything they needed to do to survive. Débrouillez-vous (“improvise” or “get by”) became the modus operandi for Zairians of all classes, in particular the armed forces.

  It is difficult to overstate the impact these policies had on the security services. As early as 1979, a scholar traveling in the northeast came across soldiers in “tattered uniforms, the victims of long deferred pay. A number were reduced to begging for food.” In order to survive, they were forced to hire themselves out to local farmers to work in the fields.11 In military camps throughout the country, soldiers had turned training grounds into vegetable plots, and chickens and goats strayed about the dilapidated compounds.

  Most soldiers resorted to less gallant means to earn their living. By the 1990s, impromptu roadblocks at which soldiers would extort money had become ubiquitous features of the Zairian countryside. Soldiers became known as katanyama, a Lingala term meaning “meat cutters,” because they would come into the market and seize the choicest morsels of meat from the butchers. Mobutu himself, in one of his periodic bouts of “self-criticism,” admitted that, “The truth is simply that these cadres seem to have lost the rigor of military life and discipline in favor of all sorts of commodities: commerce, beautiful cars, beautiful villas, bourgeois life.”12

  In Bukavu, Nabyolwa arrived to find the officers had become businessmen. “They would come to staff headquarters wearing gold rings and chains, sometimes even sunglasses, smelling of cologne,” he told me, shaking his head. Most commanders had several wives; one of Nabyolwa’s deputies had a clothes shop on the main road, while another ran a smuggling racket with local businessmen, sending trucks through the Burundian border at night.

  As with a bankrupted business, when the army ceased functioning, its leaders began disassembling it and selling it off—weapons, vehicles, airplanes, generators, and anything else that could get a decent price on the international arms market or on the black market. In June 1994, General Nzimbi and General Baramoto sold the air force’s last remaining fighter jets to arms dealers. Several months later, General Eluki gave orders to the air force commander to sell the last C-130 transport aircraft to South African dealers. So many spare parts were bartered away that, by the end of the 1980s, only 70 percent of the tanks of the country’s main armored brigade were functional. A similar statistic applied to the Zairian air force.13 The Zairian army was unable through its own means to transport troops or goods anywhere in a country 1,000 miles wide and with barely any paved roads. They had to resort to using commercial planes. At the end of the war, the defunct state allegedly owed local businessmen over $40 million in debts for air travel alone.14

  The arrival of the displaced Rwandan army of the Habyarimana regime and the refugees also provided a good business opportunity for the generals. When Mobutu’s security advisor inspected the arsenal of confiscated weapons in a Goma military camp, it took him a whole day to see all the equipment: “The whole courtyard was covered with heavy and modern machinery. Many of these had never been used. I was even surprised to see very modern amphibious tanks. Entire hangars were full of hundreds of thousands of rifles of all kinds, while three buildings were full of ammunition.”15 Most of these weapons were bartered away by the various generals involved in arms trafficking. The destination of the weapons revealed the officers’ extreme cynicism: some were sold back to the Rwandan army in exile, while others were supplied to the RPF across the border. The Zairian army supplied its enemy with some of the bullets and guns it would use to kill them with later.

  After decades of nepotism and mismanagement, it was clear that the only loyalty most commanders felt was to their own pocketbooks. General Tembele, Mobutu’s commander on the eastern front, met regularly with RPF commanders across the border to brief them on the military situation.16 Patrick Karegeya, the Rwandan external intelligence chief, spoke with Mobutu officers in Kinshasa and in the east in the run-up to the war. “We had extensive infiltration, we used money, we used friends. It wasn’t hard.”17

  Nabyolwa was in downtown Bukavu when the rebels finally reached town, entering across the Rwandan border and from the south at the same time. He raced in his pickup to Hotel Residence, a large monolith on the main strip where the army high command had rented apartments. His commanding officer had barricaded himself there, swearing that he would not abandon his position. Nabyolwa rushed into his room, urging him to order a tactical retreat. His commander refused, saying that they would still be able to hold the town. Exasperated, Nabyolwa took him out to the balcony, from where they could see Rwandan troops swarming into town. As they stood on the balcony, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the wall just meters away from them, knocking them both to the ground. Convinced, the general informed his staff to prepare a hasty withdrawal to a suburb on a hill adjacent to Bukavu, from where they would be able to prepare a counterattack.

  The army high command piled into their military jeeps and screeched out of town, only to find that most of the army had already fled to the military barracks to the north. The situation, however, was not favorable for a counterattack. In the barracks, the terrified soldiers milled about with their wives and children. Their belongings—and also pillaged goods, Nabyolwa suspected—lay strewn about the parade grounds. It was impossible to envision a counterattack in these conditions, he thought. Nonetheless, and against his advice, his commander gave orders for the soldiers to line up in preparation for an attack. They finally got the unit commanders to present themselves at the front of the parade grounds, but their soldiers balked, leaving their officers standing alone, looking sheepish in the middle of the pitch. “My general was convinced that we had an army—we didn’t,” Nabyolwa recalled.

  They beat a further retreat to the Kavumu airport eighteen miles to the north of town, where Kinshasa had promised to send them reinforcements. There they found one of the most formidable pieces left in Mobutu’s arsenal, a fifteen-meter-long BM-30 Smerch rocket launcher with twelve barrels. His commander grinned and told Nabyolwa, much to his dismay, “We will use this to bomb Bukavu.” Nabyolwa, who still had relatives and family members in town, retorted: “That doesn’t make any sense. We will just kill civilians and destroy houses!” An order is an order, the general insisted, and they prepared a column to drive toward Bukavu to find an appropriate place from which to bomb the town.

  Halfway into town, the general pulled up alongside Nabyolwa, who was driving in the middle of the convoy in a pickup, and ordered him to lead the offensive. “You want your operational commander to be the first to die in battle?” Nabyolwa fulminated. That was it: He stopped his vehicle and handed the keys over to his general. “I wasn’t going to die like that,” he remembered. He did not want to cross the line between bravery and stupidity. “If he wanted to lead the offensive, he was more than welcome.”

  Nabyolwa began walking back toward the airport on foot. He found the bulk of his troops at a crossroads together with hundreds of Rwandan refugees, debating whether to head north toward the airport or west into the equatorial rainforests. After some deliberation, they headed over the mountains into the inhospitable jungles. Naby joined them, climbing into a jeep belonging to a presidential guard commander.

  In the meantime, the BM-30’s electrical system short-circuited, and the hapless general fled toward the airport. Instead of taking the road westward into the jungles, however, he decided to head northward along Lake Kivu to Goma, where he thought he might still be able to join other units to resist the Rwandan invasion. Over his radio, Nabyolwa heard of his commander’s decision and felt a pang of remorse. He was sure that Goma would soon fall as well and the general would then be stuck between two enemy contingents. In a small village sixty miles into the jungle, Nabyolwa told the presidential guard unit that they needed to return to get the general. It was the last straw for the sol
diers, who thought it was suicidal to go back. They turned their guns on him.

  “They didn’t make any sense,” Nabyolwa remembered. “First they accused me of deserting—which was strange coming from a bunch of deserters. Then they said I wanted to kill them by going back. Finally, an officer said, ‘We think you are a traitor. Every time you send us into battle, we get attacked!’

  “‘But that’s what war is about!’

  “‘You are a sadist!’”

  Faced with this kind of logic, all Nabyolwa could do was to persuade them that, instead of killing him, it would be wiser to arrest him and take him to their commanding officer.

  On the other side of the battlefield, the troops were being led by men a generation younger than the Zairian generals.

  On the face of it, the Rwandan-led invasion was an amalgam of different nationalities, chains of command, and military cultures. There were Ugandan artillery units, Eritrean speedboats, Tanzanian military advisors, and Congolese soldiers. When it came down to it, however, the people calling the shots were Rwandans, at least for the first half of the war. The thirty-three-year-old in charge of operations on the ground was Colonel James Kabarebe, the former commander of Kagame’s guard.

  Kabarebe’s reputation is legendary in the region, to the extent where people only refer to him by his first name, “James” or “Jamesi.” Just a second lieutenant when the RPF invaded the north of Rwanda in 1990, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel by the time they captured Kigali in 1994.18 According to Congolese officers who worked with him, he led by example, often eating with his officers and going to the front line to lead offensives. In tactical meetings, he would typically defer to his colleagues for their opinions, and he was thus able to cultivate a loyal following among young Congolese army officers.