The only road of escape was toward Kisangani, Zaire’s third largest town at the bend in the Congo River, more than three hundred miles to the northwest. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees were on the move now through the forests of the eastern Congo, accompanied by tens of thousands of scared Congolese. First, they had to climb the hills of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, in more peaceful times famous for its lowland gorillas and highland elephants. On the narrow footpaths, Beatrice ran into a traffic jam of people. It was the beginning of the rainy season, and every evening heavy rains would gush down over them, turning the soil into a muddy, slippery torrent. Tens of thousands of people filled the forest; at times, Beatrice had to stand on the path and wait for the single-file line to start moving again. The humid, cool air under the canopy echoed with the sound of thousands of tired feet slapping through the mud.
Not only was this one of the longest mass treks in modern history, but it was also one of the most outlandish. The refugees walked through some of the densest rain forest on the planet, under layered canopies two hundred feet high. Beatrice walked for days without seeing direct sunlight. Elsewhere, they had to ford deep rivers or cut new paths through the forest. Wasps laid larvae under their skin, long leeches plastered their bodies after they passed through streams, and several of Beatrice’s companions were killed by snakes. Once in the middle of the night, Beatrice was awakened by screams when her group was attacked by millions of driver ants. They tried, with some success, to use fire to chase the ants away, but eventually they had to move.
The basic need to survive overcame the many taboos inherent in Rwandan society. Forced to eat raw roots and leaves, Beatrice developed sores in her mouth and a bad case of diarrhea. First, she tried to hide herself behind bushes to ease her discomfort, but eventually, when she no longer had the strength, she would just squat down next to the path and look the other way as others plodded by. Lacking soap, she began to stink, and fleas and lice infested her clothes. Rwandan women, who are known for their modesty, were forced to bathe topless next to men in rivers.
Death surrounded them. Chronic diseases, such as diarrhea, malaria, and typhoid, were the biggest killers. Others died of diabetes or asthma, having run out of medicine to treat their chronic illnesses. The smell of rotting bodies filled the air. “In this race against the clock, if anyone fell, it was rare to see someone reach out a hand to help her or him. If, by chance, they were not trampled, they were left lying by the side of the road.”6 Beatrice saw flurries of white and blue butterflies alight on fresh corpses, feeding off their salt and moisture. Further on, she saw a woman who had just given birth forced to bite through her own umbilical cord and continue walking. In one town, locals by the side of the road held up a malnourished baby they had found lying by the side of the road after her mother died and her father was unable to feed her. People passed by in silence, unwilling to take on another burden.
After two hundred and fifty miles and five weeks of walking, Beatrice reached Tingi-Tingi, “the camp of death,” as she calls it. Mobutu’s soldiers had blocked their advance westward, saying the refugees’ arrival would help the rebels infiltrate. Too weak to fight the soldiers, the refugees settled down and prayed for help to arrive.
The name for the town meant “swamp,” and it lived up to its name; mosquitoes and dirty groundwater plagued the refugees. Beatrice had lost over thirty pounds by the time she arrived there; her skin was leathery and stiff, her muscles were sore, and she was so hungry that the sight of food made her salivate. To the refugees’ dismay, no humanitarian organization was there to help them; there were few latrines and no clean water. A dysentery epidemic broke out shortly after their arrival, followed by cholera. Soon, aid workers did arrive, but they were overwhelmed by the needs of 80,000 people. Every day, bodies, partially covered by white sheets, would be carried away on stretchers. The refugees looked as if they had aged twenty years—their eyes sunk deep into their skulls, skin hanging loosely from their bodies, and their feet swollen from malnutrition and hundreds of miles of walking. Children, in particular, were affected by the lack of vitamins and protein: Their hair thinned and turned beige or blond. Beatrice described women suffering from dysentery as “old fleshless grandmothers even though they weren’t even thirty.... They had lost all their womanly attributes.... We only knew they were women because they looked after the children.” Beatrice joked with her newly acquired family that they should take a good look at her feet and toenails so they could recognize her when she was carted away in a shroud, her feet protruding.
During the two months Beatrice spent there, aid workers registered 1,800 deaths, about half of them children.7
A decade later the town where the camp was located is still not easy to reach. I had to fly into Kisangani, a hundred and fifty miles away, and rent a motorcycle. In some places the road was completely overgrown by the surrounding forest. Here and there deep, muddy pits had replaced the asphalt for several hundred feet. About twenty miles before Tingi-Tingi, the wrecks of armored cars belonging to Mobutu’s fleeing army sat abandoned on their naked axels, rusting on the side of the road, their heavy-caliber machine guns pointing into the rainforest.
An old yellow highway sign reading “Tingi-Tingi” was still standing by the side of the road, a reminder of when truckers could travel from Kisangani to Bukavu in two days. Now it takes two weeks if the truck doesn’t break down. A rickety vehicle I saw there had taken a whole month to reach Tingi-Tingi from Bukavu, two hundred fifty miles distant. In the town itself, the tarmac was in good shape, and villagers showed me the stretch of road around which the refugees had built their camp, boasting that airplanes had used it as a landing strip to supply the refugees with food and medicine.
The whole village remembered the two months the refugees had spent there in 1996. It had become a reference point—“he got married two years after the refugees left,” or “I bought my house before the refugees came.” When asked how many refugees were there, some villagers said, “a million”; others, “it was a city of Rwandans.” Now Tingi-Tingi has reverted to being a village of several dozen huts scattered through undergrowth on either side of the road. Locals live by farming cassava and beans, supplementing their diet by hunting monkeys and small antelope in the nearby forest.
The local traditional chief was not there, so the villagers took me to the Pentecostal minister, a fifty-one-year-old named Kapala Lubangula. He was wearing plastic flip-flops, pleated dress pants, and a plain cotton shirt. When I told him I wanted to talk to him about the refugees, he nodded grimly and called a group of four other elderly men from his church. It was dangerous speaking to a foreigner alone in your house; people could accuse you of anything afterwards. We sat on rickety wooden chairs in a small mud house with a low ceiling. Despite the stewing heat, he insisted on sitting inside; he didn’t want people to see us talking.
“Why do people always talk about the refugees?” He blurted out almost immediately, to my surprise. “The local population also suffered! Imagine 100,000 people arrive in this small town. They ate everything we had. Their soldiers raped our women and shot dead our traditional chief. Nobody talks about us!” The other men nodded.
The elders described successive waves of soldiers and refugees intruding on their small village. First, a wave of fleeing soldiers had come to town—Mobutu’s soldiers mixed with ex-FAR. They had terrorized the local population, taxing people going to the market, breaking into their houses, and stealing their livestock. Then the refugees arrived, “like a band of walking corpses.” They were starving. Instead of talking, they just stared and cupped their hands. They pulled up cassava roots and peanuts from the fields and picked raw mangos from the trees. As dire as their situation was, if the villagers shared the little they had with this horde of foreigners, they knew they would all die of starvation. The men from the church helped organize vigilante groups to guard the village and the fields. They patrolled with machetes and sticks. If they found someone stealing, they would beat him
to death. There were no prisons and no courts. Justice was swift and decisive.
The minister remembered vividly new colleagues who arrived with the refugees. Two Catholic priests as well as Adventist and Pentecostal ministers set up churches made out of UN tarps. Wooden planks set on rocks served as benches. They gave sermons almost every day during which they talked about the genocide. “They said the Tutsi wanted to dominate everything, to take the land away from the Hutu. So when Habyarimana was killed, they sought revenge for his death and killed. They admitted they had killed! What kind of priests were these?”
When the white people’s aid groups came, he said, they only thought about the Rwandans. If a Congolese fell sick, he would be treated last. Reverend Kapala’s voice rose. “First the white people bring the refugees here; then they refuse to help us!” When I reminded them that it had been the civil war in Rwanda that had brought the refugees, not the United Nations, Kapala sucked his teeth. “The international community has all the power. You can’t tell me that the United States, the biggest superpower in the world, could not stop all this if they had wanted to. They didn’t stop it because they didn’t want to.”
Another elder chimed in:“Do you think that Rwanda, this peanut of a country, could defeat the Congo alone? No way.”
For a while, it seemed that Tingi-Tingi had become the capital of the world. Three weeks after the arrival of the first Rwandans, aid groups began arriving with helicopters, large and small planes, and, eventually, convoys of trucks with food. Doctors and logisticians from the United States, India, France, South Africa, and Kenya set up shop in the local hospital and health centers. Emma Bonino, the EU aid commissioner, arrived, as did Sadako Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Agathe Habyarimana, the wife of the former Rwandan president, also visited from her exile at Mobutu’s palace in Gbadolite to deliver bags of cornmeal, rice, and beans. The planes landed in the middle of the camp, sending people scurrying for cover. In one case, a woman, dizzy and disoriented from hunger and thirst, didn’t move out of the way quickly enough and was decapitated by a plane’s propellers.
Laurent Kabila’s improvised army, the AFDL, arrived in Tingi-Tingi on February 28, 1997. Many sick or weak refugees did not manage to flee. Dozens were crushed to death or drowned following a stampede on a nearby bridge. Some 2,000 survived the attacks and were airlifted back to Rwanda by aid organizations.
Others were killed. A worker for the local Red Cross, who, ten years later, was still too afraid to tell me his name, said he had returned several days afterward to find bodies bludgeoned to death in the camp’s tented health centers. Others had fallen, intravenous needles still in their arms, in the forests nearby. A local truck driver, who had been commandeered by the AFDL to help clean up the town after the attack, told me there were dead bodies everywhere, refugees who had been too weak to flee and had then been bayoneted by the soldiers. “They didn’t use bullets on the refugees—they used knives,” he told me. His eyes glazed over as he remembered the image of an infant sucking on his dead mother’s breast, trying in vain to get some sustenance from her cold body. Reverend Kapala, who had fled into the forest for one night and then returned, told me, “They killed any male refugee over the age of twelve. They slit their throats. Not the women or children. Just the men.”
However, when I separately asked the truck driver, the minister, and the Red Cross worker how each had felt about the AFDL, they all quickly responded, “It was a liberation! We were overjoyed.”
I was amazed. I pressed Reverend Kapala: “What about their killing of refugees? How can you call them liberators?”
He shrugged. “That was a Rwandan affair. It didn’t concern us.” He told me the story of a brave local man, who, during a public meeting shortly after the AFDL’s arrival, asked the local commander why they killed so much. “He answered, ‘Show me the Congolese we killed. There are none.’ And it was true. They didn’t kill any Congolese.”
This is one of the paradoxes of the first war. The population was so tired of Mobutu that they were ready to welcome their liberator on whatever terms. The Hutu refugees hadn’t been welcome in the first place; any massacre was their own business. For the local population, this paradox was resolved by separating the rebels into two groups: the aggressive Tutsi killers and the Congolese freedom fighters.
After their flight from Tingi-Tingi, the refugees marched toward Kisangani, only to find their path blocked again by the Zairian army at Ubundu, a small town sixty miles south of Kisangani. After several days, the local commander allowed Beatrice’s group to pass, in return for five hundred dollars. Leaders went around to the thousands of refugees, collecting tattered and soiled banknotes from different currencies until they had the sum. Most of the refugees, however, stayed behind, too tired or afraid to continue.
In the meantime, the AFDL had already conquered Kisangani, the country’s third largest city. Some 85,000 refugees were stuck in the camps along the train line between Ubundu and Kisangani. They knew that if the international community did not come to their rescue, they would be forced to follow Beatrice and the others, crossing the mighty Lualaba River and plunging once again into the inhospitable jungle, where there were no villages or food for dozens of miles.
Humanitarian organizations followed the refugee stream, hopscotching from one camp to the next, packing their bags every time the AFDL approached. They set up shop in various camps around Ubundu in early April, providing elementary health care and nutrition to the despondent refugees. The conditions they found were terrible: In some camps, mortality rates were five times higher than the technical definition of an “out-of-control emergency.”8 Nevertheless, by this time the AFDL soldiers had arrived in the camps and began regulating humanitarian access. Foreign health workers were only allowed into the camps for a few hours during the day.
Finally, on April 20, the AFDL soldiers made their move. Without warning, Rwandan soldiers shut down all humanitarian access to the camps south of Kisangani. When diplomats and aid workers asked, they were told the security situation had suddenly deteriorated. Then, several planeloads of well-equipped Rwandan soldiers arrived at Kisangani’s airport and immediately headed toward the camps. The next day, the Rwandan soldiers attacked them. Congolese workers in the camps reported well-armed soldiers in uniforms participating in the attack, lobbing mortars and grenades into the dense thicket of tents and people during the nighttime attack.9 One nurse working for Doctors Without Borders recalled: “One day, they dropped bombs on the camp; everybody fled, leaving everything behind and scattering in the equatorial forest—there were many dead. The AFDL put the cadavers into mass graves and burnt them.”10 When journalists and humanitarian organizations were allowed back to the camps three days later, they found them ransacked. The thousands of refugees who were there had all disappeared. Doctors Without Borders had been providing medical treatment to 6,250 patients who were too weak even to walk short distances. When they didn’t find any trace of them after one week, they assumed they had died, either violently or from disease and malnutrition.
How many of the Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda during the genocide died in the Congo? From the beginning, the refugee crisis was bogged down in number games. One major problem was the lack of a starting figure: Rwandan officials challenged the United Nations’ figure of 1.1 million refugees in the camps before the invasion, arguing that aid estimates err on the high side so that no one is deprived of food or medicine. The ex-FAR and former government officials in the camps had refused to allow a census, themselves inflating their population in order to receive more aid. Doctors Without Borders’ estimate was 950,000, although Rwandan officials sometimes place it even lower. In the early days of the AFDL invasion, between 400,000 and 650,000 refugees returned to Rwanda, and a further 320,000 refugees were either settled in UN camps or repatriated over the course of 1997, a total of 720,000 to 970,000 refugees. As the starting figure is not clear, this number is not very helpful: Anywhere between zero and 380,000
refugees could still have been missing.11 Also, just because refugees were missing, they weren’t necessarily dead. Some had repatriated spontaneously, without UNHCR help; many others were hiding in the mountains of the eastern Congo, and others had settled with friends and relatives in villages and cities across the region.
It is more fruitful to base estimates on eyewitness accounts. When in July 1997, after eight months of walking, a group of refugees arrived on the other side of the Congo River in neighboring Republic of Congo, Doctors Without Borders conducted a survey of 266 randomly selected people, asking them how many members of their families had survived the trek. The result was disturbing: Only 17.5 percent of people in their families had made it, while 20 percent had been killed and a further 60 percent had disappeared, meaning they had been separated from them at some point in the journey. Over half of those killed were women; it wasn’t just ex-FAR being hunted down. If that survey was representative of the rest of the refugees—the sample size is too small to be wholly reliable—then at least 60,000 refugees had been killed, while the whereabouts of another 180,000 were unknown.
Reports by journalists and human rights groups confirm this magnitude of the killings. Although the AFDL repeatedly denied access to international human rights investigators, making it difficult to confirm many reports issued by churches and civil society groups, there is no doubt that massacres took place. The UN human rights envoy, the Chilean judge Roberto Garreton, received reports from local groups that between 8,000 and 12,000 people were massacred by the AFDL in the eastern Congo, including Congolese Hutu who were accused of complicity with the ex-FAR. In the Chimanga refugee camp forty miles west of Bukavu, eyewitness reports collected by Amnesty International tell of forty AFDL soldiers separating about five hundred men from women and children and murdering them. Close by, a Voice of America reporter found a mass grave containing the remains of a hundred people who, according to villagers, were refugees massacred by the rebels. Rwandan Bibles and identity cards were scattered amid human remains and UN food bags.12 In the Hutu villages I visited north of Goma a decade later, villagers consistently spoke of RPF commanders calling meetings and then tying up and executing dozens of men. They showed me cisterns and latrines with skeletal remains still showing.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 16