Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  If Kabila had given way to demands for multiparty democracy and elections immediately, he would have most likely lost power. Indeed, an independent opinion poll in June 1997 indicated that 62 percent of the capital’s population supported opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, while only 14 percent favored Kabila.17

  Moreover, the new leaders were mostly inexperienced. Following Mobutu’s demise, hundreds of top officials in government agencies and ministries were sacked or fled into exile. “It was like what the Americans did with the Baath Party in Iraq,” one official in the Ministry of Mines told me. “From one day to the next, everybody was gone.”18

  The government did not have the time or the means to conduct a serious job search for all the new officials it needed. This led to ad hoc, hasty decisions. When Jean-Claude Masangu, the director of Citibank in Kinshasa, visited the new minister of finance to introduce himself, the minister sized him up: “Aren’t you Congolese? Are you looking for a job? We need people like you!” Several weeks later, Masangu was appointed governor of the Central Bank (it didn’t hurt that his father had been a childhood friend of Kabila’s).19

  To Kabila’s credit, the first ministerial cabinet included several respected members of the opposition: Justine Kasavubu, a former Tshisekedi activist and daughter of the country’s first president, became the head of civil service. Two prominent doctors and Mobutu opponents, Jean Kinkela and Jean-Baptiste Sondji, were named as ministers of telecommunications and health, respectively.

  The most important portfolios, however, went to unseasoned members of the diaspora. Mwenze Kongolo, a bail officer from Philadelphia, became interior minister, and Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, an agronomist from the University of Kentucky, was named minister of finance. A few appointees didn’t even know Kinshasa and had to hire drivers or guides to show them around the capital, as they had just returned from decades of exile.

  Two of the new ministers had had run-ins with the law abroad. Thomas Kanza, who was in charge of regional cooperation and aid, was unable to deal with the U.S. government because he was wanted in Tennessee for fleeing a $300,000 fine for fraud. Celestin Lwangy’s nomination for justice minister elicited some chuckles in the Belgian press, as he had served eight months in prison in Belgium for illegally hooking up his electricity supply to the power grid.

  It was no surprise that this motley group had trouble carrying out the necessary reforms. Nonetheless, with the arrival of the AFDL, the Congolese did get their first taste of democracy. In towns across the country, mayors and governors were initially elected by popular vote. Kabila, never one for lengthy proceedings, made short shrift of ballots and simply told people to gather together in the town square or marketplace. He would then parade a number of candidates in front of the crowd and ask them to raise their hands if they were in favor. The man—almost no women stood for election—for whom the highest number of hands were raised was immediately proclaimed winner. Despite its improvised nature, this process produced some decent results. Several well-respected university lecturers were elected by popular acclamation. This experiment, however, was brought to a hasty end when Kabila realized that many of the leaders that the population wanted to elect, especially in the center and the west of the country, belonged to Tshisekedi’s party.

  Other initiatives were also aborted when Kabila feared that opponents of the regime could hijack them. Soon after the AFDL took power, the new minister for reconstruction announced that national and provincial conferences on reconstruction would be held so local leaders could propose development priorities. The participants, however, saw this as an opportunity to talk about much more than just development. They began condemning their new government for “misguided behavior” and “cooperation agreements with foreign armies,” and they demanded the opening of political space.20 Kabila soon suspended the whole initiative and adopted a more top-down approach toward development.

  “During that first year we started a dozen projects and finished almost none,” Didier Mumengi, the former information minister, told me. “Kabila was surrounded by people with no experience. We didn’t have any money. And the Rwandans were still there, looking over his shoulder.” Mumengi shook his head. “Kabila was a man who needed to be helped. But he wasn’t.” On one occasion, the president decided he wanted to create a “canteen for the people,” where the poor could come and eat. Mumengi said he tried to dissuade him, saying that it would not be feasible, but the president insisted. “The people are hungry! They have a right to eat,” he told them.21 “The amount of money we wasted on bags of corn and beans!” Mumengi remembered. “That was misguided socialism.”

  Lastly, we have to understand the time warp that Kabila was in. For decades, he had set his compass to the cold war divide, preaching against the neocolonial domination of Africa by the United States. To people who met him in the early days of his presidency, it was as if the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union had passed him by; he gave the impression of a revolutionary fossilized in the 1960s. He had come of age during the anti-western socialist rebellions that swept through Africa just after independence. The writings of Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tsetung, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon lined his bookshelf; after he took power he continued to call his associates “comrade” (although, apparently none of them was allowed to reciprocate).22

  To make matters worse, Kabila was saddled with questions about the massacre of Rwandan refugees. According to his advisors, he initially thought this, too, was an American conspiracy to smear his revolutionary government. Only later did he come to realize that RPF troops had carried out systematic killings.23

  In all his early interactions with western diplomats as head of state, the refugee crisis dominated discussions. Immediately after he was sworn in, all contacts with the Congo’s traditional donors—Belgium, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—focused on the alleged massacres. The day of his inauguration, the UN Security Council issued a statement calling for “an immediate end to the violence against refugees in the country” and demanded full access for the UN human rights teams.24 President Bill Clinton dispatched UN Ambassador Bill Richardson to meet with Kabila several days later. He obtained yet another promise to allow the UN investigators into the country, but Kabila turned around several days later and dismissed the initiative as a “Frenchinspired smear campaign.”25

  The first UN report on the massacres was published in January 1997 in the midst of the rebellion and prompted Kabila to block any further investigations. Kabila eventually accepted the deployment of another team, but this time demanded that they be accompanied by Congolese officials, whose trip expenses would be $1.7 million per day, higher than the working costs of any government ministry.26 When the team finally deployed to the field in early 1998, they were met on several occasions by “spontaneous” mobs of locals armed with machetes and spears. The United Nations finally abandoned its efforts in April 1998.

  The refugee question helped snuff out any chance for rebuilding the country. Donors didn’t want to give the new government the wrong message and made funds conditional upon a serious investigation. This attitude contributed to a vicious circle. Kabila defaulted on his promises of human rights and governance, prompting aid to be cut, which led to a further radicalization of the regime. When the World Bank convened a donors’ meeting in Brussels in December 1997, Kabila asked for $575 million to help rebuild the country but received a mere $32 million. Eritrean president Isaias Afeworki visited Washington around the same time and urged the United States not to give up on Kabila, warning that it could be disastrous, that Kabila needed to be helped. “Kabila stinks,” he told U.S. officials, “but you have to just hold your nose and engage.”27 They didn’t.

  To add insult to injury, the World Bank informed the new government that they owed $14 billion in debts that Mobutu had accumulated over the years, debts on which interest would have to be paid each year. For the new government, it was the height of hypocrisy that they would have to pay back m
oney that had served largely to enrich Mobutu’s cronies and destroy the country.

  Kabila, feeling let down, lambasted the “embargo” western countries had imposed on the Congo. With little money in his coffers and a collapsed economy, Kabila had to rely on donations from his allies, including $10 million a month from Zimbabwe, and on the strength of diamond exports, the main source of Congo’s foreign currency.28

  Like a car driven by a learner not yet used to a clutch, the government lurched clumsily from one policy initiative to another. One thing was sure, however. For a man who was initially perceived as a puppet of foreign interests, Kabila left no doubt that he was in charge. During his first year in power, he had no fewer than seven ministers arrested, as well as the self-styled commander in chief of the army, two directors of his intelligence agency, and the governor and vice governor of the Central Bank. He used justice as a tool of disciplining his associates at his discretion, not as a means of enforcing the law. There were rarely any trials or verdicts, and the arrests were usually short-lived. It is possible that the accusations against the accused were well-founded, as reports of embezzlement plagued Kabila’s various administrations. He himself was known to say that the AFDL was a “conglomerate of crooks.” In the end, however, he realized that loyalty was more important than integrity, and he used the arrests as a means of reminding his subordinates of his power, not to impose accountability.

  Kabila’s idiosyncratic style extended to his personalized management of state funds. He was known to keep large stashes of money at his residence, where he would dole out stacks of bills to visitors. In early 1998, when the government tried to contract a Swedish company to print the Congolese franc as the new currency, the minister of finance complained they didn’t have the funds. Kabila told him not to worry—he would get the money at home. When he came back, he brought more than $1 million in cash with him to cover the expenses.29 Similarly, when his assistants brought to his attention that Congolese students in the diaspora were running out of stipends to pay their tuition, he took $1 million out of his safe to foot the bill. “He didn’t keep records and didn’t ask for invoices or receipts,” remembered Moise Nyarugabo, his personal assistant at the time. “It was a disaster.”

  Kabila had a disdain for institutions intended to oversee the executive and hold him in check. For over two years after he took power, there was no Parliament or official budget, no means by which to hold the government accountable for its actions. “The means by which money left the Central Bank and went to pay for state projects or for salaries was an utter mystery to us,” remembered Mabi Mulumba, the auditor general.30 According to some former AFDL officials, up to half of the country’s funds were managed directly by Kabila.31

  Perhaps the funniest, albeit not most reliable, story about Kabila’s personal banking system comes from Deo Bugera, the head of his political party who defected to join a new rebellion against Kabila in 1998. Like so many of the apocryphal stories surrounding Kabila, it is worth retelling, in part because it could well be true, but also because it was part of the constantly growing and increasingly surreal mythology about the new regime.

  According to Bugera, a delegation of military officials from various southern African countries was visiting Kinshasa to see how the formation of the new army was proceeding. Many countries had invested in this project by sending officers to help train the new recruits and integrate Congo’s fractured militias. During a long meeting with Kabila, a Tanzanian commander excused himself, saying he had to use the toilet. Kabila looked around sheepishly and finally ordered a bodyguard to find the key for the toilet. The bodyguard ran about, but was unable to come up with the key. Finally, the Tanzanian was taken to a toilet in another building much further away. After their meeting was finished, Kabila reprimanded his bodyguard with a laugh, fishing a key out of his pocket: “You idiot! I had the key the whole time! All my money is stored in that toilet—I couldn’t let him in there!”

  After six months in power, by the end of 1997, Kabila was becoming increasingly worried for his life. Nothing seemed to be working—his quixotic plans for the country were stymied by disorganization around him and his own erratic behavior. The coffers of the state were empty, and donors were reluctant to give money to the regime. At the same time, the Rwandan military had permeated the security services in Kinshasa. A Rwandan, Captain David, was Kabila’s main bodyguard and accompanied him everywhere—he held his glasses, his notebook, and his pen for him. He stood in front of his door when Mzee slept. He rode in the front seat of the presidential car. Another Rwandan, Captain Francis Gakwerere, was the commander of the presidential guard. Rumors of coup attempts filtered through to Kabila regularly, fueling his paranoia.

  The population was also becoming increasingly discontent with the Rwandan presence in the city. Kabila’s AFDL soldiers, most of whom were from conservative, rural backgrounds, cracked down on what they saw as lewd and disrespectful behavior, arresting women for wearing tight dresses and pulling people out of taxis if they exceeded the legal passenger limit. Everywhere child soldiers could be seen caning people splayed out on the asphalt for minor violations. It was as if they were trying to beat propriety into Kinshasa’s inhabitants.

  The situation was volatile; Kabila’s paranoia became a self-fulfilling prophecy. By early 1998, diplomats and government officials in Luanda, Kinshasa, Kigali, and Kampala were already fueling rumors about Kabila’s imminent demise and wondering who would replace him. Tired of his whimsies and monopolization of power, former allies began plotting against him.

  Moise Nyarugabo, a Tutsi from South Kivu who had been his personal assistant, was one of many Tutsi to fall out with Mzee soon after they arrived in Kinshasa. One morning shortly after his inauguration, Kabila called Nyarugabo into his office, where he was preparing a list of people for his first cabinet. According to him, Kabila told him without preamble:

  “Look, I can’t make you minister, as that would be two Tutsi in my cabinet. I’m very sorry. You can leave now.” Two weeks later, Nyarugabo found out through friends that he had been named as the deputy director of a government body charged with expropriating state goods that had been stolen by Mobutists.

  “We had been together the whole day and he hadn’t had the guts to tell me! That day, I decided to fight him.”

  Nyarugabo stormed into Kabila’s office. “Look, Excellency, if I bother you because I am Tutsi, I can leave you—it’s not a problem. But why did you name all of these people to your cabinet who were not with us when we were being attacked? I hid with you under tables when Mobutu was bombing us! I was loyal to you!”

  By November 1997, just six months after Kabila took power, Nyarugabo and other Tutsi were reaching out to Mobutu’s ousted generals and former ministers in Brazzaville and Europe. It wasn’t difficult to find people opposed to Kabila and willing to fund a new uprising. In the end, Laurent Kabila would only preside over a peaceful country for fifteen months, from May 1997 to August 1998, before another war would break out in the east of the country.

  “It was obvious by then that Kabila had to go,” Nyarugabo said. “I talked to several people, including Bugera. The easiest option would have been a coup d’état. But—believe it or not—at that point Rwanda didn’t want to do that. It would have been easy! But for some reason, they didn’t want to go that far. Not yet.”32

  PART III

  THE SECOND WAR

  13

  ONE WAR TOO MANY

  No matter how hard you throw a dead fish in the water, it still won’t swim.

  —CONGOLESE SAYING

  RUHENGERI, RWANDA, AND KINSHASA, CONGO, AUGUST 1998

  The war to topple Mobutu had created serious security problems back in Rwanda. The Rwandan army’s attack on the refugee camps caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to stream back into their country. The authorities there knew that this influx would create trouble, as their enemies would seize the opportunity to infiltrate. “We had a discussion about what to do with them,”
Vice President Kagame explained. “We think that it is better for them to come and we fight them here, [where] we can contain them. And you don’t get problems with the international community for fighting them outside your country.”1 Between 10,000 and 15,000 enemy soldiers entered into northwestern Rwanda in the months following the invasion.2

  These insurgents sparked the worst fighting the country had seen since the genocide. By the end of 1997, the northwest region was in upheaval, suffering dozens of insurgent attacks each month against government installations. The insurgents also targeted government officials and sympathizers in an effort to intimidate the population into supporting them.

  The infiltrators, however, were militarily weak and didn’t try to engage in conventional battles with the government. Instead, they adopted terror tactics, killing hundreds of Tutsi, especially Congolese refugees who were easy targets in makeshift refugee camps close to the Congolese border. Between January 1997 and August 1998, thousands of civilians were killed by both the Rwandan army and the insurgents as the tactics of insurgency and counterinsurgency became increasingly bloody.

  General Paul Rwarakabije himself had infiltrated across the Rwandan border in July 1997 and become the operational commander of the insurgency, based around the town of Nyamutera. “Our headquarters was mobile,” he explained. “We never spent too long in one place, but moved around, sleeping in the huts of local sympathizers .”3 The insurgents held meetings in local schools at night and brought their office along, transporting official letterhead, stamps, and maps with them. They avoided using walkie-talkies for fear of being detected or overheard. Instead, Rwarakabije and his comrades relied heavily on locals, sending letters with operational orders via local farmers or market women, who then passed them on to other sympathizers.