The insurgents were initially popular among some locals in northwestern Rwanda. This was the heartland of President Habyarimana’s regime, from where he and many in his government came. The insurgents sometimes referred to themselves as les fils du vieux—the sons of the old man (Habyarimana). Many of the villagers there were returnees from the camps in Zaire and still harbored deep resentment against the RPF for overthrowing “their” government and for the massacres carried out in the refugee camps. They articulated their grievances in messianic terms—evangelism had found fertile ground in the camps, and preachers had been touting their people’s return to the promised land. The commanders gave two of their operational sectors the code names “Nazareth” and “Bethlehem.”4
Thus the Rwandan civil war started up again, after a hiatus of three years. The same commanders faced off again on the battlefield, only this time Kagame’s troops were in power in Kigali, and Habyarimana’s former army was hiding in banana groves and eucalyptus woods. The Tutsi-led Rwandan government, intimately familiar with the dangers of such an insurgency, having come to power on the back of one themselves, responded with overwhelming force. They deployed thousands of troops to the region and began ruthless counterinsurgency operations. Their first priority was to convince the population that they would suffer more if they collaborated with their enemy than if they didn’t. According to human rights reports, they cordoned off areas, rounded up peasants suspected to be in connivance with the rebels, and then beat and shot many of them. Some of their victims were probably working with the rebels; many others were not.5
In early 1998, Rwarakabije noticed a strange development. Soldiers in his ranks were quietly defecting and going to a Congolese army training camp in Rumangabo, just across the border from where he was operating. At the same time, Congolese officers based in the eastern Congo were baffled by instructions that were coming from Kabila’s army headquarters in Kinshasa. “The Rwandan commanders who were based with us were busy day and night fighting the ex-FAR and Interahamwe,” a senior Congolese intelligence officer recalled, “but at the same time, Kabila sent a delegation in June 1998 to instruct us to send all the ex-FAR prisoners we had to a military base in the south of the country. We heard from our friends there that these ex-FAR were being freed and trained in the Congolese army. We were floored!”6
President Kabila had made his move. In his mind, if he waited too long, the Rwandans and Congolese Tutsi would remove him from power. In the early months of 1998, Kabila’s army was a loose pastiche of kadogo, Katangan Tigers, and new recruits. The Angolans, Ugandans, and Rwandans, who had been the backbone of his rebellion, had mostly returned to their countries. He needed his own force, and in desperation he drew on the largest, most determined mercenary troops available in the region: the ex-FAR, Habyarimana’s former army, which his AFDL rebellion had sought to defeat. It was a deal with the devil, one that precipitated Rwanda’s new invasion.
Malik Kijege, the highest-ranking Congolese Tutsi in the Kinshasa garrison, was in a foul mood. In July 1998, Laurent Kabila sacked Colonel James Kabarebe, the Rwandan officer who had been commander of the Congolese army, and asked all Rwandan troops to leave the country. The departure of the Rwandans left the army without a real leader at a moment when hostility against Tutsi in Kinshasa was mounting and tensions between Kinshasa and Kigali were escalating. General Celestin Kifwa, the new commander, was over sixty years old and incompetent. They called him a fetisheur, a witch doctor, as it was rumored that he believed in magic potions and in consulting the ancestors to make decisions. When he arrived to take over his office from his Rwandan predecessor, he allegedly brought a goat with him that he proceeded to slaughter so as to chase away the evil spirits. He had hardly been seen in public since his nomination. For Malik Kijege, this was probably a good thing. One of Kifwa’s bodyguards had shot a Tutsi soldier dead the day before during an argument. The less he got to see of Kifwa, the better.
Anti-Tutsi sentiment was quickly spreading through Kinshasa, whipped up by Kabila’s politicians but also fed by the beatings and humiliations that residents of the capital had endured at the hands of the Rwandans. Congolese police and soldiers evicted dozens of Rwandan soldiers from apartments in downtown Kinshasa, took them to the airport, and put them on planes for Kigali. The enthusiasm of these Congolese security forces quickly boiled over; they began harassing and attacking Tutsi civilians and Congolese soldiers, prompting the justice minister to appear on national television, instructing soldiers not to bother Tutsi civilians.
Malik Kijege was well acquainted with the kind of mob violence that anti-Tutsi sentiment could provoke. During a similar frenzy in 1996, soldiers had shot and killed his aunt in the street in Bukavu. “ Every time there is trouble, you can expect the crazies to take it out on us,” he recalled.7 At home, he still kept a copy of a tape distributed by ex-FAR demagogues in the refugee camps, exhorting Bantu people to rise up and chase the Tutsi down the Nile River back to Ethiopia, where they claimed the Tutsi came from.
Malik began to reach out to other Tutsi soldiers, who were dispersed throughout Kinshasa’s various military camps. In case of trouble, he thought, it would be smart for them to assemble in one place to find safety in numbers. “When the Rwandans left, we stayed behind,” he said. “We thought we were Congolese, not Rwandan. We had fought the war so as to defend our citizenship. We weren’t about to be forced onto a plane to go to Kigali.”
One evening shortly after the departure of Rwandan troops, General Yav Nawej, the newly appointed commander of Kinshasa, telephoned after he heard that Kijege was assembling Tutsi soldiers. “Malik! Where are you?” He barked at him.
“I’m at home.”
“Get your weapons. I am coming to disarm you to take to you to Makala [the central prison]. Don’t ask me why—that’s an order!”
“General, I came here with my weapon, and I am going to leave with it.”
“That’s a mutiny!”
“I have a right to self-defense, General.”
“Get ready then. I am coming.”8
Shortly afterwards, Malik received another phone call from General Jean-Claude Mabila, another commander leading military operations in the capital. He threatened that he would come and disarm Malik with a tank. That made Malik laugh: “How do you disarm a couple of soldiers with a tank?”
Malik was worried that the lack of a clear chain of command would allow soldiers to take the law into their own hands and begin attacking Tutsi soldiers in the capital. Congolese troops had chafed under the command of Rwandans, who together with Congolese Tutsi had formed an elite clique within the AFDL. They were itching for a chance to get back at the Tutsi.
According to Malik, he called Joseph Kabila, the president’s son, who was in China undergoing military training. The young army officer, just twenty-seven at the time, reassured Malik that he knew there were problems in the government. He sounded worried. “ I’ ll be back in three days,” he promised him.
“Three days is too long,” Malik answered.
By August 2, Malik had been able to assemble 586 Tutsi soldiers in an improvised battalion at Camp Tshatshi, a large military camp in Kinshasa. “I knew exactly how many they were; I counted them.” His foul mood began to lift. In front of him, on the parade grounds, he inspected the troops. They stood at attention in lines of twenty, their hands flat by their sides. Some didn’t have boots; others didn’t have whole uniforms. They were mostly young Tutsi recruits who had joined in 1996: students, peasants, and cowherds who had joined to fight for their community and to find adventure. Most of them had ended up walking across the country, fighting Mobutu’s troops, ex-FAR, and Serbian mercenaries from town to town.
“They were inexperienced, but the morale was high,” Malik remembered. “ We had a key advantage: We were united; we were fighting for our survival. The others were just bandits.”
That night the fighting started, heralding the beginning of the second congo war.
Didier Mumengi wa
s awakened at 4 o’clock in the morning on August 3 by heavy shooting.9 He lay awake for a while with a sinking feeling in his stomach as he listened to the call-and-response of a booming mortar and staccato machine gun fire. It was only a year since he had returned to the country after several decades living in Brussels, where he had spent most of his life studying, writing, and moving in the circles of the Congolese political opposition. A month before, the thirty-six-year-old had been appointed information minister by Laurent Kabila.
At 4:30 his clunky Telecel phone rang. The Congo was one of the first countries in Africa to have a mobile phone network, as a result of the absence of working landlines. Anybody of importance in the capital had a Telecel phone, a device the size of a milk carton with a rubber antenna attached to it. There were so few numbers that their owners could write all the important ones on the back of an envelope or memorize them. “Didier!” Kabila’s baritone rang out.
“Yes, Excellency.”
“We are under attack. You have to go to the Voice of the People [the national radio station] and talk to the country. It’s important to calm people down. Tell them we have the situation under control.”
“Yes, Excellency. Who is attacking us?”
The president paused. “Just tell them inciviques—bandits.”
Mumengi quickly got dressed and jumped in his official car. On his way to the radio station, he had to double back several times and take side roads to avoid cannon fire. His mind was racing as he tried to think of what he would tell the country; he had no idea what was going on. Who exactly was attacking? Was this linked to the president’s eviction of the Rwandan contingent several days before?
At 5:30 he finally reached the radio station, a nineteen-story, decrepit building surrounded by an asphalt network of major thoroughfares. He raced in the back door and up the stairs to the radio studio. All the soldiers who had been posted there had fled, knowing that the building was a prime target for any mutineers. (The first move in a military putsch is usually to seize the radio and television stations in order to control popular sentiment and encourage desertions.) The place was deserted. The usual smell of sewage wafted up through the cement stairwell, lit by flickering neon lights. He heard a noise from the broadcasting room: The journalists on night shift had barricaded themselves in there when the fighting had started. A man with shaky hands opened the door when Mumengi told them who he was. One of the journalists had died of heart failure; the others were visibly distressed.
Mumengi told them to hold on as he rushed down the stairs again and across the street to the Kokolo military camp, the largest barracks in Kinshasa. The sun was just coming up, and other than a few dogs and some laundry flapping in the breeze, there was no movement among the rows of cement houses. Mumengi finally found one desolate old man, who didn’t recognize him and wasn’t able to tell him who was in charge. “The place had completely fallen apart!” Mumengi remembered. “Most soldiers had moved out and rented their houses to civilians, who were cowering under their beds! Part of the parade grounds had been turned into cassava fields!”
Finally, Mumengi reached by phone a cousin who was a general in the army. He promised to come as soon as possible with reinforcements. Mumengi rushed back to the radio studio to address the nation. For Mumengi, who was known for his flowery speeches, it was one of his less inspired performances: “Citizens, patriots. Do not leave your houses, and stay calm. Inciviques are troubling public order. I assure you that the army has full control of the situation and will reestablish order soon.” Then he had the technicians play some mellow music.
He had lied. The army didn’t control anything. As Mumengi left the radio building with his cousin and hurried to the presidential palace, they saw the streets were deserted. Mortar and machine gun fire was passing overhead without any obvious target. His cousin, the army general, shook his head:“It’s a mess. A complete mess.”
Kabila received Mumengi at the heliport behind his presidential palace. He was wearing a dark safari suit and flip-flops and holding a walkie-talkie. Grinning, he sat Mumengi down in the middle of the concrete landing pad.
“Didier,” he said, “first, don’t worry. We’ll survive. We will live through this.” Instead of comforting him, the president’s words had the opposite effect. He thought his boss had lost it. The presidential palace was only several hundred yards from the Tshatshi military camp where Malik had dug himself in. The heavy artillery fire was deafening. As they spoke, Mumengi could hear bullets whistle overhead.
Given the circumstances, Kabila was curiously jovial. “Look, my son,” he started. Mumengi’s father had been involved in the rebellion of the 1960s and had known Laurent Kabila. Over the past few months, Mumengi had grown close to the president, who would often call him to discuss policy. To people around Kabila, he was known as l’enfant cheri of Mzee. “Our Rwandan friends have always dominated us. It was like this under Mobutu—they pushed him to undergo Zairianization, which they benefited from! They asked him to sign a decree that made all immigrants into citizens. Is that normal? The Tutsi in the east had everything, while the Congolese were stuck with nothing.”
The firefight crescendoed around them. Mumengi suggested they go inside the thick cement walls of his residence, but Kabila refused, saying that his presence outside would reassure his soldiers, the dozens of young men manning the parapets of his palace in green fatigues. He took his walkie-talkie and called one of his commanders, “General Mabila! Why are you firing the cannon? It’s not with artillery that you will get them! Attack on foot!”
He looked back at Mumengi, who was shaken by the fighting surrounding them. “You know, Japan dominated China. That is normal. But I will not let our great country be dominated by its tiny neighbor. Can a toad swallow an elephant? No!”
Kabila instructed Mumengi to go back to the radio and speak to the people, to motivate them. “We will survive with the force of the people—you have to rally them behind us. We don’t have an army, so we will need them. In the meantime, I will go look for allies.” He called one of his bodyguards and asked for his pistol. “Do you have a gun?” Mumengi had never used a gun before. “Here. You must use this. From today on, you will be the minister of war!”
Meanwhile, the Rwandans had taken control of much of the eastern Congo in a matter of hours. While Colonel Kabarebe had been commander of the Congolese army, he had prepositioned units loyal to him with stockpiles of weapons in the eastern Congo. When he was sacked, he gave orders to these units to rebel against Kabila. With support of Rwandan troops who crossed the border, they took control of Goma and Bukavu and began advancing on Kisangani.
Hubris can breed fantastic courage. After taking the border towns, Colonel Kabarebe decided to go straight for the jugular by leapfrogging Kabila’s ramshackle army and attacking the capital, 1,000 miles away. It was one of the most daring operations in the region’s military history.
The “Kitona airlift” is still talked about by foreign military attachés and Congolese army commanders alike. A U.S. officer based in the region later wrote in a military journal:“This was an operation that exemplified audacity and courage, and its aftermath became an odyssey fit for a Hollywood script.”10
Kabarebe commandeered a Boeing 707 at the Goma airport and loaded one hundred and eighty Rwandan, Ugandan, and Congolese soldiers on board with weapons and ammunition. “Everybody wanted to get a piece of the action,” remembered a senior Congolese military officer who participated. “Mobutu’s former soldiers were outraged at their humiliation by Kabila, and the Tutsi wanted to get back at the government for the treatment of their relatives in Kinshasa.”11 Soldiers deserted from their units around Goma and showed up at the airport once they got word of the operation. Kabarebe put a brash Rwandan commander called Butera in charge of the first plane to leave.
It could have indeed been a scene from a movie: With Butera brandishing his pistol behind him, the distraught pilot flew 1,000 miles across the country, over the capital to the Kitona mi
litary base, 250 miles west of Kinshasa on the mouth of the Congo River.12 Most of the soldiers on the flight had no idea that the commander of the Kitona base had secretly defected to the Rwandan side—they expected to land in a hail of bullets. A hundred and eighty soldiers nervously gripped their AK-47s and looked warily at the flight safety cards in their seat pockets. In the back of the aisle, stacked to the roof, were dozens of wooden crates of ammunition. The soldiers spoke Luganda, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, English, and French with each other. Outside the window, they broke through the thick cloud cover to see the rolling hills of Bas-Congo province and the Congo River snaking placidly toward the Atlantic ocean. After a three-hour flight, the long landing strip of Kitona airbase came into view.
Despite the pistol-waving Rwandan behind him, the pilot began to complain that they would be killed if they landed at the heavily fortified airbase. “Don’t worry,” Butera said. “We have our people at the airport.” Using the pilot’s high-frequency radio, he programmed a frequency he said belonged to their commander on the ground. A surprisingly clear voice responded to his call in calm English: “All clear, afande. You can land.” What the pilot did not know was that the radio Butera was calling actually belonged to his deputy commander, who was lounging in a seat at the back of the plane.13
When Kabarebe had been chief of staff of the Congolese army, he had studied old Belgian military maps of the region closely. Kitona was an obvious choice for several reasons. Kinshasa was connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a narrow land corridor. Almost all cargo going to Kinshasa had to pass through this umbilical cord, at the head of which sat Kitona. The military base also had a long airstrip that could accommodate aircraft weighing up to fifty-four tons. Its barracks now housed thousands of former Mobutu soldiers who had been sent there for reeducation. Their living conditions were terrible—hundreds had died from cholera and malnutrition—and, despite their notorious disciplinary problems, they would need little convincing to join in the fight against Kabila. Lastly, Kitona was close to the Inga Dam, the largest hydroelectric dam in central Africa, which supplied the capital with most of its electricity.
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