Congo (81 page)

The bolt is slid aside. I cross a patch of dry lawn and arrive at a building with turnstiles, where I nod to a few apathetic-looking guards. “Pavilion 1?” I ask as casually as possible, as though it were something I did every week, pay a visit to death row. One of them raises his chin slowly to indicate a door. I find myself in a narrow corridor between two high concrete walls. The realm of the guards ends here, this is where the realm of the criminals begins. The guards haven’t been paid for years, which means they’re on something like permanent strike. They still show up, but they don’t do diddly-squat. They drape themselves listlessly over their plastic lawn chairs and fiddle with their broken walkie-talkies. The warden has therefore farmed out the upholding of intramural discipline to the prisoners themselves—with all that obviously entails. The sky is a blue strip far above. In the corridor, hundreds of eyes stare at me. Raucous noise. No one is wearing a prison uniform. Basketball jerseys. Tank tops. Muscular bodies. Shaven heads. Makala was originally built for fifteen hundred prisoners; today it holds six thousand.

Standing still is a sign of weakness, so I worm my way through a row of young men who ask for, no, who demand, money and cigarettes. A little farther along I arrive at the notorious pavilion. The bright daylight is suddenly cut off. The long, gloomy corridor with cells on both sides is plunged in darkness. A few of the cell doors are open; there is laundry hanging out to dry. Hubbub. Here and there in the darkness I see the faces of prisoners sitting around little coal fires. It reminds me of a Russian Orthodox church just before midnight liturgy, but these are not icons illuminated by flickering candlelight. These are condemned men, preparing their meal on primitive stoves, for there is no official prison grub distributed in Makala. If your family doesn’t bring you something, you eat grass or gravel.

“I’ve been here for eight years,” Antoine Vumilia tells me in his barebones cell. I look around: the entire cell seems to measure about seven by three-and-a-half feet, narrower than a good-sized twin bed in Europe. “I share this cell with two other people.” He has me sit down on his cot. There are a few books on the nightstand: Celine’s
Voyage to the End of the Night
,
A Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, books by Abdourahman Waberi, Zadie Smith, Colette Braeckman . . . . It is a good thing for him that he has them, the books. “The most hardened prisoners are lord and master around here. The warden’s office lets them do whatever they want. They run the drug trade, money changing, the trade in mobile-phone vouchers.” And then, in a whisper: “Last year they ‘executed’ three prisoners.” With a gun? “No, they just kicked them to death.”

I
T WAS
J
ANUARY
16, 2001. Antoine Vumilia was employed by the Conseil National de Sécurité, Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s intelligence service. His office was right beside the Palais de Marbre, the residence of the head of state. Only a single wall separated him from the presidential quarters. A little after noon he was startled by an infernal racket. “I heard shots,” Vumilia told me there on death row, “three of them. And a couple of minutes later, eight or ten more.”

On the far side of that wall, Kabila was meeting with an adviser when a
kadogo
came up to him.
Mzee
’s guard still consisted of faithful child soldiers from Kivu. Although Ruffin had been demobilized by UNICEF a year earlier—he was seventeen and had to go back to school in short pants, amid city kids of twelve who didn’t even know how to take apart an AK-47—Rashidi, one of his former comrades in arms, was still in service. It was Rashidi who walked up to the president now. It looked like he meant to whisper something in his ear, but then he drew an automatic pistol and fired three times. One of the bullets went through the back of the president’s colossal head. Kabila died immediately, forty years less a day after Lumumba was murdered. A few minutes later, young Rashidi was riddled by bullets fired by a colonel in the palace.

Vumilia had heard that gun battle. One week later he was arrested on suspicion of conspiring in the murder. As a security officer, Vumilia had written a report in which he warned of irritation among the child soldiers from Kivu. The
kadogos
were Kabila’s most loyal followers, but it seemed as though they too were starting to feel passed over. Vumilia himself came from Kivu; he knew what was going on there, but because he was personally acquainted with the ones involved he had decided not to tell everything he knew. “I was in a dilemma: I had to protect the regime, but these were my friends. They were extremely dissatisfied. What do you expect? Masasu had been murdered in November 2000.” Young Anselme Masasu Nindaga was their hero: a street fighter like themselves, a man of verve and daring, one of the founding fathers of the AFDL.
¹
After Kinshasa was taken in May 1997, however, Kabila shoved him aside and had him thrown in prison. When he was released in fall 2000, he dreamt aloud of Kivu’s secession and won a large following. Soon after that, he was shot. In the violent protests that followed among the child soldiers in Kinshasa, dozens of people were killed. The love affair with
Mzee
was over for good. Kabila had now even blown up the bridge connecting him to the ones he called “my children.” Bitterly, the children began plotting. Revenge, blood, murder. Vumilia tried to talk them out of it: “These were really young boys. All they wanted was to show that they were fed up. I told them it was pure suicide, that there was no future in.” But he was arrested along with them and refused to testify against them in a trial that was no trial at all. “They wanted me to testify against people I knew, people I ate with every day in prison.”

Besides, wasn’t it possible that Kabila had been murdered for very different reasons?
²
Could one really be sure that the plot came from Kivu? What if Angola was involved? Couldn’t it perhaps all have been about diamonds? There were rumors that Kabila, who owed so much to Angola, had entered into cahoots with the hated UNITA rebels who controlled northern Angola with its wealth of diamonds. Hadn’t there been Lebanese men who acted as mediators between Kabila and UNITA? And weren’t eleven Lebanese diamond dealers murdered in Kinshasa right after Kabila’s assassination? Yes, that was all true. But it was all so vague, so shadowy. No one could get to the heart of the matter, especially not Vumilia. “I tried to get the boys off the hook, but that made people conclude that I must be one of them.” Along with thirty others, Vumilia was sentenced to death with no chance of appeal. International human rights organizations called the trial a miscarriage of justice.
³

For the thousandth time, Vumilia’s eyes traced the walls of his cell. “I’ve been here for eight years already. It’s unspeakable, it’s incredibly hypocritical. The leaders of the regime know the truth, but all they wanted was to keep the public quiet by quickly giving them a scapegoat.”
⁴

K
ABILA
’
S DEATH WAS A TURNING POINT
in the Second Congo War. His son, Joseph Kabila, was quickly appointed to replace him. With his wavering voice and extreme youth (he was only twenty-nine), he at first cut a rather feeble figure. The Congolese barely knew him; the West figured he was a marionette. But less than one month later, he met his Rwandan counterpart and archenemy Paul Kagame in New York and delivered a number of striking speeches. He spoke of peace, national unity, and the role of the international community. Could this mean that a new era was dawning? Yes, it could. After a number of United Nations reports had clearly shown how Rwanda and Uganda were pillaging the country’s raw materials, Kagame and Yoweri Museveni could no longer claim that they were in Congo only for national security reasons. This resulted in a long series of peace talks in Gabarone (August 2001), Sun City (April 2002), Pretoria (July 2002), Luanda (September 2002), Gbadolite (December 2002), and again in Pretoria (December 2002). At this final meeting, thanks to brilliant negotiations by Senegalese UN negotiator Moustapha Niasse and considerable pressure from South Africa and the African Union, the crucial agreement to put a complete stop to the war was signed at 3
A.M.
on December 17, 2002: the
Accord Global et Inclusif
. Rwanda and Uganda had already agreed to a withdrawal, but this time the agreement also applied to their domestic militias. The signatories included the government in Kinshasa, a few representatives of Congolese civil society, Tshisekedi’s UDPS, Jean-Pierre Bemba’s MLC, Azarias Ruberwa’s RCD-G, Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi’s RCD-ML, Roger Lumbala’s RCD-N, and the Mai-mai. The term
inclusif
was apt enough. In fact, the agreement was so all-inclusive that war criminals, to keep the peace, were not prosecuted but promoted to the office of vice president.

The accord allowed for a two-year transitional period, during which power was to be distributed according to the formula “1 + 4”: beside President Kabila there were to be four vice presidents, two from among the rebels (Bemba and Ruberwa), one from Kabila’s entourage (Abdoulaye Yerodia) and one from the peaceful opposition (surprisingly enough, not Étienne Tshisekedi, who had been carrying out a nonviolent struggle for the last ten years, but Arthur Z’Ahidi Ngoma). Within that two-year period all existing militias were to be combined into a new national army and preparations were to be made for democratic elections. The term could be extended by two six-month periods. In anticipation of the long-awaited popular vote, an interim parliament and cabinet were installed.

The agreement was absolutely historic. Now, after years of despair, there was a major chance of achieving peace and reconstruction. The new Congo therefore received the international community’s concerted support: the troop strength of MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force, was raised to 8,700 blue helmets and rose in subsequent years to 16,700, making it the biggest UN operation in history (and, with an annual budget of around $1 billion, also the most expensive).
⁵
Led by the always-optimistic American William Swing, the soldiers were to safeguard the ceasefire and supervise disarmament. “
Ça va swing!
” a popular song on Congolese radio in those days, parodied his pronounced Anglo-Saxon accent. The new regime was assisted in policy matters by the the Comité International d’Accompagnement à la Transition (CIAT), a unique instance of bilateral and multilateral diplomacy in which the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, along with those from Belgium, Canada, Angola, Gabon, Zambia, and South Africa, and representatives from the African Union, the European Union, and the MONUC, actually helped to run the country. The CIAT was no external advisory body, but a formal transitional institution.
⁶
“We were, in fact, a supervisory committee,” said Johan Swinnen, Belgium’s ambassador in Kinshasa at the time. “We had no legislative power, but we served to provide momentum and to stimulate. We supplied expertise. We didn’t want to be busybodies, but partners. Still, there were frictions between the CIAT and the 1 + 4. When the process was over, we issued a few highly critical and outspoken communiqués. We had abuse heaped on us. After that, they didn’t like us anymore.”
⁷
There was talk of “monitored sovereignty”; the country, however, was at least partly in de facto receivership. The MONUC and the CIAT were more than just the training wheels of the new Congo.
⁸

And that support was badly needed. The new leaders did not do a particularly good job; they emulated the abuses of Mobutism with a zeal that would have startled Mobutu himself. While crucial dossiers dealing with military reform and the electoral process awaited action, one of the first laws to pass through parliament stipulated . . . higher wages for the members of parliament. The fixed salary of six hundred dollars a month (already generous in a country where a university professor earned thirty) was doubled to twelve hundred. The senators, as political elders, even jacked up their pay to fifteen hundred dollars a month.
⁹
In 2005 the members of parliament as a whole (620 souls) treated themselves to a respectable vehicle: each representative was given a brand-new SUV valued at twenty-two thousand dollars—the terrible condition of Kinshasa’s roads, after all, called for solid coachwork.
¹⁰
That those same roads could have been repaired for that money seemed hardly relevant. Rather than an opportunity for a lasting reconstruction of society, political mandates were still the fast lane to individual financial gain. There were no incentives for good governance, not as long as corruption was so rewarding, both financially and socially: it was considered praiseworthy. “You mustn’t forget that our politicians are the children of poor people,” a Congolese school principal told me once.
¹¹
While corruption in the West is viewed as unjustifiable, in Congo it is seen as extremely justified: it is the person who misses out on a perfect opportunity to feed his family who is acting in a completely unjustifiable fashion.
¹²

The cabinet ministers and vice presidents were not about to miss out. All of them felt that they had a right to “special treatment” for their “logistical requirements.” In everyday language that meant: a villa and a large automobile. The four vice presidents even received villas with three bathrooms, in addition to a Mercedes limousine, a luxury passenger car, and two escort cars. The hope that the
quinquevirate
of president plus vice presidents would serve to maintain an ethical balance soon proved quite naive. The gentlemen gave each other plenty of room and shared only one concern: making sure the transition lasted as long as possible. In 2004, they all exceeded their budget by more than 100 percent, Bemba by even 600 percent.
¹³
The 2005 budget awarded the head of state a sum eight times that reserved for health care in Congo as a whole and sixteen times the country’s agricultural budget. Politics was war by other means. The state-owned Gécamines enterprise still had all the resources needed to breathe new life into the national economy, but the president’s circles signed a series of dubious contracts with often extremely shady foreign businesses. Those contracts established joint ventures that allowed foreign cowboys free rein within certain operational arms of the mining giant. They were allowed to exploit and export at will, while the Congolese state received little or nothing in return—and the well-filled envelopes went on changing hands under the table.
¹⁴
Once again, a tiny elite was being given the keys to the kingdom. Clientelism was in ruddy good health. “1 + 4 = 0” was the equation popular painters sometimes added to their satirical canvases.