Congo (82 page)

The army fared no better. Officially, all of the militias were to be fused into a new, 120,000-man army.
¹⁵
And yes, quite a few former rebels suddenly received a national army uniform, while many of their commanders received a high rank (always good bait for pulling in warlords), but in actual practice this
brassage
(intermingling) barely scratched the surface. Behind the facade, nothing changed. Soldiers who have been each other’s enemies for five years do not embrace each other that quickly. By 2006 only three of the planned eighteen brigades had actually fused.
¹⁶
What’s more, the
brassage
had rendered the Congolese army top-heavy: after the promotions of all those former rebels, there were now almost twice as many officers and noncoms as foot soldiers.
¹⁷
Within the Congolese armed forces, commanding was considered more pleasant than obeying—no, not commanding, but
commandeering
. The extensive officers’ corps busied itself with the mass misappropriation of funds. The salaries of the rank and file vanished into the pockets of colonels and generals who did not hesitate to roundly exaggerate the numbers of their enlisted men in order to receive more funding. The underpaid and badly trained soldiers themselves were neither motivated nor disciplined, and behaved accordingly. The new government army, the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), should have been the cornerstone of the resurrected state, but instead became as much a whited sepulcher as the FAC of Kabila
père
, Mobutu’s FAZ, or even Lumumba and Tshombe’s ANC. Jokingly, people sometimes twisted the acronym FARDC to make of it:
phare décès
(dead beacon). Since gaining independence, Congo has never had at its disposal an army comparable in efficiency and discipline to the former Force Publique. For that reason, that army has never been able fulfill the primary function of statehood, that of maintaining the monopoly on violence.

Does it come as any surprise then that the war was never completely over? As long as the security forces remained a sham, the MONUC stood alone. But one cannot hold together a territory half the size of Europe with only seventeen thousand men; even the biggest UN mission in history was no more than a drop in the ocean. In Iraq, six times smaller than Congo, there were stationed at that moment some 150,000 American troops, and even they were unable to contain the violence. The blue helmets’ presence had a calmative effect is some areas, but elsewhere impotence was their portion.

E
ASTERN
C
ONGO
remained in turmoil, even after the
Accord Global et Inclusif
. There the conflict entered its third phase. Its theater of operations was much smaller, but the human suffering was still great. In essence, the violence was now concentrated in two areas: Ituri and the two Kivu provinces. By no coincidence whatsoever, both areas were rich in ore and bordered on Uganda and Rwanda, respectively.

In Ituri, the conflict flared up precisely because of the peace agreement. When the Ugandan army withdrew definitively from Bunia on May 6, 2003, Lendu militias pounced on the city’s center and killed dozens of Hemas. A few days later the Hemas rolled in, in turn, and killed off dozens of Lendus. The conflict resembled a miniature version of the 1994 genocide. The cattle-breeding Hema felt affinity with the Tutsis: an ethnic minority that formed the social elite. The Lendu were farmers who compared themselves to the Hutus: numerous, but at the bottom of the social ladder. It was, in fact, the ancient conflict between herders and farmers concerning access to the land, the conflict between the pastures and fields and the crops that were eaten by cows.
¹⁸
But this time that Cain-and-Abel conflict was stirred up by overpopulation, and put to good use by a Uganda greedy for gold.
¹⁹
The ethnic tension in the region rose to such heights that devoutly Catholic women from both sides told me: “Even we,
les mamans
, took up arms. We felt threatened.” Or: “We were accomplices. We carried weapons in our baskets and water jugs.”
²⁰
The ethnic violence in Ituri was no atavism, no primitive reflex, but the logical result of the scarcity of land in a wartime economy in the service of globalization—and, in that sense, a foreshadowing of what is in store for an overpopulated planet. Congo does not lag behind the course of history, but runs out in front.

Hundreds had already been killed in the provincial town of Bunia within one week in May 2003, but the entire region was entangled in a bloody war of inextricable complexity. And in terms of that complexity, in the Ituri district, the Second Congo War reached its absolute nadir. A dozen militias were active, loosely organized little armies of children in flip-flops toting guns, led by dodgy young men in their twenties and thirties who often operated under an assumed name and switched alliances back and forth with other warlords. With its countless mergers, schisms, joint ventures, and takeovers, this new brand of armed conflict looked more like the business world than war as we know it. In the offices of the MONUC, dispirited officials hung charts on the wall tracing the organization of the various militias: it made them only more dispirited. Every month a new militia came along, or the orderly chart had to be rearranged—more columns, more arrows, more acronyms, more additions to the rogues’ gallery of photos beside them—until the chaos finally jibed with that in the field and lost all explanative value. But there was one constant factor: sooner or later, all parties received weapons from and were trained by Uganda.
²¹
That was less an indication of a conscious divide-and-conquer policy in Kampala, however, than of the internal rivalry within the Ugandan army; each general had his own militia in Congo, a militia he could abandon or resuscitate as the situation required. Even more arrows, even more connections, for on the Ugandan side too there was no solid ground. Rwanda backed the occasional militia as well. No, the war was not over yet. It had become a small but stubborn snarl, a form of self-perpetuating armed banditry.

Exactly one year later, in May 2004, Kivu was the scene of extreme outbursts of violence. The major rift there remained that between Hutus and Tutsis; there too overpopulation played a role, but particularly the overpopulation in Rwanda itself. Ten years after the genocide, Rwandan Hutus still could not return to their overfull fatherland, where partisan prosecution awaited them. “Kabila doesn’t chase them away and Kagame won’t have them,” was the pithy way Belgian diplomat Johan Swinnen summarized the situation.
²²
Their long-lasting exile was still causing unrest, prompting Rwanda’s continued support for Congolese Tutsis willing to deal with the Hutus. In May 2004, therefore, Laurent Nkunda’s men, along with those of Mutebusi, moved killing and plundering through the streets of Bukavu. They raped dozens of women and girls, usually as a gang. Some of the girls were no older than three.
²³
Nkunda was a Tutsi from North Kivu and a welcome guest in Kigali. From 1990 on he had fought alongside Kagame; in 1996 he had advanced along with the AFDL. He had held a top position in the RCD-G in 1998 and terrorized the population of Kigali with an iron fist in 2002. Because of his leading role in the massacres, he was leery of accepting a position in the new government army. And so Nkunda became Kigali’s new golden boy, taking Bukavu in his own, characteristic fashion. For a time, the fragile peace process seemed to ground to a halt. Was this the start of a third war?

Amid general outrage, the UN blue helmets (most of them Uruguayan) in both Bunia and Bukavu stood by and watched powerlessly, to say nothing of faintheartedly. But, thanks to a number of historical firsts, calm soon descended again in Ituri. For the first time in history the European Union carried out a joint military action, with something like a European army. With UN approval, primarily French commandoes pacified the city of Bunia during Operation Artémis. International arrest warrants were issued for the most important warlords. Three of them were detained and sent to The Hague, including Thomas Lubanga, the head of the biggest Hema militia. In 2010 he was the first defendant to be tried by the new International Court of Justice. In that regard, too, Congo is at the vanguard rather than the rearguard of history.

In Kivu the transition seemed about to founder and make way for a new war when 160 refugees—most of them Congolese Tutsis—were brutally murdered at the Gatumba camp in Burundi, in reaction to Nkunda’s violence. Rwanda once again sent troops to Congo to protect the befriended Tutsis. For a while everything seemed to be starting all over again, but the United Nations, South Africa, and the CIAT did everything in their power to ease the pressure.

During the third phase of the war, the conflict gradually reverted to what it had been at the start: a clash between Rwanda and Congo concerning the treatment of Hutu exiles in Kivu. Kagame still hoped to neutralize them, fearing as he did that they were plotting a coup in Rwanda. Just as his own regime had been molded during banishment in Uganda, he now believed that a Hutu takeover was being plotted in eastern Congo. And he had no intention of letting that happen: Rwanda was full and firmly in Tutsi hands. The chronic conflict has now lasted for more than fifteen years. The suffering in the area around the Great Lakes can be traced back to that fateful day in spring 1994 when the French government decided to allow the Hutu regime to escape to eastern Congo, weapons and all.

Today, small but powerful Rwanda—still in great favor among the donor countries—displays all the earmarks of a blossoming military dictatorship, while neighboring Congo remains huge, sluggish and weak, and unable to deal with the problems of the day. It is as though a lone professional soldier, Rwanda, were living in a rigorously simple one-room flat in a chaotic apartment building inhabited by an enormously loud and dysfunctional family that has fights, neglects to pay its bills, and sometimes even forgets to turn off the gas stove. On more than one occasion the soldier takes his gun down off the wall and storms into the neighbor’s kitchen, where he causes more damage than necessary. Rather than simply turning off the gas, he shatters all the cups and saucers, shoots holes in the kitchen ceiling, and marches out again with a boiled ham under his arm. The result is more noise and more fighting. A neighbors’ quarrel: that, in effect, is what is going on in Central Africa today, a neighbors’ quarrel in which one party roundly curses the other. Not without reason, by the way, for Kigali is every bit as culpable as Kinshasa. The conclusion, however, remains bitter: as long as the crucial transition simply refused to take place in Kinshasa, the Second Congo War in the east simply would not stop.

T
HE CLINKING OF BEER BOTTLES
—hundreds, thousands of beer bottles, big brown bottles jostling for position on the conveyor belt—drowned out the other factory noises. It sounded like a carillon, a high, insistent tinkling that rose above the hiss of the rinsing machine, the clack of the labeler, the rattle of the conveyor, and the sigh of the pressure hoses—like the sound of chimes ringing out above the bustle of a busy city. The nervous, cheerful tinkling rolled through the noisy factory hall and mingled with the smell of malt and alcohol. It was 2002 in Kinshasa and Bralima, and the Primus brewery had just opened two ultramodern, fully automatic packaging lines that could process seventy-two thousand bottles an hour. The war was barely over, but the brewing industry was bursting at the seams. Bralima (from Brasserie et Limonaderie de Léopoldville) started as a small colonial brewery in 1923, but has been owned by Heineken since 1987. In the war’s wake, the Dutch conglomerate had every intention of gaining control of and expanding the beer market in perennially thirsty Congo. A million and a half hectoliters (about 57,000 gallons) of suds went out the factory gates in 2002; by 2008 that was almost 3 million. That spectacular doubling of production, though, was still a far cry from the record that had been set in 1974, the magic year of the boxing match, when Bralima had produced 5.5 million hectoliters (over 200,000 gallons). But the future looked bright.
²⁴
In Kinshasa alone, Bralima once again had fifty thousand retail outlets and bars.

The way the politicians were dragging their feet did not, in any case, much faze the multinationals. The start of a new period of peace held the promise of new markets, which had to be conquered with all due speed. The same applied, a fortiori, to mobile telephone systems. Vodacom, the South African telephony operator, had started laying the first cables while the ethnic violence was still in full swing. During the worst firefights, the workers would simply stop digging and take cover for a few hours.
²⁵
Whence all the hurry? In a country where the telephone infrastructure had been in ruins for decades, there was an enormous demand for cell phones. The MONUC troops alone accounted for thousands of subscriptions. And the Congolese rank and file, too, began dreaming of owning a GSM. When I was in Kinshasa for the first time in 2003, a Congolese cell phone number had only seven digits; by 2006 it was up to ten. Mobile telephony is to Africa what movable print was to Europe: a true revolution that has profoundly redefined the structure of society.
²⁶

A weak state like Congo left plenty of room for new international players. During the Cold War it had been foreign nations (France, Belgium, and the United States) that helped determined Zaïre’s fate, but now it was increasingly foreign private partners, such as companies, churches, and NGOs. Since the end of the last war, large parts of Congo were run by international charities that took over government tasks. The reason Kabila could grant himself a budget eight times that for national health care was because he knew the money for that care would come from abroad anyway. The same went for education and agriculture: the favorite domains for international donors. The assistance granted by many hundreds of NGOs was often impressive, but not devoid of consequences. The corruption endemic within the Congolese civil service apparatus prompted many NGOs to remain “nongovernmental” in the host country as well and to work only with regional and local partners.
²⁷
Understandable, but hardly conducive to restoring the bond of trust between government and people. In addition, the influx of foreign funding created something like “aid addiction”: the Congolese began doubting their ability to manage for themselves. Monsieur Riza Labwe, a friendly but hardworking man who ran a modest hotel in Bandundu, was kicking against the pricks of such passivity when he said to me: “All these NGOs here make us too dependent. Someday an NGO is going to come along and start telling us how to brush our teeth.”
²⁸
Nowhere was this “NGO-ization” more obvious than in Goma, blasted to pieces by the war and overrun with lava since 2002. In December 2008, while crossing town at evening rush hour on the back of a scooter—the public transport of the common man—I looked around at the traffic we were jauntily zipping past: all jeeps, all belonging to NGOs, all of them with a logo decal on the door or a pennant on the antenna. For Justine Masika, the founder of La Synergie des Femmes, this was a source of great irritation.