Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (29 page)

There was a lot of scurrying about when our helicopter landed at the compound. Diplomats were busy sending off the last couple of helicopter loads of evacuees for the evening. I found Jackson standing in line. Sims stood sheepishly nearby. Jackson and I hugged briefly, and I could sense how troubled he was just by the look in his eyes. When I asked what the matter was, he told me that on instructions from Washington, Sims had ordered him onto the very first available helicopter. Jackson was to be flown to Freetown and then onward to Dakar, Senegal, where he was to board a flight to the States, paperless and penniless, and separated from his family.

“I want to stay here and report on the evacuation,” Jackson protested. “I am a reporter. I want to do my job, but they won’t allow it.”

Then he explained to me how he and Jerry had followed the beach, clambering over boulders and being smashed by waves, rather than risking the road to the embassy, where even now gunfire occasionally rang out. The marines had grilled them at the gate, originally believing they were trying to sneak into the compound. Sims, who had told Jackson there was no way he could have asylum, and then later promised a van that never arrived, waved Jackson, dripping wet, through the security gate. “We are so relieved to see you,” Jackson said Sims had exclaimed. “Now you have to promise me a good article about this in the newspaper.”

CHAPTER TEN

Long Knives

The war in Zaire had begun to settle into a fatal rhythm by the early months of 1997. Each time the government announced a counterattack on a rebel position, it seemed to herald a fresh new advance from the east. Laurent Kabila’s mysterious army was constantly on the march, and now all signs pointed to the imminent capture of its biggest prize yet, Kisangani. For over three decades, between long bouts of slumber, the city’s vocation seemed to be to determine the entire country’s fate. In Kinshasa, everyone knew that once Kisangani fell, a rebel victory would be inevitable. The details that remained to be decided would be as tedious as the running out of the clock in a lopsided football game.

In the last few weeks, the events on the ground had finally begun to force the Americans in Kinshasa to change their tune. The U.S. ambassador, the ever gruff Daniel Howard Simpson, had belatedly stopped arguing that Mobutu’s regime could turn things around. To his credit, Simpson had worked feverishly at the outset of the conflict to seize Washington’s attention about the unfolding humanitarian disaster in the east, where Rwandan Tutsi were hounding Hutu, and more urgently still, about the spread of political instability, lawlessness and refugee crises throughout Central Africa that the violent breakup of Zaire would engender.

Week after week, though, the American Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, had been countering Simpson’s view, issuing diplomatic cables that backed Rwanda’s view of the war: No Rwandan troops were in Zaire, there was no refugee problem, there had been no massacres of Hutu, or at least no proof of massacres.

Mobutu had been America’s trusty surrogate in Africa for so long that Simpson, a veteran of multiple tours in the country, had found it difficult to realign his thinking. The turnabout could hardly have been more stark, though. Rwanda and Uganda were now suddenly America’s best friends in this neighborhood, and Washington was even courting its old enemies, the former Marxists who ruled Angola. Uganda was an eager partner in American policy to support anti-government rebels in its huge neighbor, Sudan, which was run by a dreadful group of Islamic fundamentalists. As I said earlier, Uganda had also become a much-touted “success story” of the World Bank. Support for Rwanda, meanwhile, had taken the form of penance by Washington for having turned a blind eye to the anti-Tutsi genocide.

This realpolitik flip-flop was dressed up with flashy slogans. The United States said it was promoting an “African renaissance” under a generation of new leaders. But whatever one made of the rationale, it was clear that America’s longtime favorite African dictator, Mobutu, was being replaced as top dog by two newer, but by no means freshly minted, authoritarians, Museveni of Uganda and his former protégé, Paul Kagame, in Rwanda.

Just as it had done with Mobutu, beginning in the 1960s, when the young colonel was asked to fight a covert war on our behalf in Angola, Washington was beginning to entrust the new renaissance gang with the security of a vast swath of the continent. While Museveni walked the beat in southern Sudan, Rwanda was given the lead—and a free hand—in sorting out the nasty Hutu problem in Zaire. America was interested in Angola purely for its resources. The country has lots of oil, and most of its reserves are offshore, securely insulated from the region’s chronic political instability. By comparison, Zaire’s huge storehouse of mineral wealth is entombed not just by the country’s red earth but by the country’s horrendous corruption, interminable secession bids and political uncertainty.

Only gradually did it dawn on Ambassador Simpson that the argument in Washington was over, if there had ever been an argument. In an odd replay of the country’s civil war in the 1960s, Mobutu had hired a couple of hundred Serbian killers, led by an international war crimes suspect named Yugo Dominic, from Krajina, to mount a last stand.

Thirty years earlier, Kisangani had been held by the Simbas, rebels who had been loyal to Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister Mobutu had overthrown and helped kill. Then, with help from the CIA, the ruthless young Mobutu hired Cuban mercenaries who were honing their skills for the failed attack on the Bay of Pigs to oust the Lumumbist faithful. This time around, the Serbs had three helicopter gunships and a couple of ground attack fighter planes, and the ambassador seemed to hold out some hope that the rebels might stub their toe for the first time, perhaps changing the war’s course.

With the fall of Kisangani, though, Simpson, too, would make a full conversion, turning his thoughts and affections to Kabila. Compared to the ambassador, my best American intelligence source, a man I’ll call John, had been far more closely attuned to Washington’s true thinking from the very beginning. John knew or suspected that the American shift of African clients that was under way had been well planned, and he understood that the rebellion that was steadily building up steam like a tropical storm on its long route to Kinshasa was far too big a challenge for a few dozen mercenaries—even if they
were
Serbian war criminals.

“Do you know how many helicopters the United States lost in Vietnam?” he asked me over beers in a low-slung Kinshasa villa one evening. “Five thousand. The mercenaries might put up some resistance, but once the attack on Kisangani gets going, I expect them to commandeer whatever aircraft they can and get the hell out of there.”

John couldn’t get over the rebels’ tactical proficiency. He knew Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, or AFDL, was no hodgepodge group of tribal fighters and child soldiers hastily thrown together and dressed in Wellington boots, as the official story would have it. “They’ve got an Eisenhower- or a Montgomery-type putting together a very impressive, very methodical campaign.” The tactics, he said, even included sophisticated psy-ops, or psychological operations. One recent trick involved calling the confidential satellite phone numbers or radio frequencies of Mobutu’s top generals and telling them the time to make a deal was running out.

As no American diplomat would, John acknowledged that this war was about one thing alone: counter-extermination. The Hutu had their day in 1994, killing the 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates during the Rwandan genocide. Now, Rwanda’s government, led by the small Tutsi minority, was butchering Hutu refugees in Zaire. The United States had eagerly avoided intervening in the first genocide, and its subsequent guilt over that decision kept it out of this campaign of slaughter, leading to the same kind of tragic results.

John maintained the diplomatic fiction that Kabila’s army was mostly Zairian, or at least mostly the Tutsi pastoralists, the Banyamulenge, from the east of the country. All pretense ended, however, when it came to saying who was leading the insurgency, and what that group’s aims were. “The original AFDL column came from Rwanda, passed through Burundi and entered Zaire near Cibitoké,” he said. “They started taking on a lot of volunteers, but this was a Rwandan-trained and Rwandan-led force, and when they set out on the Walikale-to-Lubutu axis, it was with the express purpose of breaking up the Hutu camps and hunting down refugees.

“Some of the Hutu fought back, for sure. There was some very brutal fighting in the early stages, but the worst killing was in the moppingup operations. Those forests out in the east have witnessed some real horrors, but luckily for the Tutsi, trees can’t talk.”

The official American line on the war effectively forbade anyone, whether diplomat or intelligence officer, to be quoted saying anything like this, not even on background. And for the most part, the media followed the official narrative. As Kabila’s rebellion swept westward, almost no reporters made it to the front to witness actual combat, or to check the rebels’ claims of victory or of popular support. Kabila or, more likely, his minders in Kigali were savvy enough to understand the paramount importance of controlling journalists’ access. The peril of the war zone and the sheer impenetrability of the terrain also deterred most of those who might have been tempted to strike out on their own.

Even after the fighting had moved on—until the final stages of the war, at least—rare was the reporter who sought to determine the toll, or to dig into reports of atrocities, either. The death of large numbers of Hutu refugees was accepted with a journalistic shrug, as perhaps a sad but inevitable consequence of being on the wrong side of Central Africa’s ugly history.

For more than three decades, Mobutu was not just America’s best friend in Africa, he was a larger-than-life thief and scoundrel, a man who had bad guy written all over him just as clearly as the spots on his leopard-skin cap. Kabila’s greatest public relations advantage, in fact, was Mobutu’s incorrigibly negative image. To be sure, the sixty-something rebel leader sometimes seemed like a campy joke, roly-poly and all too jovial in his brief encounters with the Western press. But good and bad, or at least better and worse, had already been sorted out. The only story that mattered was the countdown to the overthrow of the mythical dictator in Kinshasa, and the inclination of the press to cheer the rebellion along only grew in strength as the weeks passed. There were plenty of well-informed sources on the slaughter of Hutu refugees that was unfolding in the east, but almost no one was listening to them.

As well as anyone else, Guillaume Ngefa, the head of the Association Zairoise de Droits de l’Homme, or AZADHO, understood what was happening on the ground. A slight man, he always spoke in careful sentences that reminded me of a clinician, except that even his weightiest thoughts were always eventually punctuated with an unexpected joke delivered absolutely deadpan, and followed up with a devilish grin. Ngefa was one of those almost recklessly courageous figures who had somehow proliferated and thrived—if intermittently—during the long, dark years of Mobutu’s rule.

Ngefa received me late one afternoon in March 1997 in his office on Avenue Mutombo Katsi, and we chatted for a few minutes on the terrace, overlooking downtown Kinshasa in all its shabby glory. His description of what was going on was succinct and without appeal.

“You can call it a war, if you like, because there is some combat, and yet anyone who follows the itinerary of the rebels knows that this is a campaign to exterminate the Hutu refugees. The Tutsi thesis is that all of these people are Interahamwe [the Hutu militia that carried out the Rwandan genocide], and now, those who suffered a genocide are committing one in their turn,” Ngefa told me. “The international community only sees one thing, the fate of Mobutu, so the rebels are free to kill whoever they like. The error here is that these crimes will not be forgotten. You can’t march hundreds of thousands of people across the breadth of this country, killing them at every turn, and expect they won’t seek vengeance someday.”

For the relief agencies and for the refugees, the press had become a frail and final reed. On the last leg of their march toward Kisangani, the rebels had taken a telling detour at Pene-Tungu, a desolate jungle crossroads town, heading southwest instead of northwest, and they were going fifty miles out of their way to reach the Zaire River, within sight of Ubundu on the opposite bank. Awaiting them there was the largest surviving concentration of Hutu refugees still wandering the Zairian wilderness. There had been 150,000 of them less than two weeks earlier at Tingi-Tingi, but a third of their number had been picked off in machine-gun ambushes and artillery attacks during their desperate eight-day flight from a town where the United Nations had promised they would be safe.

The rebels were about to apply the brilliant military tactics that John had praised, executing the revenge genocide Ngefa had warned of. The only safe way across the river for the Hutu was in a rusty steamboat, an
African Queen–
style affair that could carry a few hundred passengers at a time, but even this ferry had been shut down by the government, which feared a flood of refugees into Kisangani, about seventy miles up the road. The river was unnavigable from here. Just downstream lay the tremendous cataract, where furious whitewater cascades and immense boulders had clashed without cease for an eon. In the invitingly calm tea-colored pools near the banks, crocodiles swam thick among the clots of water hyacinth, and were sure to devour anyone foolish enough to attempt to make it across.

The United Nations put on a flight from Kinshasa a small number of reporters, doubtlessly hoping that the pictures and stories of the scene at Ubundu would bring some kind of international action. Fifty tons of food were needed each day to feed the Hutu. There were five hundred tons, or a ten-day supply, stockpiled in Kisangani, but fighting in the area had rendered delivery nearly impossible. Even if the ferry service were restored, it would take three months of nonstop crossings for the creaky steamer to get all of the Hutu stragglers across the river. The only hope was a ceasefire. The Security Council was indecisive about the crisis, largely because of American and British resistance to any condemnation of Rwanda and Uganda.

The French called for an international humanitarian intervention, but they were virtually alone in clamoring for strong diplomatic action. Their arguments were weakened, too, by Paris’s transparent preoccupation with its loss of empire. The only meaning the war had for the French, one sensed, was the erosion of their prestige and influence. In France, Rwanda and Uganda were seen as the spearheads of what Paris called Anglo-Saxon power.

From Kinshasa we flew to Kisangani, and the scene on the ground at the airport there could not have been more different from a couple of weeks before. The Serbian mercenaries had taken over the airfield, and here and there an advance team of French operatives were collecting intelligence and consulting with the Zairians about the defense of the city.

As we piled into a smaller plane to fly onward to the far bank of the Zaire River, beyond Ubundu, a French agent slipped in among us. I overheard him telling a French reporter that in a few days the foreign legion would be here, hopefully at the head of an international force, and the entire flow of the war would change. The French, he said, had already been building up their forces across the Zaire River from Kinshasa, in Brazzaville.