Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (30 page)

Twenty minutes later, after we had circled over Ubundu and done a quick flyover of the landing field, the plane plowed to a stop in a broad grassy field bordered by two thick stands of trees. After an exhausting day’s travel from Kinshasa, we were told by UN officials that we had only forty-five minutes on the ground, because of approaching nightfall and the possibility of attack.

Piling out of the airplane, I immediately found myself surrounded by a sea of desperate faces. Incredibly, some of them had seen me in Tingi-Tingi and called out eagerly for me to acknowledge the extraordinary coincidence. This was a hopeless, broken population. Where there had been a proper settlement at Tingi-Tingi, carved out of the wilderness with the expectation of semi-permanence, and above all, of survival, the shattered people in the field near Ubundu saw themselves for exactly what they were: inmates in a death camp awaiting their summons to the chamber. Few had even bothered putting up makeshift shelters. Bundles of ragged clothing and whatever other belongings people had managed to bring this far sat in desolate piles. Babies tugged at the shriveled breasts of their mothers, who could do nothing but watch their children dying with downcast eyes.

“We are hungry and we are sick, but above all, we have lost all morale,” said Imaculée Mukarugwiza, a widowed schoolteacher from Butare, Rwanda. She had walked eight days from Tingi-Tingi with her own two children and five orphans she had picked up along the way. With the sting of a summation, Imaculée asked me, “Are all of us guilty of genocide, even these little children?”

In the few minutes I had to wander in this desperate crowd, many of the refugees insisted on recounting the stories of their flight from Tingi-Tingi. As they did so, they assumed an almost beatific air, and some of those describing the horrors glowed with the strange smiles of miraculous survivors as they spoke. Each concluded darkly, though, that he or she had only feinted death, not escaped it. “We heard the first gunfire around eight o’clock, and it just kept growing in intensity,” said a thirty-one-year-old Hutu doctor from Bukavu, Zaire, who gave his name as Camille as he asked for my card. “Most people fled during the night, but there were nine of us and we stayed put. With sunrise they marched into the camp, and they shot at anything that moved. It was a total rout.” Camille said he had survived only by playing dead alongside a pile of cadavers. When things finally went quiet in the settlement, he managed to find nine members of his extended family, everyone except his frail grandfather.

As he was a young man, the presumption of guilt for having participated in the 1994 anti-Tutsi genocide hung heavily over Camille, but after eight days of terrified flight through the forests, he had decided he would be better off going home to Tutsi-ruled Rwanda and facing his fate there. “All the world is willing to do is feed us, but that is of no use if we have to keep running like this. Take us home, but give us protection.”

A man named Christophe stepped forward and spoke impassionedly to describe how he survived a previous ambush by Kabila’s rebels, who, he insisted, were precisely what the Western diplomats were still denying—members of the Forces Patriotiques Rwandaises, Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated army. His first brush with slaughter, he said, had come in 1995 during an attack on his first refugee camp, in Kibeho, in southwestern Rwanda, where the United Nations itself had estimated that eight thousand Hutu were massacred.

“I was nearly killed in Tingi-Tingi because I took Madame Ogata at her word, that we would be protected. In fact, the world has done nothing for us,” Christophe said. “They did nothing to save people in Rwanda and they have done nothing to save us here. But dying here at least has one merit. If people like you bear witness, sooner or later the international community will have to accept its responsibility.”

I flew back to Kinshasa in an intensely dark mood. Kabila’s fighters and the crocodiles would soon be sorting the refugees out, and whatever Christophe believed about the stories I and others would write, since there were no television crews here, the world, by and large, would be spared the disturbing images.

In the course of the war, I never saw fresh killing fields. But the faces of innocent people about to meet violent deaths stay with you. Having just been served up true desperation in crowd-sized doses, now I felt I truly knew what it meant to be haunted.

Mobutu had left the country again—this time, quietly—shortly after his faux-triumphal return from cancer surgery a few months before. For a man vain and depraved enough to sleep with, and then wed, his wife’s identical twin sister, the hormonal castration that is a routine element of prostate cancer treatment was more than he could contemplate.

As Robert and I transited through Kisangani again after returning from Ubundu, Mobutu’s commander on the ground exuded confidence, telling me that his defenses, bolstered by the mercenaries, were rock solid. “You can drive one hundred fifty miles out of town and you won’t encounter any trouble,” General Kalumé said. Kalumé, a tall, proud man whose warm, rounded features seemed to bespeak integrity and even kindness, may already have been working for Kabila. In any event, two days later, the rebels launched a well-planned attack on Kisangani.

Back in Kinshasa, I got a call on my satellite phone from a very well informed Catholic cleric late on the afternoon of March 15, just as the sun started its dappling descent over the cascades of the Zaire River. The river’s beauty, which I could take in from my hotel room, was a rare comfort during weeks-long stays covering Zaire’s downward spiral. The caller told me that a rumor was sweeping the city that armored vehicles and heavy weaponry—artillery pieces and Chinese-made mortars—were being rushed forward toward Kisangani, down the road from Bafwasendé.

By early evening, the smoke and dust of afternoon rumors had settled into a reasonably solid picture of what was happening, although the news was nowhere to be found yet on the news wires or the international radio stations. A UN relief worker in Kisangani who had given me mail for his family forty-eight hours earlier called to say that bombs and explosions could be heard going off here and there. A little while after that, all the aircraft controlled by the mercenaries and loyalists were ablaze, hit by artillery fired from as far away as seven or eight miles, according to John. As he described the scene, full of details about the operational range of this or that heavy weapon, he could hardly contain his excitement. The 24th Regiment of the Angolan army had joined the battle, which explained, he said, the unusual accuracy of the attacking gunners.

In the end, there was hardly a fight. The mutinous Serbs slipped out of town aboard their Russian-built Mi-24 attack helicopters, coming under fire from Mobutu’s own 31st Paratroop Brigade as they flew away. The mercenaries put down in Gbadolité, Mobutu’s fantasyland capital in the northern jungles. Mobutu’s soldiers ran wild in Kisangani for a few hours, stripping off their uniforms and looting whatever they could. And then the invaders arrived.

General Kalumé changed his uniform but not his job, staying on as the local commander for the AFDL, and for a time, life went on just as it usually had in Kisangani, meaning nothing much happened and nothing much changed. In Kinshasa, though, nothing would ever be the same. “Everyone is making new calculations about their future,” one of Mobutu’s senior counselors told me. “The old game is up. The next few days will show what the new game is all about.”

The verdict on the street was much the same. Overnight, the people of the capital had understood that Mobutu’s days were now numbered. The only uncertainty was over what lay ahead. For years, in the political struggle for hearts and minds, Kinshasa—indeed, much of the country—had belonged to Etienne Tshisekedi, the stubborn and courageous leader of the country’s democracy movement, and once and future prime minister. Though many in the capital cheered on the rebellion, people said they could not imagine a future under Kabila that did not also include an important role for Tshisekedi. The people of Kinshasa dreamed that somehow the democrats and the rebels would work side by side to finally deliver on some of their country’s elusive promise.

In Matongé, the vast slum that had been the African quarter during the years of Belgian rule, the so-called
parlementaires debout
loitered around the newspaper stands to read the headlines and debate each day’s momentous events. “We had been very worried for our brothers and sisters in Kisangani before the fall, because we all felt that Kabila was a killer and a puppet of the Tutsi,” Patrice Makambu, a thirty-two-year-old electrical engineering student, told me. “But nothing bad has happened at all, and we can see that Kabila stands together with all of Zaire’s forty-five million sons and daughters.”

A cheer went up among the twenty or so people who had gathered at the newsstand, and then someone shouted a question about Tshisekedi, who, although he was sacked as prime minister by Mobutu during a previous crisis, many people still considered as their legitimate leader. The answer came swiftly. “Today, we are applauding Kabila, but if he thinks he can govern Zaire without our prime minister, we will drop him like a sack of rice.”

Even the Kinshasa multimillionaires, the barons of the Mobutu system who fought Tshisekedi for years, had changed their tune. For men like Bemba Saolona, whose immense fortune from mining, agriculture and transportation had been built in connivance with the president-for-life, Tshisekedi’s reputation for incorruptibility was a lesser evil compared to the sheer unpredictability of a revolution led by Kabila. “Tshisekedi is a strong personality, and that’s exactly what we need in this situation,” Bemba told me in his luxurious house, decorated with all the nouveau riche warmth of a four-star hotel. “If he is allowed to set up a national unity government, Tshisekedi can go and sit down with Kabila and ask him just what he wants.”

The United States had other ideas, however, and was beginning to weigh in more and more heavily in favor of the rebels. With the fall of Kisangani, Ambassador Simpson was deep in the throes of his eleventh-hour conversion. He could now bring himself to say flatly that Mobutu was finished. Kengo wa Dondo, the mulatto prime minister whom Washington had worked so hard to prop up, was now suddenly, in Simpson’s words, a “world-class crook,” and Tshisekedi, the man designated to lead the nation by the people in the 1992 National Conference, the most democratic national event Zaire had seen in a generation, was a nuisance to be ignored.

The future envisioned by the United States was Kabila and only Kabila. “There is a consensus that we have to deal with Kabila,” the ambassador told me, growing annoyed with my questions as we sat across a low table from each other in his chilly office. “Tshisekedi is an obstacle, and we don’t see him as a player anymore. I just don’t see any reason why Kabila at this point should deal him into the game.”

Ironically, in the time it took Simpson to get with the Kabila program supported so enthusiastically by American embassies in East Africa, and ostensibly in Washington, too, strong doubts were cropping up within Simpson’s own mission. John, for one, had early on applauded the rebels’ pluck, but now that they had swallowed half of the country, and were girding for an assault on the capital, he was expressing serious reservations. “Mobutu destroyed Zaire militarily and politically, and brought this thing down on himself,” John told me over beers at his home that same evening. “But now we have a guy taking over the country by military versus political means, and that is clearly going to debase political opposition movements all across Africa.

“We are welcoming Kabila without knowing who he is,” he continued. “Is this a George Washington or a megalomaniac? Is this a period of enlightenment coming to Central Africa or a new dark age we’ve just signed up for? Personally, I have a hard time believing a man who trained at Nanjing University and who ran with Che Guevara can save this country.”

John did not mention Tshisekedi by name, but implicit in his comments was a questioning of the betrayal Tshisekedi’s supporters were already bracing for. It echoed a betrayal in the country’s earliest independent history, when the United States preferred another strongman, Mobutu, over Lumumba, also a proud and democratically minded leader who was widely supported by his people. The United States had helped engineer Africa’s first coup d’état, overthrowing Lumumba after less than ten weeks in power, over unsubstantiated concerns about his communist leanings. Lumumba was murdered less than a year later, in a political assassination that was also promoted by Washington.

With the fall of Kisangani, things were indeed moving quickly. Mobutu returned home for the third time from his coddled convalescence in the south of France. Once more, the crowds were carefully turned out, using all the old tricks of beer and pocket change, but from his airplane, angry, hurting and doubtless full of despair, Mobutu ordered that the festivities be called off, and slipped off to Camp Tshatshi virtually undercover.

In Kinshasa, the political significance of this sudden bout of camera shyness escaped no one. Albert Kisongo, the editor of
Demain le
Congo,
captured the common feeling in a telling phrase. “We Bantus love a good spectacle, and that is why we have put up with Mobutu for over thirty years. Now he is telling us himself that the show is over.”

That very same day, March 21, Kabila arrived in Kisangani. Thirty-two years earlier, in 1965, Mobutu’s Cuban and Rhodesian mercenaries had defeated the Simba rebellion, and run Kabila, one of its leaders, out of Kisangani. This time, the mercenaries and their white magic had failed. Triumphant, Kabila was being greeted by huge crowds who turned out entirely of their own accord. Kisangani toasted him as its liberator, and the cheering crowds urged him onward to Kinshasa. To be sure, the old warrior had earned his credentials as a survivor, but he had to be as surprised as anyone else to be plucked out of his obscurity, more than two weeks into the supposed Banyamulenge rebellion, to head a creation of Rwanda and Uganda called the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire.