Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (34 page)

“We in the international community will be watching very carefully,” Richardson said, a bit stiffly. “Today you have been very cooperative, and we appreciate that. We must also ask you to give free access to journalists. That is the meaning of a free society.”

After witnessing the baby’s death close up, it was impossible for me not to be underwhelmed by the sentiments expressed. Richardson never insisted that we be allowed to travel down the dirt road that reportedly led to the killing fields. Whether it was the United States or the United Nations, no Westerner would ever push hard enough to lift the veil over this crude little Auschwitz. In fact, just a few months later, Washington would be pushing to make sure that no Western investigators ever made it down that road.

Tacitly, America had already made common cause with Rwanda’s Tutsi-led government, which was counting on the thickness of the bush at the heart of the continent to hush the agonized cries of the massacred, just as it was counting on the unending rains that fed the great river to wash away the ashes, along with every last drop of blood.

Over the next few days, tragedy turned to farce, but this being Zaire, it was never more than a reprieve. Richardson had obtained agreements from Mobutu and Kabila to meet at sea aboard a South African ship— an icebreaker no less—named the
Outeniqua.

Mobutu may have been clinging to power, but this was no ordinary procrastination. By now, he could barely stand up, and with one glance at the
Outeniqua,
he said there was no way he would be ascending the thirty-one-step gangplank to get on board. Copious amounts of time were wasted trying to devise a backup plan. Someone suggested the dying leader be hoisted aboard by crane, but the cancer had done nothing yet to diminish his vanity, and the idea was quickly discarded. In the end, a special ramp was hastily put together, allowing Mobutu to drive up the steep incline in his black limousine. He even managed a smile as he waved through the window at the mass of journalists gathered at the scene.

Kabila was already affecting the haughtiest of airs, and decided to keep people waiting for him well beyond the scheduled time for the talks to begin. When it came time for the two men to finally meet, however, his monumental arrogance did nothing to conceal his deep insecurities. Kabila was now on the verge of overthrowing Mobutu, mostly by virtue of the fact that he was the last opposition figure remaining of any historical note who had never cut a deal with him. As the two men stood on the prow of the ship, though, it was clear that Kabila, like almost every other Zairian, was in awe of the old man, sick or not. Mobutu turned toward his rival on several occasions to try to engage him, to work some combination of his immense native charm and the universal African sense that one must respect one’s elders.

Kabila, dressed in a dark blue safari suit, mugged for the cameras like an African Mussolini, but he dared not look Mobutu in the eye, not even for an instant. The man who had organized a witch hunt and pogrom back in Fizi years ago seemed deathly afraid that Mobutu, who supposedly possessed the mythical attributes of the most revered forest animals, the leopard and the eagle, would pull a sorcerer’s trick on him, perhaps transferring his disease with a magical wink and denying Kabila the victory he himself had never completely believed in.

Nelson Mandela and Richardson jointly oversaw the shipboard meeting, acting as shepherds and facilitators, but it produced nothing of real substance. The ice had been broken, but barely. There was talk of a freeze of forces on the ground, and conciliatory words from Kabila about seeing to Mobutu’s safety. The two sides said they would meet again soon, but when each departed, it was to prepare very different endgames. Mobutu wanted more than anything to avoid handing the country over to a man he believed unworthy of succeeding, never mind overthrowing, him, and thought he had a few final tricks up his sleeve.

There were 3,500 Western troops just across the river in Brazzaville. Most were from France, but the United States had sent 1,150 soldiers, and there was a smattering from other countries as well. Rumors began to circulate among usually well informed Zairians that Mobutu was secretly hoping for—or perhaps even planning—another grand bout of pillaging and that that, combined with the murder of a few white people, would draw the troops across the river to stabilize Kinshasa, at which point Kabila would not dare attack.

Whatever he had promised aboard the
Outeniqua,
Kabila’s forces never stopped their advance into positions around Kinshasa. The Zairian army had blown up a major bridge just south of Mbandaka, three hundred miles to the north, upriver from Kinshasa, to slow the AFDL’s approach along the river. The rebels had long ago become adept at fording rivers, though, and the only thing that detained them at Mbandaka was the need to dispose of a large population of Hutu stragglers, who by that point had walked a thousand miles, traversing the entire breadth of Zaire on foot, and were now hoping to cross into the Congo Republic next door.

Mbandaka became the next scene of the horrible, rolling massacres. The city was a major river port and border crossing, and, unlike places like Ubundu and Kilometer 42, was not entirely lost to time or smothered amid impassable roads and forests of elephant grass and bamboo. Local Zairians who had initially applauded the rebels’ arrival were soon horrified by the scale of the killings by Tutsi troops, and word of the atrocities spread quickly.

While Washington remained low-key, in Lubumbashi Kabila brushed off questions about the fate of the Hutu, calling it a “petit problème.” But Emma Bonino, the European Union’s humanitarian aid commissioner, qualified, saying that the zones under Kabila’s control had become a “slaughterhouse,” and international human rights networks were already beginning to insist that whoever came to power in Zaire must address what had happened at Mbandaka.

In Kinshasa, people were too concerned with their own survival to think about something as distant and abstract as massacres of foreign refugees. This was the fall of Saigon brought to Central Africa, and scenarios of disaster and dread played in everyone’s mind. Few thought that Mobutu’s army would actually make a last stand in the capital, turning it into a battlefield. Most people were fixated, instead, on the random danger and sheer chaos that another bout of pillaging would surely bring.

Hearing Elie Noël, a forty-five-year-old carpenter whose heavily varnished beds and other furniture he made cluttered the Matongé sidewalk in front of his shop, recall the last pillage, it was easy to understand the horror people feared would be repeated. “It began at six a.m. with the sound of bullets penetrating the rooftop and walls,” he said. “I heard the soldiers enter my neighbor’s house and then they were beating on my door. They took everything of value they could find, even my clothing. I was lucky that my wife and daughter had slept somewhere else the night before. Next door they raped my friend’s daughters, ten years old and twelve years old, and they made him watch.

“People denounce our soldiers as savages, but this was all done on Mobutu’s orders. The rapes and the pillaging were meant to punish us for supporting the opposition. They say he wants another round now to save himself.”

The diplomats were still pushing the idea of talks to avoid this kind of scene from transpiring. Mobutu and Kabila were to meet aboard the
Outeniqua
one more time, and with people in the president’s entourage sending their families out of the country, talk was spreading that if no agreement could be reached between the two men Mobutu would opt to fly off into exile. Kabila, sure of victory, chose to stand everyone up.

Mobutu took a short flight back to Kinshasa the next morning, cutting short the speculation about whether he would return. In the meantime, I had again spoken to General Mahélé. He was furious that Kabila had not shown up, and equally frustrated that Mobutu was showing no sign of leaving. His priority, he said, was to negotiate a peaceful handover of Kinshasa. “If I make contact with the other side I will be regarded as a traitor. But otherwise, what will tomorrow be like?” he asked, agonizing over his predicament. “Make contacts today in order to spare the city and you risk being executed. If you do nothing, there will be a great tragedy here, and you will be marginalized in the end, and perhaps executed anyway.”

I thought Mahélé was merely rehearsing his thoughts aloud for me, but the coming hours showed how far and how fast things had moved. The following day, on May 15, I was summoned to army headquarters along with a group of colleagues, ostensibly to meet with General Mahélé. Clearly, everything was in play, but we were to be given only the narrowest, most sanitized version. Mahélé’s aide, Colette Tshomba, a woman whose conspicuous elegance suggested other special missions on the general’s behalf, sternly warned us that the moment was grave, and told us to be responsible in our handling of information. “We in the government are doing the best we can do to give negotiation a chance. We do not believe in war for war’s sake. That is nonsense. We can all imagine what would happen if fighting broke out in Kinshasa.” Later I learned that Ambassador Simpson had urged Mahélé to speak directly with Kabila in order to negotiate the so-called soft landing for the city, and making use of the telephone numbers he had obtained in Lubumbashi, the ambassador was proposing to personally broker the telephone call.

The next day, Mahélé and the other top generals jointly petitioned for an urgent meeting with Mobutu to tell him bluntly and for the first time that the situation on the ground was hopeless. In a scene that brought to mind the meeting of Dorothy, the Lion and the rest of their merry band with the Wizard of Oz, Mobutu’s top generals, many of them his in-laws, and most of them perfectly useless figures, were ushered in to meet the badly diminished president at 5 p.m. The group promptly lost its nerve, or perhaps, as some suggest more skeptically, they strategically deferred to Mahélé, allowing him and him alone to stick his neck out, deliberately leaving their rival, a man Mobutu had always distrusted, way out on a limb.

Mahélé spoke forcefully, even raising his voice on occasion, straining to convince Mobutu that his survival depended upon his abandonment of power. “Vous devez partir,” you must leave now, he pronounced boldly, but with an air of loyalty. “We can no longer assure your security.” Mobutu fumed, listening silently throughout, and when Mahélé finished his soliloquy, Mobutu curtly pronounced, “Give me an hour and you will have my reply.”

One hour later the generals were summoned anew, and Mobutu intoned gravely, “I will not leave.” At that point, and for the very first time, Mahélé lost his composure, and as the generals filed out, he slammed the door. At 4 a.m., Mobutu called his generals and told them that he had changed his mind and would leave that morning. He ordered a plane to be readied for a 10 a.m. departure.

I had taken to sleeping with my cell phones by my pillow, and received first word of the second generals’ meeting with Mobutu in a late-night phone call from the aide-de-camp of General Likulia, the prime minister. He told me Mobutu would fly off the next morning for Gbadolité.

A few minutes later my phone rang again, and the news was confirmed, mournfully, by Guy Vanda. It would keep ringing through the night, as the rumor of the Leopard’s departure swept the city. There would be no public announcement, Guy told me, but if I wished to witness the president’s final flight from Kinshasa, I should be at Ndjili airport at dawn.

I shared what I knew of the situation with my friend Ofeibea, who had heard as much from a foreign airline manager who seemed to be in the know whenever something important was about to happen. The airline man generously offered us a ride to Ndjili in one of his company vans. It was about the only sure way to get near the airport on a day when anything else moving was likely to be shot at.

A half dozen or so of us crammed into the van and drove the sixteen miles through Kinshasa’s dusty, potholed streets. Zairians knew better than to be out and about, and the route was absolutely deserted. Soldiers had already been stationed at regular intervals along the route, and we could see a few photographers being attacked and arrested as they attempted to stake out positions to capture Mobutu’s motorcade on film.

Ndjili airport was deserted. There would be no pomp for Mobutu today. Our airline van deposited us at a side building a hundred yards away from the VIP entrance that the president would surely use, and as the BBC-TV people I had shared the ride with began setting up their equipment, we heard the wail of sirens, faint at first, but clearly drawing near. At the very moment Mobutu’s motorcade wheeled into view— identical black Cadillacs, a bleating ambulance and scores of outriders—a handful of soldiers who had been posted at the VIP entrance came to life and began waving at us, signaling that we should put away all of our cameras. Then some of them began running in our direction. There had been all too many moments like these during the last seven months of war in Zaire, when I did not know whether my face was going to be smashed in or indeed if there would be a tomorrow.

The streets had been absolutely clear of vehicles during our entire drive to the airport, but at that instant, as if by magic, a lone, shabby taxi appeared, and with the soldiers closing in on us, I managed to discreetly wave him to a halt. “Ofeibea, Ofeibea, come on, let’s go,” I urged my friend, but she was too valiant to allow herself to be separated from her BBC colleagues, and I jumped in the car and drove away, not knowing what would become of them.

On the long ride back to town I worked my telephones, calling Guy, who had often saved me from the SNIP and the DSP in the past. I called the British Embassy and the American Embassy, too, and told them that a news crew at the airport was in peril.

Mobutu had fled, and in a final act of vanity he had prevented anyone from filming it. The war was all but over. All that remained now was to await the rebels, whose forward positions were said to be scarcely a few miles beyond Ndjili.