Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (12 page)

The war with UNITA was understandably an obsession for the Angolan government. In 1996, there were 1.2 million displaced people in the country, amounting to 10 percent of the total population, and the government was spending over half of its budget on the military.
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Jonas Savimbi was making millions of dollars in diamond sales a year, and he had his own impressive, illegal networks for selling gems and purchasing weapons.
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Although both sides had signed a peace deal in 1994, neither side believed it would hold. A previous agreement had resulted in bloody clashes in the capital, Luanda, after Savimbi rejected elections won by his rivals.

In the fall of 1996, Kagame sent his intelligence chief to Luanda to negotiate the government of Angola’s participation in his plans. The response was cautious. The Angolan government couldn’t afford to get bogged down in a protracted war in eastern Congo while it faced Savimbi’s threat at home. “They weren’t sure; they needed a lot of convincing,” a member of the delegation later recalled.
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Angola was heavily dependent on loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; an overt intervention in a foreign country could have jeopardized its international standing.
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Angolan president Dos Santos offered a compromise. They would send the Katangan Tigers and some logistical help. The Tigers—or
diabos
, the Devils, as they liked to call themselves—were troops from southern Congo who had fought for the secession of Katanga Province in 1960. After their defeat, thousands of these troops had fled into northern Angola, where, over the years, they fought first for the Portuguese colonial government and then, after independence in 1975, for the Angolan government.

By mid-1996, Museveni and Kagame had stitched together an impressive alliance of African governments behind their drive to overthrow Mobutu. The war that started in Zaire in September 1996 was not, above all, a civil war. It was a regional conflict, pitting a new generation of young, visionary African leaders against Mobutu Sese Seko, the continent’s dinosaur. Never had so many African countries united militarily behind one cause, leading some to dub the war Africa’s World War. Unlike that war, however, the battle for the Congo would not be carried out in trenches over years, leading to millions of military casualties. Here, the battles were short and the number of soldiers killed in the thousands, figures dwarfed by the number of civilians killed. Unlike World War II, the African allies banded together not against aggressive expansionism, but against the weakness of the enemy.

The leader of this coalition was its youngest, smallest member: Rwanda. It was typical of the RPF, who had played David to Goliath several times before and would do so again later. At the outset, it seemed to be the perfect embodiment of a just war: Kigali was acting as a last resort based on legitimate security concerns.

What seems obvious in hindsight—that Mobutu’s army had been reduced to a mockery of itself, that Mobutu’s hold on power had crumbled—was a vague hypothesis in RPF intelligence briefings at the time. When Kagame told his officers that they would go all the way to Kinshasa, they nodded politely but in private shook their heads. That was a journey of over 1,000 miles, through unknown terrain, similar to walking from New York to Miami through swamps and jungles and across dozens of rivers. They would have to fight against 50,000 of Mobutu’s soldiers as well as perhaps 50,000 ex-FAR and Interahamwe. It seemed impossible. “We never thought we could make it all the way to Kinshasa,” Patrick Karegeya, the Rwandan intelligence chief, told me.

It is easy to forget, now that greed and plunder claim the headlines as the main motives for conflict in the region, that its beginnings were steeped in ideology. The Rwandan-backed invasion was perhaps the heyday of the African Renaissance, riding on the groundswell of the liberation of South Africa from apartheid, and of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Rwanda from dictatorships. It was an alliance motivated in part by the strategic interests of individual governments, but also by a larger spirit of pan-Africanism. Not since the heyday of apartheid in South Africa had the continent seen this sort of mobilization behind a cause. For the leaders of the movement, it was a proud moment in African history, when Africans were doing it for themselves in face of prevarication from the west and United Nations. Zimbabwe provided tens of millions of dollars in military equipment and cash to the rebellion. Eritrea sent a battalion from its navy to conduct covert speedboat operations on Lake Kivu. Ethiopia and Tanzania sent military advisors. President Museveni recalled: “Progressive African opinion was galvanised.”
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The optimism of the day was summed up by South Africa leader Thabo Mbeki, who just months before the beginning of the war had made his famous endorsement of pan-Africanism:

I am African.

I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.

The pain of violent conflict that the peoples of Liberia, Somalia, the Sudan,

Burundi and Algeria is a pain I also bear.

The dismal shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my continent

is a blight that we share....

Whatever the setbacks of the moment, nothing can stop us now!

Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace!

However improbable it may sound to the sceptics, Africa will prosper!
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Absent from these talks, however, were the Congolese. Their country was to be liberated for them by foreigners who knew little to nothing of their country. And of course, these foreigners would soon develop other interests than just toppling Mobutu.

Within several years, the Congo was to become the graveyard for this lofty rhetoric of new African leadership as preached by Mbeki, Albright, and many others. Freedom fighters were downgraded to mere marauding rebels; self-defense looked ever more like an excuse for self-enrichment. Leaders who had denounced the big men of Africa who stayed in power for decades began appearing more and more like the very creatures they had fought against for so many decades.

In 1996, however, the future remained bright.

4

SIX DAYS

BUKAVU, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 8, 1996

All Banyamulenge remember October 8, 1996. On that day, Lwasi Lwabanji, the vice governor of the province, made his way to the governor’s office in Bukavu in a motorcade, accompanied by a pickup bristling with soldiers. The town was alive with rumors of the impending Rwandan invasion.

Bukavu is a border town in the eastern Congo, built on five hilly peninsulas on the southern end of Lake Kivu, separated only by a narrow river from Rwanda. From the main street, one could see the Rwandan army positions in the hills to the east, low camouflaged bivouacs with soldiers milling about. A few weeks before, the Zairian army had exchanged artillery fire with these positions, provoking mortar and machine gun fire into Bukavu’s residential areas. Travelers arriving from the south brought stories of nightly infiltrations from Rwanda across the Rusizi River and fighting between Zairian troops and rebels there.

Lwabanji was of medium build, with an urbane manner he had cultivated during his studies in Kinshasa. With the military governor a thousand miles away in the capital Kinshasa, the task of dealing with the day-to-day administration of the province had fallen to him. The threat of an attack did not daunt him; on the radio, he had boasted of the Zairian army’s prowess. “We will crush Rwanda if they try something,” he promised, bolstered by the anti-Rwandan sentiment simmering in Bukavu’s streets. No one imagined that Rwanda, a country ninety times smaller, could seriously challenge Zaire—in terms of size, it would be like Switzerland trying to conquer all of western Europe.
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At the governor’s office, a crowd of local and international journalists awaited him, as well as several dozen legislators in suits and ties. The building’s conference room, like much of Zaire’s infrastructure, had fallen into disrepair. Windows were cracked or nonexistent, the yellow paint was peeling, and corridors smelled faintly of sewage. The vice governor had come to address the issue on everybody’s minds and lips: the approaching rebels, referred to by most as “the Banyamulenge.”

The Banyamulenge are a small community of Tutsi, the minority ethnic group in Rwanda, who emmigrated from Rwanda and Burundi to the Congo between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, settling in the remote highland pastures to the south of Bukavu. Only a few years earlier, most people in Bukavu had never heard of them. The war, however, catapulted them to national ignominy; it came to be known as the Banyamulenge’s war.

Lwabanji resorted to the kind of anti-Tutsi hyperbole typical of many Congolese politicians: “In some villages of the highlands in which the Banyamulenge regularly exterminate civilian population, the latter are already defending themselves with their bare hands, knives and sometimes they capture firearms from the Banyamulenge.” He cleared his throat. “I demand the population in the highlands to descend to the shores of the lake. We will consider everybody who stays in the high plateau as rebels.” Striding out through the hallway afterwards, a journalist accosted him. How much time would they give the Banyamulenge to pack their belongings and leave? “I think a week will be enough,” he said. “Six days.”
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In times of tension, radios were almost like an appendage for many Zairians, the only means of getting reliable information. The first sound in villages, before even the cock’s crow, is often the crackle of a shortwave receiver, as people tune in to the 5 o’clock Radio France International or BBC Swahili Service broadcast, which is relatively static-free in the early morning hours. In Bukavu, on their way to work, pedestrians typically walk with their radios in front of them or clasped close to their ear, listening to the news.

Many Banyamulenge heard Lwabanji’s speech huddled around radios. Others heard of it by word of mouth, the details distorted with every retelling. Within several days, the news had spread that the vice governor had tendered a six-day ultimatum for all Banyamulenge to leave for Rwanda or be attacked. Lwabanji later protested that the regrouping of the Banyamulenge community was for their own protection, and in villages in Zaire, not in Rwanda. His explanation was to little avail; for the Banyamulenge, his name was henceforth tied to eviction from their country.
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Lwabanji was not alone in singling out the Banyamulenge community. Ask a random Congolese what the root of the war was, and he or she will usually answer, “Rwanda,” or “the Banyamulenge.” As the war dragged on, their notoriety grew, spreading far afield from their home in the highlands of the eastern Congo. This despite their size: The Banyamulenge make up only several decimal points of the entire Congolese population, between 100,000 and 300,000 people out of 60 million. However, given the Banyamulenge’s close ethnic ties to the new Rwandan government—both belong largely to the Tutsi community—the war catapulted their leaders to the front of the political scene. From complete obscurity, they became arguably the country’s most hated group, attracting venom from church leaders, human rights activists, and politicians alike.

Benjamin Serukiza emerged as a leading figure in the Banyamulenge community during the war. He was vice governor of South Kivu throughout the war, representing the community at the highest level in their home province. When I saw him in his apartment in downtown Kinshasa in November 2007, he was unemployed, having left politics. Dressed in an untucked pink shirt and plastic flip-flops, he told me he was tired of politics—“that never helped us much”—and was trying to leave the Congo to get a job in an international organization.
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