Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (14 page)

Sitting on his beige, faux-leather sofa, Serukiza sought out dates like rosary beads, fingering them for reassurance and circling back to them as the conversation went on. April 24, 1990: That was a big one, he nodded. Mobutu, a deeply superstitious man who employed at different points in time West African marabouts (Muslim religious mystics), Indian gurus, and Catholic priests, chose the date because it contained the number four, a lucky number for him. He had been born on October 4, 1930; his first coup d’état took place on September 14, 1960, his second on November 24, 1965.

This date, as opposed to the others, was a black day for Mobutu. After twenty-five years of autocratic misrule, his grip on power had slipped. The cold war—in which he had masterfully positioned himself as an ally of the west, garnering billions of dollars in aid—had come to an end. Several months before, his friend the Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu was accused of abuse of power and put in front of a firing squad with his wife, an event that deeply affected Mobutu. Shocked, he watched on television as Romanian soldiers manhandled the dictator’s limp, bloody body. Pressure was already coming from the United States, Belgium, and France, which had all supported him for many years, to reform. The economy had stagnated. Congolese wages were lower than at independence thirty years earlier. Inflation had climbed to over 500 percent.

“
Comprenez mon emotion
,” went his now legendary appeal to the country on national television, wiping a tear from beneath his glasses. A rumble went through the rows of his loyalists who had lined up in the Nsele Party headquarters: They could not believe their ears. After twenty-three years of one-party rule—every man, woman, child, and even corpse was constitutionally required to be a member of the Popular Revolutionary Movement (MPR)—he legalized other political parties and stepped down from the helm of his own. Several months later, under continued domestic and international pressure, he bowed to the demand for a national conference of civic leaders that would name a prime minister and draft a new constitution, paving the way for elections.

“You know, for westerners democracy is a good thing. But I don’t think for you and us that wonderful word means the same thing,” Serukiza said. As his power slipped in the late 1980s, Mobutu began to pit different communities throughout the country against each other in order to distract from opposition against his regime. The advent of democracy saw mass mobilization, often along ethnic lines, and the autocrat tried to take advantage of these communal cleavages to divide his opposition. For the Banyamulenge, this divide-and-rule gambit focused on their citizenship and thus their eligibility for taking part in elections. Already in 1982, their candidates were barred from running for office in the MPR’s central committee because of their “dubious citizenship.” Serukiza laughed. “Oh God, that term has plagued us!”

The transition to a multiparty democracy only made things worse for the Banyamulenge population. In 1989, playing to anti-Tutsi sentiment in the East, Mobutu promised to settle the citizenship question once and for all by conducting an “identification of citizens” in the East. This despite the existence of dozens of other cross-border communities elsewhere in the country—the Kongo people, for example, regularly cross back and forth into the Congo from Angola, and the Nande migrate back and forth from Uganda.

The 1989 census ended in disaster. While Tutsi in Kinshasa and in some villages in the Kivus were given identification cards, others were turned back. Thousands of Banyamulenge in Uvira were refused citizenship.
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According to Serukiza, the authorities tried to force a special identification card on his village, which left them with an ambiguous status. “It didn’t say we were foreigners, but it wasn’t the usual ID either.” At the time a fresh graduate from the University of Lubumbashi with a degree in international relations, he rallied fifteen Banyamulenge leaders to boycott the registration. The authorities called in the army and arrested the chiefs, while Serukiza only barely escaped, jumping from an army truck and hiding in the houses of local family members. He then fled to neighboring Burundi.

The National Sovereign Conference, widely hailed as a success for stemming Mobutu’s authoritarianism, was another setback for Congolese Tutsi. Under pressure from other communities in the Kivus, all Tutsi delegates were banned from participating in the conference, where over 3,000 delegates convened to discuss the country’s future. A special subcommission was created to deal with citizenship. The opposition, initially sympathetic to the Tutsi’s entreaties, backpedaled to gain the support of the large and important Kivu delegation.

The Tutsi’s woes may have gone unaddressed if not for developments in Zaire’s two tiny neighbors to the east. Since independence, the fates of Rwanda and Burundi had diverged. Both countries were former Belgian colonies inhabited by a Hutu majority and a Tutsi minority, but in Burundi the Tutsi elite had held power since independence, while in its neighbor to the north a Hutu government had ruled. In Rwanda, Hutu governments had led pogroms against the Tutsi. In Burundi military juntas organized the mass killing of Hutu in 1972 and 1988. These dynamics reinforced each other: For the Rwandan Hutu, the killings of their brethren to the south was a portent of what might happen if Tutsi came to power there; the opposite mind game was occurring among the Tutsi leaders of Burundi.

In October 1993, Burundi’s first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated just months after his inauguration, prompting a spate of ethnic violence that drove tens of thousands of Hutu into Zaire. Less than a year later, the Rwandan genocide sent another million Hutu into camps across the border.

“Life became unbearable for us,” Serukiza recalled. “The Rusizi plain [forming the border between Zaire, Burundi, and Rwanda] became white like snow with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees tents. The refugees’ slogan was: ‘They are still alive?’” The sizable Banyamulenge population in Uvira was harassed and threatened. He recalled his mother not being able to leave the house to go to the market and being forced to ask neighbors to buy food for them.

With over half a million Tutsi massacred in Rwanda, the threat to the Congolese Tutsi was not hypothetical. Hutu militia posted a sign at the Cyangugu/ Bukavu border as a reminder: “Attention Zaireans and Bantu people! The Tutsi assassins are out to exterminate us. For centuries, the ungrateful and unmerciful Tutsi have used their powers, daughters and corruption to subject the Bantu. But we know the Tutsi, that race of vipers, drinkers of untrue blood. We will never allow them to fulfill their dreams in Kivuland.”
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The influx of refugees further poisoned relations between the Tutsi and other communities, while politicians in Kinshasa cynically drew on anti-Tutsi sentiment to boost their popularity. After sending a commission to the Kivus to figure out what to do about the refugee camps, Mobutu’s government voted on simultaneous resolutions on April 28, 1995, regarding citizenship and the refugee crisis.
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The resolutions demanded “the repatriation, without condition or delay, of all Rwandan and Burundian refugees and immigrants.”
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In case there was any misunderstanding, Uvira’s mayor issued a circular to his officers, responding to a Banyamulenge letter of protest: “I have the honor to transmit the memorandum of a certain ethnicity unknown in Zaire called Banyamulenge. ... I should also add that at the latest by 31.12.1995, they will all be chased from the national territory.”
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Kinshasa asked administrative officials to catalogue all property and real estate belonging to this group of “refugees and immigrants”—clearly understood in the Kivus to include the Banyamulenge—in view of their expropriation. In Bukavu, officials drew up lists of all Tutsi living in their respective neighborhoods.

Anti-Tutsi sentiment was exacerbated by a small group of Banyamulenge youths who, seeking adventure and responding to the call of their kin across the border, left in the early 1990s to join the RPF rebellion in neighboring Rwanda. Between 300 and 1,000 Banyamulenge joined this insurgency, although most did so surreptitiously, even stealing money from their families before quietly sneaking across the border at night.
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To many Congolese the Banyamulenge’s participation in the RPF war smacked of treason and reinforced their belief that, in their heart of hearts, the Banyamulenge were Rwandan.

In 1994, with the town of Uvira teeming with Hutu refugees from Rwanda and Burundi, Serukiza decided to leave for Rwanda with his wife and sister-in-law. He smiled, “We had to give my sister a different name for the bus manifest.” He laughed: “Her real name was Nyira Batutsi—that wouldn’t pass.” They changed her name to Chantal. At the border in Bukavu, Mobutu’s soldiers stopped him and stripped him of his Zairian ID and his briefcase, which contained his only copy of his university dissertation on Banyamulenge history. “You are no longer Zairian. You don’t need this anymore,” they told him.

5

ONION LAYERS

MUSHAKI, ZAIRE, AND KIGALI, RWANDA, OCTOBER 1993

Like layers of an onion, the Congo war contains wars within wars. There was not one Congo war, or even two, but at least forty or fifty different, interlocking wars. Local conflicts fed into regional and international conflicts and vice versa. Teasing out origins can be a tail-chasing exercise. In my interviews, I often made the mistake of asking the interviewee to start from the beginning. “The beginning?” A look of bemused condescension would follow—what does this young foreigner know about our beginnings? “Good idea. Well, in 1885, at the Conference of Berlin. ...” Others would start with Mobutu’s coup d’état in 1965 or independence in 1960.

Deogratias Bugera offered a rough date: October 1993.
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That month—he could not remember the exact date—in the muddy market town of Mushaki, in the eastern highlands, he loaded up ten truckloads of young Tutsi and sent them to join the rebellion in Rwanda to topple President Habyarimana’s regime. Three years later, Bugera and the young Congolese Tutsi he mobilized would become the vanguard in a second rebellion, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL). After liberating Rwanda, they now wanted to do the same with their homeland, with the strong backing of their Rwandan allies.

Bugera was one of the four founders of the AFDL, which was formed in Kigali in the dry season of 1996. “The only surviving founder,” he reminded me when I met him in the Sandton luxury shopping mall, one of the well-protected gated communities around which the Johannesburg upper-class social scene is based. He laughed: “The last of my cofounders was killed in January 2001.” Several years after the creation of the AFDL, Bugera had fallen out with both Laurent Kabila and the Rwandans and left for a cozy exile in South Africa, where he reverted to his previous profession as an architect. Now balding and in his early fifties, he was wearing a blue polo shirt with a beige cardigan draped over his shoulders. He spoke slowly and deliberately, and had a dazed look about him.

For Bugera, as for many Congolese Tutsi, politics had not been his chosen vocation; he had been born into it. “It was a fact of life for us; you were involved, whether you liked it or not.” His grandfather, a traditional chief in North Kivu Province, had died during a hunger strike in 1924, protesting the resettlement policies of the Belgian colonizers. When Bugera was five years old, at the time of Congolese independence, his father was killed during a bout of communal violence, as people from neighboring communities rebelled against Rwandan immigrants. Bugera remembered seeing his father bludgeoned to death and thrown into a lake. He and dozens of other children were rushed to the nearby swamps, where their parents hoped the reeds and water would muffle the infants’ cries and hide their smell. “They used dogs to hunt us down,” Bugera said. “I can still remember the sound of the dogs barking and howling.”

He initially tried to escape the turmoil of North Kivu, traveling to Kinshasa, a thousand miles away, to study architecture at the national university. Even there, however, he discovered he could not escape politics. In 1982, a group of Mobutu loyalists from the Kivus launched Operation R-B, targeting people they said were students from Rwanda and Burundi. Many Tutsi were forced to hide or be beaten by a crowd of angry students. Sympathetic friends smuggled Bugera out of his house on the floor of a car’s backseat.

Bugera returned to the Kivus in the mid-1980s and tried once again to leave politics and pursue his career as an architect. He received a grant from a Canadian charity to begin a cattle ranching project with peasants in Masisi, and he became the real estate advisor to one of the large banks in Goma. One of Bugera’s former colleagues told me, “Bugera was never a politician. He was a businessman who was forced into politics. But he didn’t have the acumen for it. Politics in the Congo doesn’t work like a business ledger, where you can add up the pluses and minuses and get a logical result. You have to be able to understand political intrigue and outplay your opponent.” Bugera, his former colleague told me, thought that he could force reconciliation on the Congolese. “How can you stick a gun to someone’s head and tell them to love you? It doesn’t work.”
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