Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (15 page)

“Do you really think you can get this right?” Bugera asked me over the dinner table, pointing at the notes I was scribbling into my notebook. Like many of the people I interviewed, Bugera was skeptical that I could represent the complexity of his history.

“It is true that the Tutsi killed,” Bugera told me at one point. “But we all had brothers, schoolmates, uncles who had been killed. It’s all part of a whole. Can you portray that to your readers in Arizona or Berlin? Can you make them understand why someone would kill?”

The history of the Tutsi community in North Kivu is drastically different from that of the Banyamulenge in South Kivu, although both groups are labeled “Tutsi” by other Congolese. Both communities, despite their tiny size, played prominent roles in the Congo wars.

The problems in North Kivu can be dated to 1908, when the new Belgian colonial government took over the reins from Congo Free State. Under this new administration, thousands of Belgians escaped the industrial drudgery of their homeland to set up cattle ranches and plantations in the province’s highlands. In 1928, the government created the National Committee of the Kivus, a charter company that granted itself “all vacant lands” in the region. In practice, this meant that any piece of land that was not being farmed belonged to the state. In a region where traditional chiefs owned all land, including forest, fallow farmland, and empty fields, this was tantamount to mass theft. The newcomers got much of the best farm and cattle land, expropriating a chunk of land larger than all of Belgium.
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The Belgians were then confronted with a lack of labor. The local Hunde and Nyanga communities wanted to farm their own fields, and the Belgians were wary of peasant revolts if they began exacting too much labor from locals. In 1937, they found the solution: By bringing in tens of thousands of Rwandans, whom they had long admired as industrious, the Belgians would create a large pool of loyal workers. It would also alleviate overpopulation and periodic famine in Rwanda. Over the next twenty years, the Mission d’ Immigration des Banyarwanda imported around 175,000 Rwandans—mostly Hutu, but also many Tutsi—to the Kivu highlands.
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Unrest in Rwanda around its independence prompted a further 100,000 Rwandans to flee to the Congo between 1959 and 1964. They were settled initially by the United Nations but eventually integrated into local communities. This second wave of immigrants around independence included many affluent and well-educated Tutsi who came to form an important part of the Goma elite. The 1970 census found 335,000 Rwandans living in the Congo, mostly in the territory of Masisi, where they made up over 70 percent of the population.
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By 1990, an estimated half million descendants of Rwandan immigrants were living in North Kivu.
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This massive influx caused bitter tensions with the local Hunde community, which had been living in Masisi for centuries. The Belgians leased land from the local traditional chief for a pittance and created the independent but short-lived chiefdom of Gishali, which was ruled by a Tutsi immigrant. The lease of land became permanent, and Hutu farmers and Tutsi ranchers came to dominate the local economy.

The newcomers constituted a strong lobby with considerable influence over Mobutu, who in turn found them to be useful allies. From 1969 to 1977, Barthélémy Bisengimana, a Rwandan immigrant and the president’s influential chief of staff, played an important role in promoting his community’s interests. Mobutu adopted a law in 1971 that granted blanket citizenship to all Rwandans and Burundians who had been in the Congo since 1960. Perhaps most importantly, when Mobutu expropriated all foreign businesses in 1973, it was the Tutsi elite in North Kivu who benefited. In Masisi, 90 percent of all large plantations—almost half of all the land—came to be owned by these immigrants or their descendants. By contrast, in South Kivu, the Banyamulenge were largely rural, uneducated, and relatively poor.

The ascendance of the Tutsi in North Kivu helps explain the virulent backlash against them. A diligent student of Machiavelli—
The Prince
could often be seen on his bedside table—Mobutu had mastered the art of divide-and-rule politics. In 1981, Mobutu reversed the citizenship law, decreeing that citizenship had to be obtained upon individual application and was only available for those who could trace their Congolese ancestry back to 1885. In theory, this not only stripped most Hutu and Tutsi in Masisi of their citizenship but also expropriated much of their property, since only Congolese could own such large concessions under the new law.
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For the “immigrants,” although most did not lose their land, this legal back and forth only underlined how tenuous their status was.

As with the Banyamulenge, the democratization process put the citizenship question front and center in North Kivu politics. In March 1993, goaded on by local politicians who reminded their communities of the land expropriation by the Rwandan immigrants, Hunde and Nyanga mobs launched attacks against Hutu and Tutsi, who fought back with their own militia and by buying protection from the national army. Somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 people had been killed by the end of the year.
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Deogratias Bugera had by this time become a member of the local Tutsi elite and helped coordinate its armed resistance. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was involved in a major offensive against Habyarimana’s regime in neighboring Rwanda. As opposed to the Banyamulenge, who had mostly lost contact with relatives in Rwanda, the Tutsi in North Kivu still had family across the border. As Zaire became increasingly hostile toward them, the allure of joining a Tutsi liberation army grew. Bugera became involved in helping to recruit young Tutsi to join the RPF, hoping that they could create a safe haven in Rwanda and—perhaps—return to do the same in North Kivu.

The RPF recruitment was a slick, well-organized operation. Since the early days of their rebellion, the RPF Radio Muhabura (“Radio Beacon”) broadcast on shortwave throughout North Kivu, providing the RPF’s version of the war and encouraging young men to take up arms to overthrow Habyarimana. At the village level in Rwanda and the Congo, they created
umuryango
(“family”) cells to mobilize new recruits and finances for their rebellion. “Each of our families gave whatever they could give to sponsor the movement. We held folk dances for fundraising and listened to RPF tapes smuggled across the border with songs and speeches on them,” Bugera remembered, smiling.

Bugera had his first contact with the RPF through an affluent friend, whose family had helped fund the rebels since their creation. In 1993, Bugera sent the first batch of 172 recruits across the border along with enough money to pay for uniforms and weapons. He traveled with the convoy to the border, where he bribed the Zairian soldiers with $11,000 to allow the recruits through. He laughed when he told the story: “They arrested me on the way back! One of the soldiers hadn’t gotten his cut. It was all about money, just money for them.”

Every Friday, the highland town of Mushaki held a large market where many Tutsi brought their cows, milk, and cheese to sell. With the RPF recruitment drive, this market also became the assembly point for young Tutsi who wanted to join the rebellion. Every week, Bugera loaded two or three trucks full of young men and sent them on their way across the border.
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In Kinshasa, I was eventually able to track down Papy Kamanzi, one of hundreds of young Tutsi Bugera had helped recruit for the Rwandan rebellion in 1993 and who had later joined the AFDL.

Papy had come to Kinshasa to be integrated into the national army, and I met him on the second-floor terrace of a bar in a busy, popular neighborhood. “Do they know you are Tutsi?” I asked, motioning toward the waiters milling around. He smiled conspiratorially. “No, they don’t know. People here can’t tell. They think all Tutsi look like Paul Kagame, tall with thin noses.” By 2007, when I met him, there had been several bouts of anti-Tutsi violence in the capital, and I was surprised at how relaxed he was moving about the bustling markets and backstreets
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Then again, he did not conform to the received Tutsi stereotypes: He was short with a broad nose and spoke relatively fluent Lingala, the language of Congo’s capital. Nonetheless, he grew quiet when the waiter came close to us, pausing until he had finished pouring our soft drinks. When Papy did speak, he turned his face slightly away from me, toward the bubbling street noise to make sure the other tables didn’t hear him.

Papy’s family had come from Rwanda to the highlands of North Kivu in the 1950s, brought by a Belgian Trappist monk, whose Flemish name tripped up his tongue: Jean de Bertersfeld. Papy’s father looked after the monks’ cattle and plantation and married a local Tutsi woman. Being part of a minority community in such a turbulent area means living in a pressure cooker in which family loyalty means everything; Papy could recite his clan genealogy six generations back.