Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (18 page)

Between Guevara’s departure and Kabila’s rebirth at the helm of the coalition that toppled Mobutu, there were three decades of obscurity. Kabila never stopped talking about the revolution, sporadically mobilizing fighters and making the rounds of regional embassies and government for support. But the élan of his early years had waned; the charismatic revolutionary had lost his shine and began to look more and more like a common bandit. The nadir was perhaps reached in 1975, when Kabila’s forces snuck into Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research camp in western Tanzania and kidnapped four American and Dutch students. They subjected their captives to lectures on Marxism and Leninism while demanding a ransom of $500,000. This was the last straw for Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, who had been tolerating the rebels out of disdain for Mobutu. At one point, he had complained to the Cuban ambassador about their behavior: He described their emissaries as “always drunk, with women, partying all the time, going frequently to Cairo.”
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Back in the Congo, Kabila’s activities were hardly more popular. In the late 1970s, Kabila tried to consolidate his power by launching a campaign against witch doctors, whom he considered a bad influence and a challenge to his rule. He ordered a strong herbal drink to be concocted, a sort of truth potion that would trigger dizziness and nausea in wizards. Of course, the herbs themselves were so strong that they elicited this response from almost anybody. According to eyewitnesses, hundreds of elderly men and women were tied to stakes and burned.
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With his prospects of rebellion dwindling and his reputation tarnished, Kabila retreated to Dar es Salaam, where he had good contacts with the Tanzanian intelligence service. They provided him with a house and a diplomatic passport and allowed him to take on a more laid-back lifestyle. He had a vintage typewriter, on which he would bang out letters to regional leaders and his commanders in the field. The few writings that remain from this time indicate his attempts to establish himself as a revolutionary intellectual, using ornate prose and Marxist jargon.

It was this role of political operative that he felt most comfortable in, traveling throughout the region, exaggerating his military exploits and prowess, writing letters to friendly leftist governments in Africa and abroad. He spent little time in the bush, preferring to hopscotch through the socialist world in search of support for his rebellion. He traveled to China for seven months and made visits to Cairo, Nairobi, and Belgrade.

At home, his family life was complicated by his fondness for women. He had affairs with his two live-in Congolese maids, Vumilia and Kessia, who “were promoted” to wives, and squabbles between them and his first wife, Sifa, sparked tensions in the household. In total, Kabila would have at least twenty-four children with six women, creating endless family intrigue and drama, especially after he became president. He had behaved similarly in the field. According to accounts that filtered out from his commanders, Kabila would resort to a Mobutist subterfuge, regularly sleeping with his commanders’ wives as a display of power and humiliation.
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In the summer of 1995, Kabila’s stars aligned. He was restless, following the BBC news broadcasts from Rwanda and eastern Zaire several times a day and pestering his friends in the Tanzanian intelligence service with phone calls about what they might know. No Congolese rebellion could ever succeed without outside help, he often told these friends. The last such support had come from the Chinese and the Cubans in the 1960s. Now it seemed that Rwanda and others were gearing up to make the push.

Then, one afternoon, the Rwandan intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, turned up at Kabila’s house in the leafy Oyster Bay neighborhood of Dar es Salaam in the company of several Tanzanian officials. The veteran Congolese rebel was in a talkative mood, his spirits lifted by the possibility of renewed support. He explained that he still had several thousand troops he could mobilize in the Fizi area of South Kivu. “He was just happy that somebody was visiting him and asking him about his ideas,” Karegeya remembered. The aging rebel, perhaps thinking he was speaking to someone from the same bloodline, invoked his anti-imperialist struggle and lambasted Mobutu’s links to the west. He dug among his chest of papers to come up with some of his revolutionary pamphlets, and he even talked military strategy, proposing flanking maneuvers of the refugee camps and tactical feints.

To Karegeya, who, like most of his RPF colleagues, had by then endorsed the maxims of free-market capitalism, the “old man seemed like a relic of the past.” Kabila didn’t convince Karegeya, but then again, “we weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.”

Karegeya later sent emissaries to Fizi to find Kabila’s rebels. His men spent weeks climbing mountains and trekking through forests on promises by their guides that the following day the rebels would appear. After several months, they gave up. And yet Karegeya persisted with Kabila. Many Congolese, especially those close to veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, now accuse Rwanda of having deliberately chosen a weak and marginal figure in order to manipulate him. The Rwandan government did, however, try to reach out to other leaders, including Tshisekedi, without much luck.
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Karegeya laughed at me when I questioned their choice of a rebel leader. “You act like we had a lot of options! By 1996, Mobutu had co-opted or locked up almost all of his opposition, with the possible exception of Tshisekedi. Kabila might have been old-school, but he had not been bought off. We gave him some credit for that.”

Kabila arrived in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, from Dar es Salaam in July 1996 with almost nothing. He shacked up in a safe house in the affluent Kiyovu neighborhood of downtown Kigali, with a couple of suitcases. His only companions were his son, Joseph Kabila, who followed him everywhere, and several of his old rebel commanders, who “came in and out of the house, looking like janitors who had lost their brooms,” as one Rwandan officer commented.

The Rwandans had picked four strange bedfellows to lead the rebellion. Besides Kabila, there was Deo Bugera, the architect from North Kivu; Andre Kisase Ngandu, a bearded and aging commander who was leading a rebellion in the Ruwenzori Mountains, on Congo’s border with Uganda, and like Kabila traced his roots back to the rebellions of the 1960s, although he at least could still count several hundred active rebels under his command; and Anselme Masasu, a taciturn twenty-some-year-old from Bukavu who had a Rwandan mother and at the time was a sergeant in the Rwandan army. Years later, Bugera laughed when he heard Masasu’s name. “You know he ended up being a popular commander, very popular. But then, he was a kid! They said he had a political party, but he was the only member in it.”

Bugera remembered his first meeting with Kabila: “He was wearing sandals and one of those safari suits. He had uncut, blackened—I tell you, blackened!—toenails that stuck out over the end of his sandals. What a strange man, I thought! He didn’t look you in the eyes when he talked.” Bugera, who seemed privately to have hoped to become the rebellion’s leader, had heard about Kabila in the 1980s but nothing about him since then. According to Bugera, Kabila was so cash-strapped that Bugera bought him some shoes and a safari suit at the local market.

These four men—two overhauled, aging guerrilla commanders, a twentysomething sergeant, and an architect—were meant to lift the Congo up out of its political morass.

In Kigali, the Rwandans embarked on some much-needed bonding exercises with their newly recruited rebel leaders.

“The Rwandans are weird,” Bugera said. “They made us stay in a house together for three or four whole days, sleeping there, eating there, and preparing the war. They wanted us to become a team.”

It must have been a strange few days. Bugera remembered Kabila as a largely silent man, listening to and observing his new comrades. Like an outmoded professor, Kabila distributed green pamphlets printed on cheap paper with his seven lessons of revolutionary ideology. Masasu skulked about in his neatly pressed fatigues, speaking mostly with the Rwandan officers who came in and out of the house, and keeping his distance from the two rebels thirty years his senior. Bugera huddled with other Tutsi leaders, who muttered bitterly about Kabila’s massacres of Banyamulenge in the 1960s. The alliance had gotten off to a shaky start.

After several days, they finally came up with the one-page founding document the Rwandans had asked them to draft. They shared it with Colonel James Kabarebe, the commander of the Rwandan presidential guard who was preparing the Congo mission. He helped them polish it and added a Congolese dateline to mask Rwanda’s involvement in their movement; the paper became known as the Lemera Agreement.
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Kabila’s outdated verbosity shines through the text: It speaks of the “imperious necessity” for their four political parties to come together to liberate Zaire and names Laurent Kabila as their spokesman. It laments the economic situation, marked by “doldrums, financial muddle, corruption and the destruction of the means of production.”

The four leaders met three times with Vice President Kagame, who was constantly involved in the war preparations and seemed well-informed of the complexities of Congolese politics. The RPF strongman seemed more enthusiastic about the rebellion than the leaders themselves, exhorting the Congolese to understand their responsibilities in the struggle, but also to understand that the RPF and others were helping them liberate their country. He said, “If we win the war, we will all win! It’s
our
victory!”

Thus was born the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL). A grandiose name for a group that initially had little political or military significance other than providing a smoke screen for Rwandan and Ugandan involvement.

At the beginning, Kabila felt awkward and marginalized. He had worked with Tutsi rebels in the 1960s, when some had fled the pogroms in Rwanda into the Congo, but he had not been in touch with this new, younger, cosmopolitan generation of rebels. They worked with laptop computers and satellite phones and organized their soldiers on the model of the British army. Even their marching style was different, he noticed.