Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (24 page)

Nabyolwa was in downtown Bukavu when the rebels finally reached town, entering across the Rwandan border and from the south at the same time. He raced in his pickup to Hotel Residence, a large monolith on the main strip where the army high command had rented apartments. His commanding officer had barricaded himself there, swearing that he would not abandon his position. Nabyolwa rushed into his room, urging him to order a tactical retreat. His commander refused, saying that they would still be able to hold the town. Exasperated, Nabyolwa took him out to the balcony, from where they could see Rwandan troops swarming into town. As they stood on the balcony, a rocket-propelled grenade hit the wall just meters away from them, knocking them both to the ground. Convinced, the general informed his staff to prepare a hasty withdrawal to a suburb on a hill adjacent to Bukavu, from where they would be able to prepare a counterattack.

The army high command piled into their military jeeps and screeched out of town, only to find that most of the army had already fled to the military barracks to the north. The situation, however, was not favorable for a counterattack. In the barracks, the terrified soldiers milled about with their wives and children. Their belongings—and also pillaged goods, Nabyolwa suspected—lay strewn about the parade grounds. It was impossible to envision a counterattack in these conditions, he thought. Nonetheless, and against his advice, his commander gave orders for the soldiers to line up in preparation for an attack. They finally got the unit commanders to present themselves at the front of the parade grounds, but their soldiers balked, leaving their officers standing alone, looking sheepish in the middle of the pitch. “My general was convinced that we had an army—we didn’t,” Nabyolwa recalled.

They beat a further retreat to the Kavumu airport eighteen miles to the north of town, where Kinshasa had promised to send them reinforcements. There they found one of the most formidable pieces left in Mobutu’s arsenal, a fifteen-meter-long BM-30 Smerch rocket launcher with twelve barrels. His commander grinned and told Nabyolwa, much to his dismay, “We will use this to bomb Bukavu.” Nabyolwa, who still had relatives and family members in town, retorted: “That doesn’t make any sense. We will just kill civilians and destroy houses!” An order is an order, the general insisted, and they prepared a column to drive toward Bukavu to find an appropriate place from which to bomb the town.

Halfway into town, the general pulled up alongside Nabyolwa, who was driving in the middle of the convoy in a pickup, and ordered him to lead the offensive. “You want your operational commander to be the first to die in battle?” Nabyolwa fulminated. That was it: He stopped his vehicle and handed the keys over to his general. “I wasn’t going to die like that,” he remembered. He did not want to cross the line between bravery and stupidity. “If he wanted to lead the offensive, he was more than welcome.”

Nabyolwa began walking back toward the airport on foot. He found the bulk of his troops at a crossroads together with hundreds of Rwandan refugees, debating whether to head north toward the airport or west into the equatorial rainforests. After some deliberation, they headed over the mountains into the inhospitable jungles. Naby joined them, climbing into a jeep belonging to a presidential guard commander.

In the meantime, the BM-30’s electrical system short-circuited, and the hapless general fled toward the airport. Instead of taking the road westward into the jungles, however, he decided to head northward along Lake Kivu to Goma, where he thought he might still be able to join other units to resist the Rwandan invasion. Over his radio, Nabyolwa heard of his commander’s decision and felt a pang of remorse. He was sure that Goma would soon fall as well and the general would then be stuck between two enemy contingents. In a small village sixty miles into the jungle, Nabyolwa told the presidential guard unit that they needed to return to get the general. It was the last straw for the soldiers, who thought it was suicidal to go back. They turned their guns on him.

“They didn’t make any sense,” Nabyolwa remembered. “First they accused me of deserting—which was strange coming from a bunch of deserters. Then they said I wanted to kill them by going back. Finally, an officer said, ‘We think you are a traitor. Every time you send us into battle, we get attacked!’

“‘But that’s what war is about!’

“‘You are a sadist!’”

Faced with this kind of logic, all Nabyolwa could do was to persuade them that, instead of killing him, it would be wiser to arrest him and take him to their commanding officer.

On the other side of the battlefield, the troops were being led by men a generation younger than the Zairian generals.

On the face of it, the Rwandan-led invasion was an amalgam of different nationalities, chains of command, and military cultures. There were Ugandan artillery units, Eritrean speedboats, Tanzanian military advisors, and Congolese soldiers. When it came down to it, however, the people calling the shots were Rwandans, at least for the first half of the war. The thirty-three-year-old in charge of operations on the ground was Colonel James Kabarebe, the former commander of Kagame’s guard.

Kabarebe’s reputation is legendary in the region, to the extent where people only refer to him by his first name, “James” or “Jamesi.” Just a second lieutenant when the RPF invaded the north of Rwanda in 1990, he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel by the time they captured Kigali in 1994.
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According to Congolese officers who worked with him, he led by example, often eating with his officers and going to the front line to lead offensives. In tactical meetings, he would typically defer to his colleagues for their opinions, and he was thus able to cultivate a loyal following among young Congolese army officers.

At the beginning of operations, Kabarebe asked Laurent Kabila whether his son Joseph could join him at the front. Joseph was the one family member the old revolutionary had brought with him to Kigali, and the twenty-five-year-old began popping up on the periphery of officials’ vision in 1996. An academic remembers being driven from Kigali by a monosyllabic Joseph to meet his father in Goma; a Kenyan security officer recalls drinking with Joseph in a bar in Kampala along with other military officers.

Kabarebe now wanted Joseph to accompany him to witness military operations in the Congo. “I told Kabila that Joseph had to learn the military profession and that the AFDL was the best school. He finally accepted.”
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According to Kabarebe, his young disciple did not take readily to soldiering. When he heard gunfire, he would panic. “He had the hardest time learning how to fight.”

Life at the front was different from Laurent Kabila’s more languid existence in Dar es Salaam. The Rwandan-led troops had some tents and tarpaulins and would bivouac their troops wherever they could find cover. But the fighting had started in September, at the beginning of the rainy season. There were downpours almost every evening, drenching the soldiers and infusing a fetid dampness into their clothes and belongings. Blow flies and jiggers deposited maggots under their skin, leading to infected, suppurating wounds.

The rain made it almost impossible to pass along the roads. Troops spent days getting trucks unstuck and over faulty bridges, and soldiers were forced to carry most of their belongings on their heads. Most threw their socks away after a few weeks and marched on, barefoot in Wellington boots, accumulating blisters and calluses. At night, they lashed together lean-tos out of banana leaves and sticks or occupied abandoned buildings.

There was little to eat. The troops had to rely largely on what they could find locally, and their path had been ravaged by several hundred thousand Congolese and Rwandan people fleeing the fighting. The fields had been uprooted, the fish ponds emptied, and the houses plundered. When they were lucky, they would stumble on stocks abandoned by humanitarian workers, in particular the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Then, for several weeks the staple diet of the soldiers became U.S., FDA-approved surplus cornmeal, vegetable oil, and kidney beans. For officers, dessert might be nutritional milk for infants mixed with sugar and coffee, along with some energy biscuits.

Most fighting along the eastern border at the beginning was carried out by Rwandan army troops along with Congolese Tutsi who had joined in the run-up to the rebellion. By October 1996, however, the first batch of new Congolese recruits had graduated from the two training camps the AFDL had set up in Nyaleke, North Kivu, and Kidote, South Kivu. Thousands of teenagers joined the rebellion, outfitted in neatly pressed green uniforms with Wellington boots. They advanced almost solely on foot—airplanes were expensive and used mostly by officers and elite units—singing songs and balancing ammunition boxes on their heads.
Mobailo
, they called it, the forced march that could cover forty or more miles in a day. They borrowed names they heard on the radio for feared fighters: “
Biso toza ba Taliban
” (we are Taliban), they told villagers. Several of them gave themselves nicknames of international bad guys; Ghadaffi was a popular one. Later in the war, Osamas began popping up. Years later, some Congolese villagers told me that the leader of the AFDL troops in their area had been Rambo or Chuck Norris.

In February, the troops were joined by over a thousand Katangan Tigers, old and young, flown in on cargo planes from Angola. The mention of the Katangan Tigers provokes a great deal of hilarity with Rwandan officers. “Eh! Tigers! Those guys caused us a lot of trouble,” the member of the Rwandan command told me. “They were old men who fought with all kinds of magic amulets, believing they would be made invincible to bullets.” Despite the Rwandans’ jokes, however, not all Tigers were geriatric and useless. Many of the second-generation Tigers had been given thorough training in the Angolan army and were in their twenties and thirties at the beginning of the war.
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It was these Portuguesespeaking exiles that the Angolan government planned on sending to join Kagame’s alliance.

There were few memorable battles for the rebels as they crossed the country. Bukavu was one of the fiercer ones, as the Zairian army tried to put up some resistance; later, they knew better. Goma fell quickly as a result of treason, as Mobutu’s officers sold equipment and intelligence to their enemies in the months prior to the invasion and then did little to defend the town. Simultaneously, Ugandan troops had crossed the border to the north and taken the town of Mahagi with only thirty soldiers. A rebel commander told me that three of his men on a motorcycle defeated two hundred Mobutu soldiers in another town in the northeast.

Where there was resistance, it was often because of foreign troops. Rwandan ex-FAR were fighting alongside the Zairian army, trying to protect the retreating refugees. In Kindu, along the upper reaches of the Congo River, over a thousand ex-FAR joined Mobutu’s troops, although they were poorly coordinated and soon scattered.
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Mobutu’s officers, however, had not given up. They decided to make a stand in Kisangani, the country’s third largest city and the gateway to the east, located at a bend in the Congo River. The city had a long airstrip and was a major river port. The army’s high command flew in reinforcements and also mined the airport and the main roads leading to town from the east. Diplomats speculated that Mobutu would be history if the town fell.