Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (25 page)

Mobutu’s generals began frantically organizing other foreign support. Using their contacts in Belgrade and Paris, they managed to hire around 280 mercenaries, mostly French and Serbs, under the command of Belgian colonel Christian Tavernier, along with some attack helicopters and artillery.
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It was too little, too late. The area they had to cover was too large, and the Zairian army too disorganized for them to have much impact. The soldiers of fortune were also perhaps not of the best quality. A French analyst described them as a mixture between “Frederick Forsyth’s ‘dogs of war’ and the Keystone Kops.” He went on to disparage the Serbs’ performance in particular: “They spent their days getting drunk and aimlessly harassing civilians. They did not have proper maps, they spoke neither French nor Swahili, and soon most of them were sick with dysentery and malaria.”
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Tavernier chose as his operational base Watsa, a remote town in the northeast that had little strategic importance, but where he had obtained mining rights. The colonel himself was seen more often in the upscale Memling Hotel in Kinshasa than on the battlefield, haranguing foreign correspondents, boasting of his feats, and complaining of government ineptitude.

Internal tensions also hampered operations. The French, mostly former soldiers from the Foreign Legion, were better connected and paid up to five times as much as the Serbs—up to $10,000 per month for the officers. But the Serbs controlled most of the aircraft and heavy weaponry, old machines leased at inflated prices from the Yugoslav army. The French accused their counterparts of amateurism; the Serbs retorted that the last time the French had won a serious battle was at Austerlitz in 1805.

On the battlefield, everything fell apart. The Serbs never provided the air support the French demanded, complaining of missing parts and a lack of fuel. On several occasions, they even bombed Mobutu’s retreating troops, killing dozens. Mobutu’s security advisor remembered the episode: “We had two different delegations from Zaire recruiting mercenaries separately. What was the result? We had mercenaries from different countries who spoke different languages. ... We bought weapons from different countries that didn’t work together. It was a veritable Tower of Babel.”
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The mercenaries behaved abysmally toward the local population. Even today, residents of Kisangani remember the deranged Serbian commander Colonel Jugoslav “Yugo” Petrusic, driving about town in his jeep, harassing civilians. He shot and killed two evangelical preachers who annoyed him with their megaphoneblasted prayers. He was sure that AFDL rebels had infiltrated Kisangani, and he arrested civilians for interrogation, subjecting them to electroshocks from a car battery and prodding them with a bayonet.
²⁵

Colonel James Kabarebe remembered the battle for Kisangani as probably the hardest one they had to fight. Surrounded by thick jungle, the Rwandan troops faced off with the enemy across a narrow bridge over a tributary to the Congo River. They tried advancing but were met with a hail of bullets and well-calibrated mortar fire. They searched the banks of the Congo River but could not find any fishermen who could ferry them across to flank the enemy.

Again, it is difficult to tell how well war stories separate fact from fiction. “Laurent Kabila had strange notions of military tactics,” James Kabarebe remembered. “In Kisangani, when we were blocked by the mercenaries, he came to me, urging me to put soldiers up in the trees and, on command, to start shooting in all different directions at once. He said it would confuse the hell out of the enemy!” From then on, every time Kabarebe was confronted with heavy resistance, his colleagues jokingly told him to put soldiers in the trees.

Other tales about the battle remain popular with the Rwandans. Blocked by heavy fire and the Congo River, the Rwandans decided to let the newly arrived Katangan Tigers have a try. According to the Rwandans, the Tigers rubbed their bodies down with magic salves and put amulets around their necks to protect them from bullets. Then they advanced on the enemy. One by one, they were picked off by sniper fire. Some jumped into the water and drowned. Others ran. “It was a massacre,” Kabarebe remembered.
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It is unlikely that the Katangan Tigers, professionally trained by the Angolan army and no kamikazes, behaved in such a fashion. The more likely story is one provided by some of the AFDL soldiers who participated in the offensive: They were finally able to outflank Mobutu’s forces by traveling several days upstream, crossing the river, and hitting them from the rear. At the same time, Ugandan tanks had arrived along the jungle roads and provided cover fire for the rebels.
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Kisangani fell in March 1997, sounding the death knell for Mobutu’s government. It was the last real battle of Mobutu’s war, with the possible exception of Kenge, some one hundred and twenty miles west of Kinshasa, when Angolan UNITA rebels rallied to his defense, along with several thousand unemployed and desperate youths from Kinshasa who had been given a hundred dollars each and sent to the front.

Mbuji-Mayi, the country’s diamond hub, fell on April 5, 1997. The fact that Mobutu’s army hardly mounted a defense of the town, whose state-run diamond company, Société Minière de Bakwanga, had been the last reliable source of cash for Mobutu, indicated that the government had pretty much given up. For Laurent Kabila, the capture of the town was a godsend, as it provided him with much-needed cash to pay the invoices for fuel and airplane rental, the two biggest expenses the rebels had. He asked the Lebanese diamond traders to pay him $960,000 in back taxes and seized a large shipment belonging to De Beers, the South African diamond giant, claiming the company was operating illegally. They reportedly had to pay $5 million to get the gems back.
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The next domino to fall was Lubumbashi, the country’s copper capital, a week later. Soldiers from Mobutu’s Twenty-first Brigade tore up bedsheets, tying white bandanas around their heads and waving white flags to greet the AFDL. Restaurant and hotel owners opened their doors, offering officers free beers and soft drinks. This was the town where Laurent Kabila had been raised, and he quickly set about recruiting new soldiers from local youth groups. The old flag of the Congo Free State, yellow stars set against a peacock-blue background, was resurrected and unfurled at government buildings in town. Painters were hired to quickly replace the ubiquitous “Zaire” with “Congo,” and the flaming torch, symbol of Mobutu’s party, was erased from public monuments.

Perhaps the true sign that Mobutu’s era was coming to an end was the arrival in Lubumbashi of several executive jets full of officials from international mining and banking corporations. Goldman Sachs, First Bank of Boston, and the Anglo American Mining Corporation all met with Laurent Kabila.
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An American congressional delegation led by Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney arrived shortly afterwards.
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It is easy to make a mockery of Mobutu’s army and government, to reduce the events that led to his demise to a comedy of errors carried on by a bunch of incompetent, bumbling generals in Kinshasa. But it was not for lack of training or expertise that the Zairian army lost the war. The security forces included a legion of intelligent officers trained at some of the world’s best military academies. The problem was the decaying, corrupt structures within which they worked. Lacking proper institutions since independence, Mobutu had corroded his own state in order to prevent any challengers to his power from emerging, eroding that very power in the process.

This dry rot that beset the army also had a serious impact on soldiers’ morale. Soldiers who were rarely paid and could barely feed their wives and children were unlikely to risk their lives for their corrupt, thieving commanders. “The real challenge in the Congo,” Nabyolwa told me, “is not how to reform the army, but how to reform the men in the army! There is a serious problem with
Homo congoliensis
!”

It is this legacy of institutional weakness that for many Congolese is almost as depressing as their physical suffering. Since the 1970s until today, the Congolese state has not had an effective army, administration, or judiciary, nor have its leaders been interested in creating strong institutions. Instead, they have seen the state apparatus as a threat, to be kept weak so as to better manipulate it. This has left a bitter Congolese paradox: a state that is everywhere and oppressive but that is defunct and dysfunctional.

9

A THOUSAND MILES THROUGH THE JUNGLE

BUKAVU, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1996

Beatrice Umutesi, the Rwandan refugee and social worker, was in Bukavu when the fighting started in October 1996. She had come to wait for money that a Belgian nonprofit organization was sending to help her and her colleagues evacuate their families before the fighting began. The town was on edge; all morning, the thunder of mortar fire had been audible in the distance. She waited desperately at the Indian-run wholesale store where the money transfer was supposed to arrive. The shop had been closed for the past three days out of fear of looting; today seemed to be no different. Around 10:30, the automatic machine-gun rat-a-tat joined the mortars, although this was not necessarily cause for panic. For the past few days, the town had been exchanging fire with the Rwandan positions across the border. The streets were full of people trying to find food at the market. A group of men with cardboard biscuit boxes on their heads was walking briskly from the Red Cross warehouse that had just been ransacked.

Suddenly, Beatrice saw a group of soldiers running down the hill, tearing off their uniforms as they ran. Somebody screamed, “They are at the ISP!” The ISP was a technical school barely half a mile from where she was standing. Pandemonium erupted, as people streamed out of their houses with baskets on their heads and babies strapped to their backs. Beatrice had enough time to grab her adoptive children, Bakunda and Assumpta, and run after the fleeing soldiers. She had to leave her other relatives, as well as her few belongings, behind. All she had was seventy dollars and her Rwandan ID card. Mortar shells passed over their heads, whistling and then exploding off to the side of the road. Everywhere there were wounded people, moaning, some alone, others with anxious family members or friends watching over them. She pinned her hopes on a refugee camp fifteen miles away, where she had friends and family members. She thought she might be able to find protection there as the international community tried to find a solution for the refugees.

Her hopes were misplaced. As Beatrice was running into the hills, diplomats around the world tried to wish the Rwandan Hutu refugees out of existence. After the initial invasion had brought hundreds of thousands of refugees back to Rwanda, the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda, Robert Gribbin, concurred with his hosts’ view that those “still with the ex-FAR and
Interahamwe
... were family or sympathizers who had no intention of returning to Rwanda,” and the remaining “refugees appear to be in the tens to twenties of thousands rather than in vast numbers.”
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In reality, between 300,000 and 600,000 Hutu refugees had fled into the jungles and were at risk of starvation and disease. None of the refugees around Bukavu had the choice of returning to Rwanda—it would have entailed heading into the advancing troops.
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