Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (26 page)

On November 20, U.S. military officers presented pictures of aerial reconnaissance to aid groups in Kigali. They had been flying over the country in PS Orion aircraft, taking pictures of refugee flows and settlements. In the photos were clearly visible around half a million people distributed in three major and numerous smaller agglomerations. It was not clear how many of these people were displaced Zairians and how many were refugees. Just three days later, the U.S. military claimed that they had located only one significant cluster of people, which “by the nature of their movement and other clues can be assumed to be the ex-FAR and militias.”
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All the other groups had magically vanished. The aid group Oxfam cried foul, accusing the U.S. military of “losing” refugees on purpose. “We feel bound to conclude that as many as 400,000 refugees and unknown numbers of Zairian displaced persons have, in effect, been air-brushed from history.”
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After Beatrice fled from Bukavu, she ran with Bakunda for a day until she could not run anymore. Fearing the advancing rebels, she stayed away from the main roads and followed a line of cowed, silent refugees through the banana groves that covered the hillsides. They spent the first night in a school that was being protected by members of Mobutu’s youth organization, who had banded together to protect their community. They checked Beatrice’s ID but were skeptical about one of the children who had joined her on the way, a child with Tutsi features. Beatrice finally convinced them that he was her son; they grudgingly allowed her to spend the night in the house of a local family. That family, she later wrote, “was part of that chain of Zairians, who, throughout my long journey, shared with me their roof and the little food they had.”
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The only road of escape was toward Kisangani, Zaire’s third largest town at the bend in the Congo River, more than three hundred miles to the northwest. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees were on the move now through the forests of the eastern Congo, accompanied by tens of thousands of scared Congolese. First, they had to climb the hills of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, in more peaceful times famous for its lowland gorillas and highland elephants. On the narrow footpaths, Beatrice ran into a traffic jam of people. It was the beginning of the rainy season, and every evening heavy rains would gush down over them, turning the soil into a muddy, slippery torrent. Tens of thousands of people filled the forest; at times, Beatrice had to stand on the path and wait for the single-file line to start moving again. The humid, cool air under the canopy echoed with the sound of thousands of tired feet slapping through the mud.

Not only was this one of the longest mass treks in modern history, but it was also one of the most outlandish. The refugees walked through some of the densest rain forest on the planet, under layered canopies two hundred feet high. Beatrice walked for days without seeing direct sunlight. Elsewhere, they had to ford deep rivers or cut new paths through the forest. Wasps laid larvae under their skin, long leeches plastered their bodies after they passed through streams, and several of Beatrice’s companions were killed by snakes. Once in the middle of the night, Beatrice was awakened by screams when her group was attacked by millions of driver ants. They tried, with some success, to use fire to chase the ants away, but eventually they had to move.

The basic need to survive overcame the many taboos inherent in Rwandan society. Forced to eat raw roots and leaves, Beatrice developed sores in her mouth and a bad case of diarrhea. First, she tried to hide herself behind bushes to ease her discomfort, but eventually, when she no longer had the strength, she would just squat down next to the path and look the other way as others plodded by. Lacking soap, she began to stink, and fleas and lice infested her clothes. Rwandan women, who are known for their modesty, were forced to bathe topless next to men in rivers.

Death surrounded them. Chronic diseases, such as diarrhea, malaria, and typhoid, were the biggest killers. Others died of diabetes or asthma, having run out of medicine to treat their chronic illnesses. The smell of rotting bodies filled the air. “In this race against the clock, if anyone fell, it was rare to see someone reach out a hand to help her or him. If, by chance, they were not trampled, they were left lying by the side of the road.”
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Beatrice saw flurries of white and blue butterflies alight on fresh corpses, feeding off their salt and moisture. Further on, she saw a woman who had just given birth forced to bite through her own umbilical cord and continue walking. In one town, locals by the side of the road held up a malnourished baby they had found lying by the side of the road after her mother died and her father was unable to feed her. People passed by in silence, unwilling to take on another burden.

After two hundred and fifty miles and five weeks of walking, Beatrice reached Tingi-Tingi, “the camp of death,” as she calls it. Mobutu’s soldiers had blocked their advance westward, saying the refugees’ arrival would help the rebels infiltrate. Too weak to fight the soldiers, the refugees settled down and prayed for help to arrive.

The name for the town meant “swamp,” and it lived up to its name; mosquitoes and dirty groundwater plagued the refugees. Beatrice had lost over thirty pounds by the time she arrived there; her skin was leathery and stiff, her muscles were sore, and she was so hungry that the sight of food made her salivate. To the refugees’ dismay, no humanitarian organization was there to help them; there were few latrines and no clean water. A dysentery epidemic broke out shortly after their arrival, followed by cholera. Soon, aid workers did arrive, but they were overwhelmed by the needs of 80,000 people. Every day, bodies, partially covered by white sheets, would be carried away on stretchers. The refugees looked as if they had aged twenty years—their eyes sunk deep into their skulls, skin hanging loosely from their bodies, and their feet swollen from malnutrition and hundreds of miles of walking. Children, in particular, were affected by the lack of vitamins and protein: Their hair thinned and turned beige or blond. Beatrice described women suffering from dysentery as “old fleshless grandmothers even though they weren’t even thirty.... They had lost all their womanly attributes.... We only knew they were women because they looked after the children.” Beatrice joked with her newly acquired family that they should take a good look at her feet and toenails so they could recognize her when she was carted away in a shroud, her feet protruding.

During the two months Beatrice spent there, aid workers registered 1,800 deaths, about half of them children.
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A decade later the town where the camp was located is still not easy to reach. I had to fly into Kisangani, a hundred and fifty miles away, and rent a motorcycle. In some places the road was completely overgrown by the surrounding forest. Here and there deep, muddy pits had replaced the asphalt for several hundred feet. About twenty miles before Tingi-Tingi, the wrecks of armored cars belonging to Mobutu’s fleeing army sat abandoned on their naked axels, rusting on the side of the road, their heavy-caliber machine guns pointing into the rainforest.

An old yellow highway sign reading “Tingi-Tingi” was still standing by the side of the road, a reminder of when truckers could travel from Kisangani to Bukavu in two days. Now it takes two weeks if the truck doesn’t break down. A rickety vehicle I saw there had taken a whole month to reach Tingi-Tingi from Bukavu, two hundred fifty miles distant. In the town itself, the tarmac was in good shape, and villagers showed me the stretch of road around which the refugees had built their camp, boasting that airplanes had used it as a landing strip to supply the refugees with food and medicine.

The whole village remembered the two months the refugees had spent there in 1996. It had become a reference point—“he got married two years after the refugees left,” or “I bought my house before the refugees came.” When asked how many refugees were there, some villagers said, “a million”; others, “it was a city of Rwandans.” Now Tingi-Tingi has reverted to being a village of several dozen huts scattered through undergrowth on either side of the road. Locals live by farming cassava and beans, supplementing their diet by hunting monkeys and small antelope in the nearby forest.

The local traditional chief was not there, so the villagers took me to the Pentecostal minister, a fifty-one-year-old named Kapala Lubangula. He was wearing plastic flip-flops, pleated dress pants, and a plain cotton shirt. When I told him I wanted to talk to him about the refugees, he nodded grimly and called a group of four other elderly men from his church. It was dangerous speaking to a foreigner alone in your house; people could accuse you of anything afterwards. We sat on rickety wooden chairs in a small mud house with a low ceiling. Despite the stewing heat, he insisted on sitting inside; he didn’t want people to see us talking.

“Why do people always talk about the refugees?” He blurted out almost immediately, to my surprise. “The local population also suffered! Imagine 100,000 people arrive in this small town. They ate everything we had. Their soldiers raped our women and shot dead our traditional chief. Nobody talks about us!” The other men nodded.

The elders described successive waves of soldiers and refugees intruding on their small village. First, a wave of fleeing soldiers had come to town—Mobutu’s soldiers mixed with ex-FAR. They had terrorized the local population, taxing people going to the market, breaking into their houses, and stealing their livestock. Then the refugees arrived, “like a band of walking corpses.” They were starving. Instead of talking, they just stared and cupped their hands. They pulled up cassava roots and peanuts from the fields and picked raw mangos from the trees. As dire as their situation was, if the villagers shared the little they had with this horde of foreigners, they knew they would all die of starvation. The men from the church helped organize vigilante groups to guard the village and the fields. They patrolled with machetes and sticks. If they found someone stealing, they would beat him to death. There were no prisons and no courts. Justice was swift and decisive.

The minister remembered vividly new colleagues who arrived with the refugees. Two Catholic priests as well as Adventist and Pentecostal ministers set up churches made out of UN tarps. Wooden planks set on rocks served as benches. They gave sermons almost every day during which they talked about the genocide. “They said the Tutsi wanted to dominate everything, to take the land away from the Hutu. So when Habyarimana was killed, they sought revenge for his death and killed. They admitted they had killed! What kind of priests were these?”

When the white people’s aid groups came, he said, they only thought about the Rwandans. If a Congolese fell sick, he would be treated last. Reverend Kapala’s voice rose. “First the white people bring the refugees here; then they refuse to help us!” When I reminded them that it had been the civil war in Rwanda that had brought the refugees, not the United Nations, Kapala sucked his teeth. “The international community has all the power. You can’t tell me that the United States, the biggest superpower in the world, could not stop all this if they had wanted to. They didn’t stop it because they didn’t want to.”

Another elder chimed in:“Do you think that Rwanda, this peanut of a country, could defeat the Congo alone? No way.”

For a while, it seemed that Tingi-Tingi had become the capital of the world. Three weeks after the arrival of the first Rwandans, aid groups began arriving with helicopters, large and small planes, and, eventually, convoys of trucks with food. Doctors and logisticians from the United States, India, France, South Africa, and Kenya set up shop in the local hospital and health centers. Emma Bonino, the EU aid commissioner, arrived, as did Sadako Ogata, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Agathe Habyarimana, the wife of the former Rwandan president, also visited from her exile at Mobutu’s palace in Gbadolite to deliver bags of cornmeal, rice, and beans. The planes landed in the middle of the camp, sending people scurrying for cover. In one case, a woman, dizzy and disoriented from hunger and thirst, didn’t move out of the way quickly enough and was decapitated by a plane’s propellers.