Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (30 page)

All recruits received a copy of Kabila’s Marxist-inspired pamphlet,
Seven Mistakes of the Revolution
, which explained why the 1964 rebellion had failed. The pamphlet was more or less unchanged from its original 1967 version.

First mistake
—During the first revolution, we did not have precise political education....

Third mistake
—We waged a war without goal or sense, without knowing why we were fighting and who our real enemy was. We rushed to seize large towns and forgot to first take small villages and to work with peasants and workers....

Fifth mistake
—Due to lack of discipline and collaboration, we fought over ranks and fame.... Also everybody wanted to be in charge and to get positions for himself and his relatives.

Given the nature of the AFDL, some of the points seemed out of place. The second mistake was: “We relied too much on external support and advice.” To the recruits, who were being trained by foreigners, the pamphlet was more of a diagnosis of the current rebellion’s faults than a critique of the past. “It was Rwandans teaching us how to be patriotic, telling us to sacrifice ourselves for our country,” Kizito reflected, shaking his head. “It was weird.”

Twelve years later, Kizito seemed to have remembered little of the ideological training. The reason for their struggle was apparent for him and all other recruits: Mobutu needed to go.

Despite the misery, the training did produce camaraderie. Some of the recruits had not even reached puberty, and for many of them the army did indeed become their family. Back in Bukavu, we gathered one evening at Kizito’s uncle’s house, along with another former child soldier who had been at Kidote after Kizito. Both of them shook their heads and sucked their teeth when they remembered the extreme brutality and pain of boot camp. However, when I asked them to sing AFDL songs for me, smiles began to warm their faces, and they tentatively started to clap.

Their favorite one appeared to be:

After four months of training, a column of trucks pulled into camp, each marked with the name of a different town. Afande Robert called the soldiers together for one last assembly, then told them they were going to fight the enemy. The soldiers lined up in front of the trucks, where each was given an AK-47. They were told to load the gun, fire in the air, and jump into the truck. Kizito climbed in a vehicle with “Bukavu” written on the side. All he had was his gun and an extra clip of ammunition. It was March 1997; Kisangani, the third largest city in the country, had just fallen to the rebellion.

In town, the soldiers arrived in time for the inauguration of the new governor in the courtyard of the large Jesuit school, Alfajiri College. They paraded in front of the crowd. “It was like coming back from another planet,” Kizito said, remembering seeing many of his friends and relatives again for the first time in four months. After the ceremony, they feasted on pots of beef stew, rice, and potatoes. It was the first time they had had meat in months. Before he gave them leave for the weekend, Kabila gave another speech, telling the soldiers that they were about to taste the fruits of their long training, that they would now be able to help liberate their country. Finally, he told them to shoot in the air three times before they entered their houses to scare away evil spirits. “The old man had funny ideas sometimes,” Kizito remembered. “He was superstitious—‘Don’t wear flip-flops at roadblocks.’ ‘Don’t ride a bicycle if you have a gun.’” That night, people in Bukavu thought another war had broken out. An hour after the soldiers left the schoolyard, shooting broke out all through town as the recruits chased away evil spirits.

Kizito’s description of induction was grisly but confirmed much of what other AFDL recruits reported of their experiences in Kidote and other training camps. The rebellion needed recruits fast. The harsh basic training was intended to instill discipline and weed out those physically too weak for the upcoming war. It was as though the Rwandan officers wanted to beat out the corruption, idleness, and selfishness that had become, in Mobutu’s own words,
le mal zairois
. Like Kizito, many of the recruits who went through this training were under eighteen years old—children according to international conventions. Diplomats estimated that 10,000 child soldiers (
kadogo
in Swahili) participated in the AFDL rebellion.
³
The rationale for child recruitment was simple: Many commanders consider that children make better, more loyal, and fearless soldiers. One commander of a local Mai-Mai militia told me: “You never know who you can trust. At least with the
kadogo
, you know they will never betray you.”
⁴
Given the lack of discipline, the amount of infighting, and the regular infiltrations by their enemies, it was understandable that commanders wanted to have an inner security buffer of people they could trust.

For the most part, the kind of combat that soldiers engaged in was guerrilla warfare, involving risky ambushes and close-quarter fighting with the enemy. Soldiers did not have protective gear, and artillery was in scant supply. If you wanted to hit the enemy, you needed to be close enough to be effective with an AK-47—within two hundred meters of the target. Children were often the only soldiers who had the guts to engage in many of the operations, who actually obeyed orders, and whose sense of danger was not as well developed as that of older soldiers. The use of children as vanguard special forces meant also that they made up a disproportionate number of fatalities on the battlefield. A Mobutu commander who had organized the defense of the town of Kindu told me:“The first time I saw the AFDL troops, I thought we were fighting against an army of children! Through my binoculars I saw hundreds of kids in uniforms racing through bush, some carrying grenade launchers bigger than them.”
⁵

According to Kizito and other
kadogo
I interviewed, they often formed the first line of defense or offense. One such interviewee told me that in the battle for Kenge, in the west of the country, he had looked around to see dozens of his fellow
kadogo
, small children in oversized uniforms, sprawled dead on the battlefield.
⁶
No one has conducted a survey of battlefield casualties during the war, but it is safe to assume that thousands of child soldiers died during the Congo wars.

11

A WOUNDED LEOPARD

After me will come the deluge.

—MOBUTU SESE SEKO

KINSHASA, ZAIRE, DECEMBER 1996

The war caught Mobutu wrong-footed, off guard. When news of fighting in the eastern Congo broke, the Enlightened Helmsman—one of the many titles he had coined for himself—was convalescing in a hospital in Switzerland.

Initially, it was news of their leader’s illness that preoccupied most Zairians more than war in the faraway Kivus. The first rumors appeared to have been influenced by the official press: Mobutu had been the victim of a savage toothache, an abscess perhaps. Conspiratorially, the CIA wrote to headquarters that he was suffering from AIDS.
¹
It was the foreign press that managed to get the real story from the hospital: He had been operated on for prostate cancer. Again the rumors boiled up in Kinshasa, relegating the fighting in the east to the back pages of the newspapers. He had fallen into a coma along with his wife, they said. The voice on the radio, saying he would soon return, was really that of an actor, impersonating the Old Leopard quite admirably.

Initially, Mobutu was not worried about the fighting. “Kabila? I know Kabila,” he told his French lawyer. “He’s nothing. He’s a petty smuggler who lives in the hills above Goma.”

“Maréchal,” the lawyer responded, “I think we need to be aware of the danger. I don’t know Kabila, but he’s at the head of organized, determined battalions. Behind him are the Rwandans, the Ugandans, and I think the Americans!”
²

Even his bitterest enemies had a hard time believing that the all-seeing Guide was fatally sick. Over thirty-one years he had fashioned himself as the spiritual, political, and customary chief of the country. Two thirds of Zairians had known no other ruler. His face was on every banknote and countless T-shirts, tablecloths, and album covers. Schoolchildren sang his praises every morning before class:
One country, one father, one ruler, Mobutu, Mobutu, Mobutu!
The evening news on state television began with Mobutu’s head descending from the heavens through the clouds.

With his silver-tipped black cane and leopard-skin hat, he was the modern version of a traditional king; no one could defy or even supplement his authority. “Does anybody know of a village with two chiefs?” he liked to ask.

His chieftaincy was not just symbolic. In 1980, during his fiftieth birthday celebrations, he was named King of the Bangala during an opulent coronation ceremony.
³
“Only God is above you,” the officiator announced. He was hailed as Mobutu Moyi, or Mobutu Sun King.
⁴
That was not his only similarity with King Louis XIV of France. Through the 1974 constitution, he became head of all branches of government and could legislate by decree and change the constitution at his discretion. In some years he personally disposed of 20 percent of the budget. He was truly the father of the nation: He often presided over ceremonies where he cut ribbons on road projects or brought medicine to a hospital, magnanimous gifts from the father to his children. Visitors to Mobutu’s palace—even foreign diplomats—could often expect to walk away with thousands of dollars in “presents.”
⁵