Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (36 page)

RUHENGERI, RWANDA, AND KINSHASA, CONGO, AUGUST 1998

The war to topple Mobutu had created serious security problems back in Rwanda. The Rwandan army’s attack on the refugee camps caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to stream back into their country. The authorities there knew that this influx would create trouble, as their enemies would seize the opportunity to infiltrate. “We had a discussion about what to do with them,” Vice President Kagame explained. “We think that it is better for them to come and we fight them here, [where] we can contain them. And you don’t get problems with the international community for fighting them outside your country.”
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Between 10,000 and 15,000 enemy soldiers entered into northwestern Rwanda in the months following the invasion.
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These insurgents sparked the worst fighting the country had seen since the genocide. By the end of 1997, the northwest region was in upheaval, suffering dozens of insurgent attacks each month against government installations. The insurgents also targeted government officials and sympathizers in an effort to intimidate the population into supporting them.

The infiltrators, however, were militarily weak and didn’t try to engage in conventional battles with the government. Instead, they adopted terror tactics, killing hundreds of Tutsi, especially Congolese refugees who were easy targets in makeshift refugee camps close to the Congolese border. Between January 1997 and August 1998, thousands of civilians were killed by both the Rwandan army and the insurgents as the tactics of insurgency and counterinsurgency became increasingly bloody.

General Paul Rwarakabije himself had infiltrated across the Rwandan border in July 1997 and become the operational commander of the insurgency, based around the town of Nyamutera. “Our headquarters was mobile,” he explained. “We never spent too long in one place, but moved around, sleeping in the huts of local sympathizers .”
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The insurgents held meetings in local schools at night and brought their office along, transporting official letterhead, stamps, and maps with them. They avoided using walkie-talkies for fear of being detected or overheard. Instead, Rwarakabije and his comrades relied heavily on locals, sending letters with operational orders via local farmers or market women, who then passed them on to other sympathizers.

The insurgents were initially popular among some locals in northwestern Rwanda. This was the heartland of President Habyarimana’s regime, from where he and many in his government came. The insurgents sometimes referred to themselves as
les fils du vieux
—the sons of the old man (Habyarimana). Many of the villagers there were returnees from the camps in Zaire and still harbored deep resentment against the RPF for overthrowing “their” government and for the massacres carried out in the refugee camps. They articulated their grievances in messianic terms—evangelism had found fertile ground in the camps, and preachers had been touting their people’s return to the promised land. The commanders gave two of their operational sectors the code names “Nazareth” and “Bethlehem.”
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Thus the Rwandan civil war started up again, after a hiatus of three years. The same commanders faced off again on the battlefield, only this time Kagame’s troops were in power in Kigali, and Habyarimana’s former army was hiding in banana groves and eucalyptus woods. The Tutsi-led Rwandan government, intimately familiar with the dangers of such an insurgency, having come to power on the back of one themselves, responded with overwhelming force. They deployed thousands of troops to the region and began ruthless counterinsurgency operations. Their first priority was to convince the population that they would suffer more if they collaborated with their enemy than if they didn’t. According to human rights reports, they cordoned off areas, rounded up peasants suspected to be in connivance with the rebels, and then beat and shot many of them. Some of their victims were probably working with the rebels; many others were not.
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In early 1998, Rwarakabije noticed a strange development. Soldiers in his ranks were quietly defecting and going to a Congolese army training camp in Rumangabo, just across the border from where he was operating. At the same time, Congolese officers based in the eastern Congo were baffled by instructions that were coming from Kabila’s army headquarters in Kinshasa. “The Rwandan commanders who were based with us were busy day and night fighting the ex-FAR and Interahamwe,” a senior Congolese intelligence officer recalled, “but at the same time, Kabila sent a delegation in June 1998 to instruct us to send all the ex-FAR prisoners we had to a military base in the south of the country. We heard from our friends there that these ex-FAR were being freed and trained in the Congolese army. We were floored!”
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President Kabila had made his move. In his mind, if he waited too long, the Rwandans and Congolese Tutsi would remove him from power. In the early months of 1998, Kabila’s army was a loose pastiche of
kadogo
, Katangan Tigers, and new recruits. The Angolans, Ugandans, and Rwandans, who had been the backbone of his rebellion, had mostly returned to their countries. He needed his own force, and in desperation he drew on the largest, most determined mercenary troops available in the region: the ex-FAR, Habyarimana’s former army, which his AFDL rebellion had sought to defeat. It was a deal with the devil, one that precipitated Rwanda’s new invasion.

Malik Kijege, the highest-ranking Congolese Tutsi in the Kinshasa garrison, was in a foul mood. In July 1998, Laurent Kabila sacked Colonel James Kabarebe, the Rwandan officer who had been commander of the Congolese army, and asked all Rwandan troops to leave the country. The departure of the Rwandans left the army without a real leader at a moment when hostility against Tutsi in Kinshasa was mounting and tensions between Kinshasa and Kigali were escalating. General Celestin Kifwa, the new commander, was over sixty years old and incompetent. They called him a
fetisheur
, a witch doctor, as it was rumored that he believed in magic potions and in consulting the ancestors to make decisions. When he arrived to take over his office from his Rwandan predecessor, he allegedly brought a goat with him that he proceeded to slaughter so as to chase away the evil spirits. He had hardly been seen in public since his nomination. For Malik Kijege, this was probably a good thing. One of Kifwa’s bodyguards had shot a Tutsi soldier dead the day before during an argument. The less he got to see of Kifwa, the better.

Anti-Tutsi sentiment was quickly spreading through Kinshasa, whipped up by Kabila’s politicians but also fed by the beatings and humiliations that residents of the capital had endured at the hands of the Rwandans. Congolese police and soldiers evicted dozens of Rwandan soldiers from apartments in downtown Kinshasa, took them to the airport, and put them on planes for Kigali. The enthusiasm of these Congolese security forces quickly boiled over; they began harassing and attacking Tutsi civilians and Congolese soldiers, prompting the justice minister to appear on national television, instructing soldiers not to bother Tutsi civilians.

Malik Kijege was well acquainted with the kind of mob violence that anti-Tutsi sentiment could provoke. During a similar frenzy in 1996, soldiers had shot and killed his aunt in the street in Bukavu. “ Every time there is trouble, you can expect the crazies to take it out on us,” he recalled.
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At home, he still kept a copy of a tape distributed by ex-FAR demagogues in the refugee camps, exhorting Bantu people to rise up and chase the Tutsi down the Nile River back to Ethiopia, where they claimed the Tutsi came from.

Malik began to reach out to other Tutsi soldiers, who were dispersed throughout Kinshasa’s various military camps. In case of trouble, he thought, it would be smart for them to assemble in one place to find safety in numbers. “When the Rwandans left, we stayed behind,” he said. “We thought we were Congolese, not Rwandan. We had fought the war so as to defend our citizenship. We weren’t about to be forced onto a plane to go to Kigali.”

One evening shortly after the departure of Rwandan troops, General Yav Nawej, the newly appointed commander of Kinshasa, telephoned after he heard that Kijege was assembling Tutsi soldiers. “Malik! Where are you?” He barked at him.

“I’m at home.”

“Get your weapons. I am coming to disarm you to take to you to Makala [the central prison]. Don’t ask me why—that’s an order!”

“General, I came here with my weapon, and I am going to leave with it.”

“That’s a mutiny!”

“I have a right to self-defense, General.”

“Get ready then. I am coming.”
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Shortly afterwards, Malik received another phone call from General Jean-Claude Mabila, another commander leading military operations in the capital. He threatened that he would come and disarm Malik with a tank. That made Malik laugh: “How do you disarm a couple of soldiers with a tank?”

Malik was worried that the lack of a clear chain of command would allow soldiers to take the law into their own hands and begin attacking Tutsi soldiers in the capital. Congolese troops had chafed under the command of Rwandans, who together with Congolese Tutsi had formed an elite clique within the AFDL. They were itching for a chance to get back at the Tutsi.

According to Malik, he called Joseph Kabila, the president’s son, who was in China undergoing military training. The young army officer, just twenty-seven at the time, reassured Malik that he knew there were problems in the government. He sounded worried. “ I’ ll be back in three days,” he promised him.

“Three days is too long,” Malik answered.

By August 2, Malik had been able to assemble 586 Tutsi soldiers in an improvised battalion at Camp Tshatshi, a large military camp in Kinshasa. “I knew exactly how many they were; I counted them.” His foul mood began to lift. In front of him, on the parade grounds, he inspected the troops. They stood at attention in lines of twenty, their hands flat by their sides. Some didn’t have boots; others didn’t have whole uniforms. They were mostly young Tutsi recruits who had joined in 1996: students, peasants, and cowherds who had joined to fight for their community and to find adventure. Most of them had ended up walking across the country, fighting Mobutu’s troops, ex-FAR, and Serbian mercenaries from town to town.

“They were inexperienced, but the morale was high,” Malik remembered. “ We had a key advantage: We were united; we were fighting for our survival. The others were just bandits.”

That night the fighting started, heralding the beginning of the second congo war.

Didier Mumengi was awakened at 4 o’clock in the morning on August 3 by heavy shooting.
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He lay awake for a while with a sinking feeling in his stomach as he listened to the call-and-response of a booming mortar and staccato machine gun fire. It was only a year since he had returned to the country after several decades living in Brussels, where he had spent most of his life studying, writing, and moving in the circles of the Congolese political opposition. A month before, the thirty-six-year-old had been appointed information minister by Laurent Kabila.

At 4:30 his clunky Telecel phone rang. The Congo was one of the first countries in Africa to have a mobile phone network, as a result of the absence of working landlines. Anybody of importance in the capital had a Telecel phone, a device the size of a milk carton with a rubber antenna attached to it. There were so few numbers that their owners could write all the important ones on the back of an envelope or memorize them. “Didier!” Kabila’s baritone rang out.

“Yes, Excellency.”

“We are under attack. You have to go to the Voice of the People [the national radio station] and talk to the country. It’s important to calm people down. Tell them we have the situation under control.”