Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (37 page)

“Yes, Excellency. Who is attacking us?”

The president paused. “Just tell them
inciviques—
bandits.”

Mumengi quickly got dressed and jumped in his official car. On his way to the radio station, he had to double back several times and take side roads to avoid cannon fire. His mind was racing as he tried to think of what he would tell the country; he had no idea what was going on. Who exactly was attacking? Was this linked to the president’s eviction of the Rwandan contingent several days before?

At 5:30 he finally reached the radio station, a nineteen-story, decrepit building surrounded by an asphalt network of major thoroughfares. He raced in the back door and up the stairs to the radio studio. All the soldiers who had been posted there had fled, knowing that the building was a prime target for any mutineers. (The first move in a military putsch is usually to seize the radio and television stations in order to control popular sentiment and encourage desertions.) The place was deserted. The usual smell of sewage wafted up through the cement stairwell, lit by flickering neon lights. He heard a noise from the broadcasting room: The journalists on night shift had barricaded themselves in there when the fighting had started. A man with shaky hands opened the door when Mumengi told them who he was. One of the journalists had died of heart failure; the others were visibly distressed.

Mumengi told them to hold on as he rushed down the stairs again and across the street to the Kokolo military camp, the largest barracks in Kinshasa. The sun was just coming up, and other than a few dogs and some laundry flapping in the breeze, there was no movement among the rows of cement houses. Mumengi finally found one desolate old man, who didn’t recognize him and wasn’t able to tell him who was in charge. “The place had completely fallen apart!” Mumengi remembered. “Most soldiers had moved out and rented their houses to civilians, who were cowering under their beds! Part of the parade grounds had been turned into cassava fields!”

Finally, Mumengi reached by phone a cousin who was a general in the army. He promised to come as soon as possible with reinforcements. Mumengi rushed back to the radio studio to address the nation. For Mumengi, who was known for his flowery speeches, it was one of his less inspired performances: “Citizens, patriots. Do not leave your houses, and stay calm.
Inciviques
are troubling public order. I assure you that the army has full control of the situation and will reestablish order soon.” Then he had the technicians play some mellow music.

He had lied. The army didn’t control anything. As Mumengi left the radio building with his cousin and hurried to the presidential palace, they saw the streets were deserted. Mortar and machine gun fire was passing overhead without any obvious target. His cousin, the army general, shook his head:“It’s a mess. A complete mess.”

Kabila received Mumengi at the heliport behind his presidential palace. He was wearing a dark safari suit and flip-flops and holding a walkie-talkie. Grinning, he sat Mumengi down in the middle of the concrete landing pad.

“Didier,” he said, “first, don’t worry. We’ll survive. We will live through this.” Instead of comforting him, the president’s words had the opposite effect. He thought his boss had lost it. The presidential palace was only several hundred yards from the Tshatshi military camp where Malik had dug himself in. The heavy artillery fire was deafening. As they spoke, Mumengi could hear bullets whistle overhead.

Given the circumstances, Kabila was curiously jovial. “Look, my son,” he started. Mumengi’s father had been involved in the rebellion of the 1960s and had known Laurent Kabila. Over the past few months, Mumengi had grown close to the president, who would often call him to discuss policy. To people around Kabila, he was known as
l’enfant cheri
of Mzee
.
“Our Rwandan friends have always dominated us. It was like this under Mobutu—they pushed him to undergo Zairianization, which they benefited from! They asked him to sign a decree that made all immigrants into citizens. Is that normal? The Tutsi in the east had everything, while the Congolese were stuck with nothing.”

The firefight crescendoed around them. Mumengi suggested they go inside the thick cement walls of his residence, but Kabila refused, saying that his presence outside would reassure his soldiers, the dozens of young men manning the parapets of his palace in green fatigues. He took his walkie-talkie and called one of his commanders, “General Mabila! Why are you firing the cannon? It’s not with artillery that you will get them! Attack on foot!”

He looked back at Mumengi, who was shaken by the fighting surrounding them. “You know, Japan dominated China. That is normal. But I will not let our great country be dominated by its tiny neighbor. Can a toad swallow an elephant? No!”

Kabila instructed Mumengi to go back to the radio and speak to the people, to motivate them. “We will survive with the force of the people—you have to rally them behind us. We don’t have an army, so we will need them. In the meantime, I will go look for allies.” He called one of his bodyguards and asked for his pistol. “Do you have a gun?” Mumengi had never used a gun before. “Here. You must use this. From today on, you will be the minister of war!”

Meanwhile, the Rwandans had taken control of much of the eastern Congo in a matter of hours. While Colonel Kabarebe had been commander of the Congolese army, he had prepositioned units loyal to him with stockpiles of weapons in the eastern Congo. When he was sacked, he gave orders to these units to rebel against Kabila. With support of Rwandan troops who crossed the border, they took control of Goma and Bukavu and began advancing on Kisangani.

Hubris can breed fantastic courage. After taking the border towns, Colonel Kabarebe decided to go straight for the jugular by leapfrogging Kabila’s ramshackle army and attacking the capital, 1,000 miles away. It was one of the most daring operations in the region’s military history.

The “Kitona airlift” is still talked about by foreign military attachés and Congolese army commanders alike. A U.S. officer based in the region later wrote in a military journal:“This was an operation that exemplified audacity and courage, and its aftermath became an odyssey fit for a Hollywood script.”
¹⁰

Kabarebe commandeered a Boeing 707 at the Goma airport and loaded one hundred and eighty Rwandan, Ugandan, and Congolese soldiers on board with weapons and ammunition. “Everybody wanted to get a piece of the action,” remembered a senior Congolese military officer who participated. “Mobutu’s former soldiers were outraged at their humiliation by Kabila, and the Tutsi wanted to get back at the government for the treatment of their relatives in Kinshasa.”
¹¹
Soldiers deserted from their units around Goma and showed up at the airport once they got word of the operation. Kabarebe put a brash Rwandan commander called Butera in charge of the first plane to leave.

It could have indeed been a scene from a movie: With Butera brandishing his pistol behind him, the distraught pilot flew 1,000 miles across the country, over the capital to the Kitona military base, 250 miles west of Kinshasa on the mouth of the Congo River.
¹²
Most of the soldiers on the flight had no idea that the commander of the Kitona base had secretly defected to the Rwandan side—they expected to land in a hail of bullets. A hundred and eighty soldiers nervously gripped their AK-47s and looked warily at the flight safety cards in their seat pockets. In the back of the aisle, stacked to the roof, were dozens of wooden crates of ammunition. The soldiers spoke Luganda, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, English, and French with each other. Outside the window, they broke through the thick cloud cover to see the rolling hills of Bas-Congo province and the Congo River snaking placidly toward the Atlantic ocean. After a three-hour flight, the long landing strip of Kitona airbase came into view.

Despite the pistol-waving Rwandan behind him, the pilot began to complain that they would be killed if they landed at the heavily fortified airbase. “Don’t worry,” Butera said. “We have our people at the airport.” Using the pilot’s high-frequency radio, he programmed a frequency he said belonged to their commander on the ground. A surprisingly clear voice responded to his call in calm English: “All clear,
afande
. You can land.” What the pilot did not know was that the radio Butera was calling actually belonged to his deputy commander, who was lounging in a seat at the back of the plane.
¹³

When Kabarebe had been chief of staff of the Congolese army, he had studied old Belgian military maps of the region closely. Kitona was an obvious choice for several reasons. Kinshasa was connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a narrow land corridor. Almost all cargo going to Kinshasa had to pass through this umbilical cord, at the head of which sat Kitona. The military base also had a long airstrip that could accommodate aircraft weighing up to fifty-four tons. Its barracks now housed thousands of former Mobutu soldiers who had been sent there for reeducation. Their living conditions were terrible—hundreds had died from cholera and malnutrition—and, despite their notorious disciplinary problems, they would need little convincing to join in the fight against Kabila. Lastly, Kitona was close to the Inga Dam, the largest hydroelectric dam in central Africa, which supplied the capital with most of its electricity.

As the plane touched down, a few Kabila loyalists managed to shoot its nose tire out, but the commander of the airport battalion quickly defected to the Rwandan side as planned and brought his men under control, allowing the troops to disembark.

The airport was taken with barely any casualties. Back in Kinshasa, Kabila fumed as he heard about the airlift. “What kind of country is this?” he asked his advisors, imagining the airplane flying overhead. “We don’t even have an air force?” The advisors called their commander in Kitona to order him to stop the landing in Kitona, but the seditious officer only responded with insults.
¹⁴

It was a huge victory for the Rwandans, who could now send reinforcements to take Kinshasa. Overjoyed, Butera set up his satellite phone on the tarmac and called back to Kigali.

Sometimes even the Rwandans foul things up: Butera had forgotten to take down the pin code for the satellite phone, without which it was useless. In Kigali, his commanding officers waited in vain for word from the young soldier, while he tried frantically to punch in different six-digit combinations. No luck. (The correct code was apparently 123456.) The pilot also failed to reach Kigali on his ham radio.
¹⁵

Butera had to find the closest means of communication: an oil rig in the nearby town of Banana. Finally, after hours of searching, he found an oil engineer with a satellite phone who, with a bit of coaxing, allowed him to call home. Sheepishly, he told his bosses he had made it.

Who had made the first move in sparking the war? From interviews with Rwandans and Congolese involved in planning the war, it is not clear whether Kabila began recruiting ex-FAR before Kabarebe began deploying his boys to the east. What is clear is that, after only a few months of Kabila being in power, both sides realized that their relationship was going sour, driven by Kabila’s paranoia and Rwanda’s obsession with control. Didier Mumengi remembered, “The Rwandans in Kinshasa were a time bomb. It was clear that they were a problem, but at the same time they helped us keep the country together. It was going to be hard to get rid of them and still maintain a grip on the army and intelligence services.”