Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (42 page)

Predictably, the RCD leaders were called to Kigali to explain their supreme disarray. Both Rwanda’s president, Pasteur Bizimungu, and its vice president, Paul Kagame, attended the meeting. Wamba complained that any initiative he undertook was blocked by others, in particular the Mobutists. Some Tutsi raised their voices to say that Wamba was excluding them based on their ethnicity. Then Wamba interjected, “I wasn’t even given a Christmas dinner! What kind of rebellion is this?”

The other members sighed, and an old Mobutist complained, “This debate has sunk too low. Christmas dinner!”

Bizimungu responded, “No! What the president is saying is important! How can you feed fifty million people if you can’t even feed your president?”

Kagame took the floor. “Your problem is that you don’t love your country. You need to suffer; you are living the good life. When we were in our rebellion, we were so poor that we didn’t have plates to eat out of. We took banana leaves and put them in a hole in the ground to eat our meals.”

The debate turned acrimonious, with Zahidi accusing the finance minister of signing contracts in his bathrobe at home and not even informing them, while Wamba was lambasted for having his head in the clouds. The Rwandans intervened to calm the group down, but it was clear that the rift would be difficult to mend. In early 1999, Wamba was toppled as the president of the RCD.

The rebellion was militarily successful. By the beginning of 1999, the RCD had seized over a quarter of the country, including the third largest city, Kisangani, and were headed toward the mining hubs of Lubumbashi and Mbuji-Mayi. Under the strict guidance of the Rwandan army, the Congolese battalions performed relatively well, although they became well-known for pillage and abuse. Faced with aerial bombardments and artillery barrages from the well-equipped Zimbabwean and Chadian armies (the Angolans chose mostly to stay behind and guard Kinshasa and Bas-Congo), the RCD fought well on a shoestring, using guerrilla tactics to their advantage.

Politically and socially, however, the RCD was a disaster. Outside of the Hutu and Tutsi population of North Kivu, the movement was never able to convince the population that it wasn’t a Rwandan proxy. Spontaneously, local militias—focused on ethnic self-defense—were formed, claiming to be protecting Congolese against foreign aggression. The RCD responded with a brutal counterinsurgency, targeting civilians in response to attacks. Within the first four months, several massacres took place, in which over 1,000 civilians were killed. “At first I didn’t believe the reports,” Wamba said when I asked him about these massacres. “But then I started using my own, parallel channels of information and discovered it was true. But I had no control over the military, and by the time I had found out, I had already fallen out with the others.”

I pressed him on one massacre in particular, at Kasika, which happened just weeks after he took the helm of the RCD, on August 24, 1998. According to UN investigators, as well as witnesses I interviewed, at least five hundred civilians were butchered by Rwandan and RCD troops there.

Wamba looked at me in shock. “Five hundred? No, impossible.” I told him that I had been there myself to interview eyewitnesses. “No, no. That isn’t possible,” he insisted, shaking his head.

In his office in Goma, Wamba was isolated from the suffering of the population. The leadership created the semblance of a functioning administration, with an executive council and legislative assembly playing the role of executive and Parliament. Laws were passed, press conferences called, and budgets discussed, but all this was a sideshow to the military operations. “Sometimes it felt like the only thing we did was sit in meetings all day,” José Endundo, an RCD finance commissioner, remembered. “Meetings that went nowhere and had no impact.”

The organization lacked not only ideological vision, but also the means with which to implement it. One of Wamba’s largest frustrations was his inability to carry out any sort of social or humanitarian project for the population. According to one leader, 80 percent of the RCD’s $2.5 million revenues each month went to feeding soldiers and buying supplies for military operations.
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“ We had health and transport departments but no money to build roads or schools,” Wamba said. They had over 15,000 soldiers who were deployed in an area the size of France. They had to feed the troops and provide for everything from credit for the satellite phones to fuel for the vehicles and bullets for their guns. The RCD was a predator that sucked resources out of the population and provided next to nothing in return.

According to many of his former rebel colleagues, Wamba was never in it for personal gain. Even when I visited him, the collar of his shirt was threadbare; he complained that he had been threatened with eviction on several occasions after he was unable to pay the rent. When I asked him about a friend of his, he tried calling him, but realized sheepishly that he had run out of phone credits.

Anyone who has spent much time in the Congo can understand Wamba’s desire to bring about radical change through armed rebellion, given the lack of viable options. But his gravest sin was to have remained in the rebellion for so long despite its glaring flaws. A former colleague of his quoted a Swahili proverb to me: “Don’t get into a ship with a hole in the bottom; it will eventually sink.” He said of Wamba, “ I don’t think he raped or killed or stole, but he was part of a machine that did. He is guilty of that at least.”

Perhaps the only good decision Wamba could have made was to leave the movement. Instead, he stayed on and made increasingly bizarre choices. In July 1999, Wamba made a desperate effort to raise funds for infrastructure projects—he wanted to open up the hinterlands’ economy by rebuilding three hundred and fifty miles of road from Kisangani to Bunia, close to the Ugandan border. He signed a deal with the African Union Reserve System, a previously unknown company, to set up a central bank with a new currency, “for the advancement and economic development for the Congo.” The company would be financed by Congolese gold and diamonds and would remit 35 percent of profits to Wamba’s treasury, with a $16 million loan up front. The company’s owner was Van Arthur Brink, who presented himself as the ambassador of the Dominion of Melchisedek, a fanciful spiritual order that sold banking licenses in the name of a virtual state. Unsurprisingly, it was a swindle. The crook’s real name was Allen Ziegler, who was on the run from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud worth $400,000, and who had set up shop on the small Caribbean island of Grenada. The rebels, of course, never saw a cent of the promised money.

Suliman Baldo, the senior Human Rights Watch researcher for the Congo at the time, shook his head when I asked him about Wamba. He had been in touch with Wamba for years during the rebellion. The professor would call him frequently from his rebel base on his satellite phone to tell his side of the story. “Wamba became a farce,” he told me. “I would meet him in the bush surrounded by child soldiers, and he would tell me he is an advocate of children’s rights.”
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When dissent broke out within Wamba’s group, his soldiers repressed it harshly, beating alleged conspirators to death.
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Wamba’s theories had clashed with the brutal realities of Congolese politics. One period during the war epitomizes this. In August 1999, Wamba was cooped up in Hotel Wagenia, a run-down, colonial-era hotel in the middle of Kisangani, as the town descended into a bloody street battle between Ugandan and Rwandan troops. His Ugandan minders had told him that the Rwandans wanted to kill him, so he spent much of his time in his room, on a satellite phone or writing. His surroundings were not conducive to creative thinking. Not only were there the sporadic bursts of machine gun fire, but the hotel had suffered the same dilapidation as the rest of the city—the water, when it ran, was rusty; the electricity was unreliable; and humidity filled the walls, floorboards, and mattresses with a dank, fetid smell. The heat was unbearable, and the extreme humidity was only leached out of the air during the late afternoon thunderstorms.

Nonetheless, Wamba was prolific. Visitors to the hotel were sometimes turned away by the guards, who said, “ The president is writing.” The professor’s essays often seemed to have little bearing on the tumult around him. As the Kalashnikovs crackled outside, Wamba wrote an open letter to the Belgians, exhorting them to examine their rule in the Congo and to follow the visionary teachings of former colonial governor Pierre Ryckmans and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Other open letters followed, including one to the people of the United States and others to the population of Kinshasa and to the Congolese diaspora. Another letter from the time was—somewhat ironically given the context—a Maoist-inspired reflection on the relation between theory and practice within the rebel movement: “[The founding statutes of the RCD] should affirm that the individual submit himself to the organization, the minority to the majority, the subaltern level to the upper level, the whole organization to the political council.”
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A Congolese friend once described the curse of Congolese politics as “the reverse Midas effect.” “Anything touched by politics in the Congo turns to shit,” he told me. “It doesn’t matter if the Holy Father himself decides to run for president, he will inevitably come out corrupt, power-hungry, and guilty of breaking all ten of the holy commandments.”

His view was extreme, but there is no doubt that there is little trace of responsibility in recent Congolese politics. Wamba is not the only civil rights activist or university professor who joined the various Congolese rebellions. Dozens of others with solid human rights credentials joined and were soon plunged into the dirty world of Congolese insurgent politics. Wamba comes out relatively unscathed in comparison. As misguided as he may have seemed, at least he didn’t become involved out of self-interest.

Expatriate workers in the Congo are often heard to say, “You know how it is—they don’t have any ideology. The Congolese like fun and dancing. They can never stand up for themselves.” “ They would sell their sister for a Gucci suit and sunglasses; you can buy anybody here.” “They are like children; you need to teach them, kindly but firmly.”

This sort of patronizing attitude is common among expatriates—be they Indian, European, Arab, or American—in the Congo. Rarely do they ponder why these alleged traits have developed. The lack of responsible politics, is not due to some genetic defect in Congolese DNA, a missing “virtue gene,” or even something about Congolese culture. Instead, it is deeply rooted in the country’s political history.

Since the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when European and Arab slave traders penetrated deep into the country and captured hundreds of thousands of slaves, often in complicity with local chiefs, hastening the disintegration of the great kingdoms of the savannah that ruled from the Atlantic seaboard throughout the center and south of the country, the Congo has suffered a social and political dissolution. It was the victim of one of the most brutal episodes of colonial rule, when it was turned into the private business empire of King Leopold; under his reign and the subsequent rule by the republican Belgian government, the Congo’s remaining customary chiefs were fought, co-opted, or sent into exile. Religious leaders who defied the orthodoxy of the European-run churches faced the same fate: The prophet Simon Kimbangu died after thirty years in prison for his anticolonial rhetoric.