Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (43 page)

Under Mobutu, the price of resistance was so great that few ever dared to stand up and be counted for fear of being chopped down. Resistance to dictatorship in other countries has been most successful when it can call on strong, well-organized structures of like-minded supporters, such as labor unions, churches, or student groups. In the Congo, where in any case only 4 percent of the working-age population had jobs in the formal sector, there were few labor unions to speak of. In the early 1990s, fewer than 100,000 students in higher education were dispersed among dozens of universities and training centers across the country. Mobutu had tamed these institutions, consolidating all labor and student unions and forcefully integrating them into his ruling party. The country’s biggest institute of higher learning, Lovanium University, previously run by the Catholic Church, was nationalized along with several Protestant universities. Mobutu even forced the Catholic Church to accept the establishment of cells of his political party within religious seminaries.

Some Congolese leaders have courageously stood up in protest: Lumumba before independence, Tshisekedi during Mobutu’s reign, and the countless journalists, priests, doctors, and human rights defenders who opposed oppression and injustice. Once these individuals become members of government, they are confronted with two problems: the lack of a popular base and the abject weakness of the state. Unable to implement policy and attacked on all sides by rivals, they have been either co-opted, killed, or forced to quit.

If the fiercest ideology or ethics that can be found in the country is ethnic, that is because no other institution has been strong enough for the people to rally around. Unfortunately, ethnic mobilization is usually exclusive in nature and does not form an equitable or truly democratic basis for the distribution of state resources; also, given the manipulation of customary chiefs, even this vessel has been corrupted. It will take generations to rebuild institutions or social organizations that can challenge the current predatory state without resorting to ethnicity.

Wamba came to power alone and isolated. He didn’t have a political power base and had few allies in the rebellion he had joined. Most importantly, the organization was fractured into different interest groups and dominated by Rwandan interference. For a political scientist, Wamba had grossly underestimated the necessity of having a strong organization to implement the lofty reforms he dreamt of. Instead of leaving, however, Wamba retreated into the cocoon of his ideas and theories, writing letters and giving interviews to leftist American and African journals. He became a victim of his own idealism, reduced to irrelevance.

15

THE REBEL START-UP

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

—NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

GBADOLITE, CONGO, JULY 1999

When the Rwandans launched their war against Laurent Kabila in August 1998, Jean-Pierre Bemba, a six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-seventy-pound, millionaire-turned-rebel leader started his own rebellion in the north of the country, the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC). Although he received backing from the Ugandan army and from an assortment of former Mobutists, for the most part, his rebellion was about Jean-Pierre Bemba.

In July 1999 Bemba captured Mobutu’s hometown of Gbadolite. Over thirty years, Mobutu had turned the sleepy jungle town, which counted only 1,700 souls at independence in 1962, into a monument to his corruption and profligacy. He built three separate, sprawling palaces for himself and his visitors. One of the palaces was a replica of a Chinese pagoda, complete with gilded dragon figurines, jade roofs, and carp-filled ponds. Ceramic tiles were flown in from Europe, pure-bred sheep from Argentina, and birthday cakes from Paris’ best patisseries. The village—one of the most remote corners of the country, five hundred miles from Kinshasa, ensconced in thick rain forest—featured luxuries most Congolese towns could only dream of: a hydroelectric power plant; a four-mile-long airport, one of the longest in Africa, which could accommodate Concorde jets; and a nuclear bunker that could shelter five hundred people. Satellite dishes provided crisp color television and a phone network. At the height of his reign, Mobutu lavished $15 million a month on the maintenance of this dreamland. It was a surreal African Shangri-la.

By the time Jean-Pierre Bemba arrived in Gbadolite, the town had been ransacked by successions of different armed groups—first Rwandans and the AFDL, then Chadian troops flown in to help Kabila fight Bemba. The crystal chandeliers and silverware had been stolen and the walls of the palaces stripped bare of anything that could be looted. Large avant-garde paintings had been replaced by graffiti—“ Fuck Mobutu,” read one—and glass from broken windows crunched underfoot. The fleet of Mercedes had been gutted; the carp were long since belly-up, and Mobutu’s pet leopard was rumored to be stalking the overgrown palace gardens. The wardrobes in town were full of thousands of white gloves, aprons, and suits belonging to the hundreds of the dictator’s former domestic staff, now out of work.

Amid the ruins, Jean-Pierre Bemba set up his headquarters. Bemba was the son of one of Mobutu’s closest business associates and had himself been a protégé of the late president. When he had walked into Gbadolite, the streets had filled with thousands of supporters wearing Mobutu T-shirts and cheering him on. His family came from the region, and most of his top army commanders had made their career in the Zairian army. Even in style and personality, he spoke with similar bombast and condescension as the late, great
Maréchal
.

Bemba was a spectacle. Dressed alternately in a smart business suit or in army fatigues, he would receive his visitors in his father’s house in Gbadolite, surrounded by his equipment: several satellite phones, a high-frequency radio, and a wide-screen television. From this central command post he would stay in touch with diplomats, his commanders in the field, and friends and family in Europe. On the coffee table in front of him was a stack of society rags:
Paris Match
,
L’Express
,
Vanity Fair
, all rarely more than three months old. He spent hours watching CNN and French news, staying abreast of world events. For journalists who had just flown over hours of impenetrable rain forest without seeing a paved road, the rebel leader seemed lost in another world, far from the thousands of square miles of jungles that his army controlled. One reporter who visited him tells the story of watching CNN as news broke of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard. Bemba was apparently crestfallen, obviously identifying with the dead scion of the Kennedy family. “Why did he choose to fly at night, in those conditions? Why?” he lamented, slapping his knee and shaking his head.
¹
As for Congolese caricaturists, they were fond of depicting him as an overgrown, spoiled baby in diapers, crying because someone had taken his rattle away.

As always in the Congo, the myth reveals a bit of the man, but not much. Bemba is certainly endowed with a bloated ego and an overly keen business acumen. But he also managed to do something that no other rebel leader in the Congo had done: He built a rebel movement that was able to control a large part of the country while maintaining popular support, all without excessive outside interference.

“This book is the history of a struggle,” Bemba writes in the afterword of his autobiography. “Struggle against dictatorship. A struggle for freedom. A struggle of so many men and women fallen on the field of honour so that an ideal can triumph.”
²
Grand words, but hardly the reality. Over the years, Bemba developed into a politician with an articulated ideology, but for most of his life he was a businessman interested, above all, in personal success.

Jean-Pierre grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, Saolona, the son of a Portuguese trader and a Congolese woman from Equateur Province, had worked his way up from a small-time coffee grower to be head of one of the largest business empires in Zaire. Based for much of his early career in the coffee growing region of Equateur, Saolona made a fortune when the coffee price peaked following the Brazilian coffee frosts of the 1970s. He grew close to Mobutu and benefited from the nationalization of foreign companies in 1973, expanding his coffee business and diversifying into manufacturing and transportation. By the 1980s, he ran a conglomerate with 40,000 employees. He was one of the richest men in Zaire, elected numerous times as head of the Congolese Business Federation.

Jean-Pierre’s mother died when he was only eight, leaving a hole in his upbringing. His father married again and had affairs with several other women, providing Jean-Pierre with over two dozen half-brothers and sisters. Not long afterwards, he was sent to boarding school in Brussels and would only see his father when he visited while on business trips or when Jean-Pierre returned home for vacation. “His mother’s death affected him deeply,” José Endundo, another affluent entrepreneur who joined his rebellion, remembered. “From then on, he always seemed to be alone.”

The distance and loneliness fueled Bemba’s desire to succeed and led him to further idolize his father. “Jean-Pierre was the first child, the oldest,” Michel Losembe, the director of Citibank in Kinshasa and a childhood friend, recalled. “He was being groomed to succeed.” During his high school vacations, he would return home to work in the coffee fields and to help manage the ever-growing network of family businesses.

Meanwhile, he led a discreet life in Brussels. “He was never his daddy’s boy, never arrogant, never throwing his wealth around,” Losembe remembered. He lived in a three-thousand-square-meter villa in a wealthy suburb of Brussels, but he almost never invited his friends to his home. He liked to socialize, but even when he went out on the town, he would always split the bill and even ask to have the wine deducted from his share if he didn’t drink. He got a reputation among the Congolese in Belgium for having
maboko makasi
—tight fists. Wary of Congolese who sought to ingratiate themselves, he preferred hanging out with Belgian aristocrats’ children just as wealthy as he was. They would go on hunting trips to the Ardennes during their vacations and test-drive each others’ new sports cars.

Looking at pictures of Bemba at that time, one finds it hard to believe that it’s the same man. In his high school snapshots, he is a tall, thin boy who seems to be smiling despite himself. He was obsessed with excelling in everything he did—tennis, squash, studies. When he flunked out of his first year of university in Brussels, he was so disappointed that he spent the whole summer cramming to pass a state exam so he could get into the prestigious Catholic Institute of Higher Commercial Studies (ICHEC) business school. He succeeded. “ He wasn’t super intelligent or quick,” a Belgian classmate remembered, “ but he was incredibly determined and rigorous.”

During this time, and contrary to later statements, Bemba did not show any interest in politics. Like most people at ICHEC, he focused on the world of profits and losses, economies of scale and price elasticities. He was wary of criticizing Mobutu, as his father’s business increasingly depended on his relations with the government. On his trips home, he, too, would rub shoulders with the Kinshasa elites, as his father began delegating much of his work to him. By the time he graduated from university in 1986, at the age of twenty-four, Bemba was managing most of his father’s foreign business interests and bank accounts.

With this promotion, Bemba’s character changed. He moved to Kinshasa, and his father made him the manager of one of his largest companies, Scibe Airlift. In a country the size of western Europe, where the national road network had collapsed, there was a lot of money to be made in air transport. By that time, Scibe had become the unofficial government carrier, ferrying goods and people around the country. Jean-Pierre ran the company with an iron fist, waking up every morning at 4:30 to go the airport. With his employees and business partners, he mimicked his father’s aggressive management style. He yelled at workers, insulted air traffic officials, and fired people who didn’t perform. “The difference between Jean-Pierre and his father,” one of his friends remembered, “was that with Saolona, at 7 o’clock, after work, that aggressive mask fell, and he became a nice, relaxed guy. With Jean-Pierre, the mask stuck.”

Throughout this time, Jean-Pierre had become close to Mobutu. His father brought him along on his trips to Gbadolite, where the dictator was spending more and more time, and Mobutu took a liking to the enterprising young man. Mobutu’s own children had mostly disappointed him—several had joined the military or intelligence services, where they were known for their crude brutality, womanizing, and crooked deals. The most promising one, his favorite son, Niwa, passed away in the 1980s, probably of AIDS. Over the years all of his other sons from his first marriage would die as well. Mobutu began to treat Jean-Pierre like a member of his own family. When the young entrepreneur visited Europe, he would fly back with gifts for Mobutu. On one occasion, he sent a massive birthday cake back on one of his Scibe airplanes.