Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (44 page)

Meanwhile, Jean-Pierre was longing to start his own business, to emerge from his father’s shadow. The privatization of telecommunications in the early 1990s provided the opportunity. Like the rest of the state’s infrastructure, the phone grid had collapsed, prompting investors to experiment with new cellular phone technology that was too expensive for widespread use in the developed world. A Congolese Tutsi businessman, Miko Rwayitare, convinced Mobutu in 1986 to set up Telecel, one of the first mobile phone companies in Africa. He distributed hundreds of clunky, brick-sized phones to ministers, and the service proved to be both incredibly successful and expensive. With charges as much as $16 per minute, Mobutu complained to his advisors about the millions of dollars in telephone bills, as well as Rwayitare’s ties to his political rivals. Jean-Pierre saw a business opportunity and stepped in: He told the president he would start a new company, Comcell, and offer cheaper rates. Mobutu was delighted. So was Saolona Bemba, who followed his son’s business exploits with great pride.

Comcell prompted Jean-Pierre’s first foray into politics. As the young entrepreneur set up transmission towers across Kinshasa, he met with sharp resistance from the political heavyweights surrounding Miko. They tried to undermine his nascent company and prevent customers from signing up with Comcell. In response, Jean-Pierre mounted his first military operation, using a gang of presidential guards to sabotage a Telecel antenna in Kinshasa. “To be in business back then, you had to have muscle to protect you,” recalled José Endundo, who at the time was as influential as the Bemba family. Jean-Pierre Bemba got used to driving around Kinshasa behind tinted windows, escorted by two vehicles with bodyguards. A friend of his remembers getting into the passenger seat of his car around that time, only to find a grenade at his feet.

As the Zairian economy capsized, economic opportunities became scarcer, and political patronage more important. When the poorly paid army went on a rampage in Kinshasa in 1991 and 1993, pillaging thousands of stores and houses, the Bembas lost millions of dollars. Increasingly, Jean-Pierre used his ties to Mobutu to defend his businesses. He obtained procurement deals from the army for the supply of fuel, uniforms, and boots and even carried out confidential diplomatic missions for Mobutu in the region. He made friends with top generals, who controlled much of the government’s spending, and when Mobutu fell sick with prostate cancer, Jean-Pierre visited him on his sick bed in France.

By the time the AFDL arrived in Kinshasa, Jean-Pierre had fled to Europe; by that time he owned several sumptuous villas in Portugal and Belgium. His father, however, stayed, in order to look after the family business and properties. Not surprisingly, when Laurent Kabila arrived in Kinshasa, Saolona Bemba became one of the first people he locked up. “When you talked about Mobutu’s business elite, Saolona was foremost,” Henri Mova, Kabila’s transport minister at the time, recalled. “We had to arrest him.”

When Jean-Pierre heard about his father’s arrest, he was terrified what might happen to him. He contacted several Mobutu officers who had fled across the Congo River to Brazzaville and tried to organize a prison break for his father. At the last minute, when preparations were already at an advanced stage, Saolona himself told his son to stand down. It was too risky, he said. This is just about money. He was right: After paying half a million dollars, he was released.

Jean-Pierre’s investments—a dozen planes, warehouses full of goods, coffee plantations, a mobile phone network—were all sunk costs, based in the Congo. While many other entrepreneurs had been able to make the transition between Mobutu and Kabila, Bemba’s intimacy with Mobutu was too well-known. He was also too proud to come begging Kabila to forgive him for past alliances.

Bemba was an avid pilot and liked talking in aviation jargon. When asked why he had doggedly pursued his dream of rebellion, he once responded: “ In an aircraft at take-off, you reach decision speed, after which, no matter what happens, you have to continue accelerating and take-off or else you risk crashing the plane. I had reached decision speed.”
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Some sociologists have put down insurgencies to “blocked political aspirations.”
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If this is true, many others from Mobutu’s entourage would have had better reason to start an insurgency than Jean-Pierre Bemba. Following Mobutu’s demise, the complacency of his lieutenants and strongmen was astounding: All of his ministers, the heads of his powerful security services, and his personal advisors contented themselves with comfortable exiles in Europe and South Africa. Instead, it was a political neophyte who took up the struggle against Kabila.

Once Jean-Pierre Bemba had decided on starting a rebellion, he had various choices. He had naturally been in touch with Mobutu’s former generals in exile but was skeptical about their abilities given their recent ineptitude. They were also divided into different, competing networks, the result of decades of divide-and-conquer manipulations by Mobutu. Bemba also wanted to avoid direct association with Mobutu’s regime.

Then there was the new Rwandan-backed rebellion that had begun gestating in the early months of 1998. Bemba had met Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni during one of his business trips before the war and had kept in touch since.
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Museveni was worried about the way Laurent Kabila’s regime was shaping up, and he was eager to identify new, more reliable figures in the Congolese diaspora. He recommended Bemba to General Paul Kagame, who was busy cobbling together the RCD rebellion. In Kigali, however, Bemba didn’t like the look of what he saw. “Militarily, the choice of this movement to lean exclusively on its Rwandan ally to the detriment of developing a Congolese capacity, makes me think that this method cannot lead to the creation of a credible popular movement,” he wrote after a two-hour meeting with Kagame.
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He was also worried by the phalanx of Congolese political and economic heavyweights already assembled in Kigali. It was clear that if he joined, he would not be the leader of the new movement, but milling around in mid-level bureaucracy. Back in Kampala, he explained his reservations to Museveni and pushed for a second option, “a real alternative force to Kinshasa’s dictatorial regime.”

Museveni himself was beginning to have his doubts about Rwanda’s approach, which seemed too top-down and controlling. “We had a different strategy,” Colonel Shaban Bantariza, the army spokesman, told me. “For us, the Congolese were supposed to learn how to manage and rule themselves.” The Ugandan army was inspired by its own experience as rebels, fighting for six years in the bush with little external support, relying on the local population. Bemba fit the Ugandan model. “He was convincing,” Bantariza said. “You could spend two hours with him, and he would give you a clear, structured vision of what he wanted to do with his country.”
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The Ugandans agreed to back Bemba and enrolled him in accelerated military training.

Shortly after the beginning of the second war in August 1998, they agreed with the Rwandans to split operational sectors, with the Ugandans taking the area north of Kisangani and the Rwandans staying to the south. Kisangani itself would remain under joint command.

To start their own rebellion, the Ugandans recruited 154 Congolese in Kisangani in September 1998 and began training them along with Bemba. That number would later take on mythical proportions for Bemba, who claimed that he conquered the area north of Kisangani with a mere 154 soldiers. That was, at least initially, not true. As Bemba sweated away in the training camp with his soldiers—he was made to goose-step, snake around on his considerable belly, and take apart an AK-47 in thirty seconds—RCD troops with Ugandan support were advancing to the north, fighting pitched battles with Kabila’s troops.

The key moment for Bemba came when Uganda seized the strategic town of Lisala, the birthplace of Mobutu, in Equateur Province, and the Ugandan commander, General James Kazini, assembled the RCD troops and told them to turn in their walkie-talkies “for reprogramming.” General Kazini sat down with the Congolese officers and gave them a choice—you can return to Kisangani and work with the Rwandans, or stay here with us and help us build a new rebellion. Most chose the latter.

It was in the midst of this Kigali-Kampala catfight that the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) was born. Bemba, who had been working for several months with friends from the Congolese diaspora on drafting statutes and a political program, quickly called the BBC radio service to announce his new rebellion.

The MLC’s beginnings were shaky. Applying himself to the rebellion with the same tenacity as he did to his business empire, Bemba managed to recruit a hodge-podge of young men and women from the business and political class of Kisangani. Of the founding members of the MLC, there was a journalist for the state radio station, the local manager of Bemba’s phone company, a territorial administrator, two former Mobutu officers, and several businessmen. None of them was over forty years old. For the most part, they were political unknowns.

Slowly, Bemba began to take over control of the military wing of the MLC from the Ugandans. He leveraged his contacts among Mobutu’s former officers to rally some of the most capable around him, making sure to stay away from the most infamous and corrupt. It had not been for lack of experience and knowledge that Mobutu’s army had lost the war, and hundreds of officers, marginalized or in exile, were eager to get back into the fray. Bemba handed the military command over to Colonel Dieudonné Amuli, the former commander of Mobutu’s personal guard and a graduate of several international military academies. Other officers’ résumés included stints at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning (United States), Sandhurst (United Kingdom), Nanjing (China), Kenitra (Morocco), and academies in Egypt and Belgium. Although the Ugandans continued to provide military support, in particular through artillery, training, and logistics, by early 1999 the Congolese were largely the masters of their own rebellion, expanding their rebel force from 150 to around 10,000 troops within two years.

Slowly, on the back of the MLC ’s growing reputation, a second wave of political figures began to board flights from Europe to join up. Their pedigree was as impressive as those of the military officers. This time it was the well-heeled diaspora, the members of the Kinshasa elite, educated in Europe and the United States. There were the young and westernized, like Olivier Kamitatu, the son of a founding father of the Congo who had been Bemba’s inseparable friend in business school in Brussels. Then there were the Mobutists-turned-oppositionactivists, including former prime minister Lunda Bululu and two other former ministers, and the businessmen, such as the erstwhile heads of the Congolese business federation and the Congo-Belgian chamber of commerce. In groups of two or three, they arrived on Ugandan military planes in Gbadolite, which by mid-1999 had become command central of the rebellion. They walked around the pillaged town dumbstruck.