Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (45 page)

Then came the luck, and with it the birth of the Bemba myth. From the early days of rebellion onwards, the portly MLC leader, who had had less than a month of formal military training in his life, was present along the front lines and insisted on participating in military operations. When the Chadians and Kabila’s troops tried to attack the MLC base in Lisala, Bemba flew into town under gunfire and drove around in a pickup truck, rounding up and regrouping his scattered soldiers. “If you have to believe in miracles, that wasn’t the only one,” he later wrote.
⁸
A day later, a rocket-propelled grenade whistled by him, missing him only by several feet. The day after that, amid a shower of gunfire, a Ugandan transport plane landed, unloaded, and took off again without major damage. “It was incredible,” a friend, who had been in touch with Bemba on a monthly basis by satellite phone, recalled. “ It was as if he was blessed with special powers.”
⁹

The MLC leaders began constructing a myth around Bemba’s exploits, a panegyric that fit well into the Congolese tradition of praise singing. The youths called him “Baimoto,” a dazzling diamond that blinds the enemy. Radio Liberté, the MLC radio station, began transmitting programs infused with Bemba’s legend. It was supposed to provide the glue to keep the disparate elements of the MLC together: Bemba the soldier, Bemba the liberator, always on the front line, always with the troops. “It did the trick,” a former MLC commander told me and then laughed:“The problem was he began to believe it himself.”
¹⁰

Bemba adopted the title of Chairman of the MLC, in part reference to his business upbringing, in part a wink to Chairman Mao’s cult of personality. Progressively, his ego became more and more bloated, even as he himself put on more weight. “Bemba was the MLC,” said José Endundo, the MLC’s former secretary for the economy. “He was an incredible egomaniac.”
¹¹
His commissioners and counselors couldn’t just go and visit him in his house in Gbadolite; they would have to wait to be called. At the entrance to his house, soldiers would frisk the MLC leaders, even the frail professor Lunda Bululu, Zaire’s former prime minister, who was in his sixties. Inside, officials sprawled on Bemba’s leather couches, but even there, they were obliged to call him Mr. President or Chairman. For some of the leaders, who had boozed and danced with Bemba in high school or had known him when he was still in diapers, this treatment grated.

Bemba’s massive ego initially had a positive impact on the organization. According to many of his former colleagues who later left the rebellion, he ruled strictly but fairly. “He respected us,” Endundo remembered. “And he was a good manager.” But for most of Bemba’s lieutenants, the goal was clear: to sit tight and wait for negotiations with Kabila’s government. If they had to endure Bemba’s narcissism until then, they would.

As opposed to most other rebel movements in the Congo, which spent much of their life spans embroiled in internecine squabbles, Bemba was the unquestioned leader of the MLC, politically as well as militarily. From command central on his couch, he micromanaged the organization, one hand on the remote control of his television, another on his satellite phone or ham radio.

While he promoted debate about internal policy and strategy, he was the only one to maintain contacts with foreign leaders. He almost never invited other MLC leaders along when he visited President Museveni, his biggest ally. The same went for other contacts. “He had a fabulous address book,” Endundo recalled. “ He would speak to [Gabonese] President Omar Bongo, [Libyan leader] Muammar Ghadaffi, [Republic of Congo] President Sassou Nguesso.” Likewise, none of the other political leaders in the MLC had much to say about military operations. Bemba sat together with the commander of the Ugandan troops and Colonel Amuli and discussed military strategy. In several cases, he went so far as to overrule his Ugandan counterparts.
¹²

Bemba did not have a hard time being popular in Equateur Province. The MLC arrived on the heels of two years of occupation, pillage, and abuse by Rwandan, Congolese, and Chadian troops. Each group had accused the local population of supporting Mobutu and blamed them for hosting such luxurious, wasteful projects as the Chinese pagodas and the hydroelectric dams. When Bemba arrived, he was treated as a
mwana mboka
, a son of the soil, a hometown hero. People lined the streets when Bemba arrived in a town, waving flags of Zaire and chanting Bemba’s name.

More than one former MLC official I interviewed compared Bemba’s management style to that of a private entrepreneur: “He ran his army like a company,” or “the MLC for him was an IPO, an initial public offering.” Nonetheless, even those who fell out with him concede that it was better organized and more successful than other rebellions. Its leaders were members of the Kinshasa elite, and tribalism, which was a problem for other rebel movements, was not an issue here. There was no interference from Kampala in political matters, and the group of decision makers was small and relatively united. Most MLC leaders were not motivated by immediate financial gain—many of them were independently wealthy—but rather by a return to power in Kinshasa.

In any case, there was little profit to be gleaned from Equateur. It was a relatively poor province, especially since its coffee, rice, and palm oil plantations had fallen into disrepair. After taking all the money they had found in the coffers of the banks—UN investigators tallied around $1.5 million “liberated” from three banks at the beginning of the rebellion—there was little money to be made. According to François Mwamba, the head of their finances, they rarely got more than $50,000 a month. “Once, I had to spend ten hours on the back of a motorcycle, hanging on to a kid with an AK-47 strapped on his back, just to collect $2,000 from a bank in the jungle town of Banalia,” Mwamba told me. “Do you think I would be doing that if we were flush with cash?”
¹³

Given their financial limitations, the MLC had little to offer the local population in terms of services. They organized communal labor to rebuild some roads and bridges, but even they admitted it was rudimentary.
¹⁴
Most of their money went to buying food and medicine for the army and paying for air transport. What the rebels could provide, however, was the most sought-after commodity in the region: security. A poll carried out in 2002 in the province concluded that 70 percent of locals felt protected against crime. The same number indicated that they would vote for Bemba and the MLC if elections were held then.
¹⁵
Indeed, when elections were eventually held in 2006, Equateur was the only province where the population voted massively in favor of the armed group that had ruled them during the war, casting 64 percent of their ballots for Bemba in the first round and 98 percent in the second. Almost everywhere else in the country, the population clearly rejected its rulers.
¹⁶

The problems arose when the MLC began expanding its military operations outside of Equateur in 2001. The northeastern region of Ituri, which borders Uganda to the east and Sudan to the north, was quickly turning into a quagmire for the Ugandan army. There, as opposed to Equateur, there was an abundance of natural resources, ranging from gold to timber, on top of the lucrative customs offices at the Congo-Uganda border, which collected millions of dollars of revenues a month. The district shared no front line with Kabila’s forces; nonetheless, Uganda had deployed a large military contingent there, ostensibly to protect their border. In addition, Ituri had a history of ethnic rivalries, especially between the pastoralist Hema people and the Lendu farmers. Ugandan army commanders quickly became involved in semiprivate business ventures, with different commanders backing various local ethnic militias in order to corner lucrative parts of the market. In January 2001, President Yoweri Museveni, who approved of Bemba’s management of Equateur Province, asked Bemba to move eastward to take the leadership of a new coalition of rebel movements, including several Ituribased factions and the MLC. Bemba accepted, attracted by the greater status it would provide him, as well as by the substantial revenues to be garnered.

The alliance, dubbed the Front for the Liberation of the Congo, was a disaster. After some early successes in calming ethnic rancor, Bemba was quickly embroiled in a struggle with the other armed groups for control of the region’s resources. Instead of trying to find a negotiated solution, Bemba retaliated with force, launching the ominously named “Clean the Blackboard” operation intended to wipe out his rivals. The attack quickly degenerated into a messy counterinsurgency operation, as 3,000 MLC troops collaborated with a Hema militia to loot, abuse, and massacre locals they accused of collaborating with their enemies. A local witness described the brutality to human rights investigators:

The Hema and the “ Effaceurs” [MLC] came into town and started killing people. We hid in our house. I opened the window and saw what happened from there. A group of more than ten with spears, guns and machetes killed two men in Cité Suni, in the center of Mongbwalu. I saw them pull the two men from their house and kill them. They took Kasore, a Lendu man in his thirties, from his family and attacked him with knives and hammers. They killed him and his son (aged about 20) with knives. They cut his son’s throat and tore open his chest. They cut the tendons on his heels, smashed his head and took out his intestines. The father was slaughtered and burnt.
¹⁷

The shine had come off Bemba’s reputation. The rebel coalition fell apart, and Bemba retreated to Equateur Province. “ He was getting reckless,” an MLC official confided. “We were broke and had engaged in a massive recruitment drive in the expectation of joining a national army, so we needed money to feed our soldiers.”

This money was supposed to come from another military adventure, this time on foreign soil. In October 2002, following a coup attempt, the president of the Central African Republic, Ange Felix Patassé, asked Bemba to come to his aid. Bangui, the capital of the strife-torn country, was just across the river from one of Bemba’s bases. It was a purely mercenary affair, with Patassé paying Bemba cash in return for sending 1,000 troops to help ward off the attack. Once again, Bemba’s troops committed atrocities, pillaging villages and raping dozens of women. Bemba, who himself visited his troops deployed there and followed the operations closely, suffered another dent to his reputation. This time, the consequences would be more serious. Five years later, he would be arrested and forced to stand trial for his soldiers’ abuses in front of the International Criminal Court.