Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (46 page)

In the meantime, life in Gbadolite for the rest of the MLC leaders was bucolic and slow. After all, their headquarters was 1,000 kilometers from Kinshasa. You could not reach a major town without boarding an aircraft and flying over a thick expanse of forest. The leaders would wake up late in their air-conditioned houses in Gbadolite and spend the day in meetings or on the phone with friends and diplomats. At times, they worked hard, sometimes late into the night. There were letters to write to the African Union and United Nations, a draft constitution to put together, and political strategy to hatch. Other times, there was nothing to do but find new ways to ward off boredom. Some would listen to classical music, while others would walk through Mobutu’s abandoned gardens, listening to parrots, hornbills, and mousebirds or hunting for Mobutu heirlooms that previous pillagers had missed. They inspected Mobutu’s private chapel, containing the tomb to his first beloved wife, Marie-Antoinette, which in better times used to elevate once a year on her birthday via a solar-powered device. In the evenings, when there was no work to be done, some would watch satellite TV with Bemba, although “that could get a little boring after a while,” one MLC leader admitted.

For the former Mobutists, who had been living in exile in their villas in Europe, life in Gbadolite wasn’t easy. “Gone were the days of champagne drinking, parties with two hundred servants, and people flown in on Concordes,” Endundo remembered. He was particularly bitter about having to run his various businesses from the isolation of the jungle town. He ran up satellite phone bills of up to $40,000 a month. Thambwe Mwamba, a former minister of public works for Mobutu, arrived in mid-2000, asking his new colleagues whether there was somewhere to get a manicure in town. Some MLC officials took to riding bicycles, a skill that some had to relearn, as there were only a few vehicles in town, all belonging to Jean-Pierre Bemba. “ We got into a fight with him one time,” a former MLC commander remembered, “ because he didn’t want to loan us a pickup to drop us off at our house. It was a pickup we had captured from the Chadians! Not his personal vehicle!”
¹⁸

When asked about how much they earned during the war, all MLC officials respond with the same guffaw. In the early days, when the MLC just controlled a handful of mid-sized towns in northern Equateur, the tax revenues weren’t enough to pay salaries. High-ranking cadres received a daily food allowance of around $4; less important officials had half as much. Their diet was a tedious repetition of fish, rice, and various manioc, pumpkin, and bean leaves stewed in palm oil. “Once, after much complaining,” said Thomas Luhaka, the MLC defense commissioner, “the commander gave me $40. I thought that was a lot!”

But boredom was perhaps the biggest challenge. The hydroelectric plant on the Ubangui River was still working and supplied the town with electricity day and night. The wives of the leaders, themselves ensconced in their houses in Europe, would send them care packages via Kampala with all the luxuries they needed: cheese, ketchup, chocolate, smoked ham, and even condoms. The latter item didn’t go to waste: There was still a coterie of beautiful women in Gbadolite, educated at the local Jesuit school, one of the best in the country under Mobutu, who had worked at the Enlightened Guide’s court. For some of his time in Gbadolite, Bemba lived with one of these women, the beautiful and tall Mayimuna, with whom he ended up having several children, much to the dismay of his wife, who had stayed in Portugal.

I met with Jean-Pierre Bemba once after he had left the rebellion, in 2005, by which time he was vice president in the transitional government. He greeted me at his desk, wearing a suit and tie. In front of him was a laptop on which “I can see all the revenues and expenditures of the government budget in real time,” he said—his portfolio included economy and finance. Just before I had arrived, he had been perusing a book that lay next to the laptop on the table:
The 48 Rules of Power
by Robert Greene. It was a good indication of his philosophy. He was more Machiavelli—the inspiration behind the book—than Mao or Marx. As with Machiavelli, who wrote during a time of upheaval and infighting among Italy’s various city states, idealism wouldn’t get you very far in the world of Congolese politics, and it had never been part of Bemba’s arsenal. Most of his own autobiography,
The Choice of Freedom
, was ghostwritten by his own ideologues: Olivier Kamitatu and Thambwe Mwamba. As an MLC friend once put it, “you can’t teach people with twenty years of experience in politics new tricks. Jean-Pierre Bemba was no Che Guevara.”
¹⁹

Congolese rebel politics since the 1960s has been either an elite or an ethnic affair, or—most often—a mixture of both. There has rarely been a successful experiment in building an insurgency from the ground up without outside help. Almost every single Congolese rebel group was helped on its way by an outside patron: Rwanda, Uganda, DR Congo, Angola, and Zimbabwe. The semi-exceptions are the various ethnic self-defense forces, usually called Mai-Mai, that operate in the eastern Congo and that sprang up in response to outside aggression. Many of these groups, while initially autonomous, only became powerful when they were co-opted by Kinshasa to wage a proxy war against Rwanda and Uganda. And almost all remained confined by the limits of their ethnicity. As Che Guevara himself had concluded at the end of his sojourn in the country in 1965, the rebels were “devoid of coherent political education . . . revolutionary awareness or any forward-looking perspective beyond the traditional horizon of their tribal territory.”
²⁰

It was therefore no wonder that the MLC would break up after the war. One by one, most of the heavyweights in the party had been thrown out of the movement, which was now battered and broken. Tired of Bemba’s ego, and broke after years of unpaid labor, many gladly accepted offers from Kabila to join his party, while others struck out on their own. Even Olivier Kamitatu, the wellspoken secretary-general of the party, who had been inseparable from Bemba since their school days, had bailed on him, taking a job as minister of planning for Kabila. Rumors abounded that Olivier’s new house had been financed by Kabila, and he was often seen driving around in a new, shiny Hummer. Those who had remained in the party were consumed by incessant squabbling. The transformation from a rebel group into a political party had failed: The authoritarianism that Bemba had used to keep people in line in the jungle was now illplaced. Opportunism, once a centripetal force in the MLC, had now burst the seams of the movement, flinging members in all directions.

Nonetheless, during its heyday, the MLC was as good as it gets for a Congolese rebel movement. Although supported by Uganda, it was run by Congolese under a more or less unified command, supported by the local population, and relatively disciplined. But the MLC also shows us the limitations of rebellion in the Congo. Like most rebellions, it was run by an educated elite, while all of its foot soldiers were local peasants. There was little ideology that took hold at the grassroots level other than opposition to the enemy and tribal loyalty.

16

CAIN AND ABEL

KISANGANI, CONGO, MAY 1999

In May 1999, the city of Kisangani, later dubbed the City of Martyrs, fell victim to the worst bout of urban warfare the Congolese war had ever seen. The battle had dramatic consequences: It spelled the end of the Rwandan-Ugandan alliance and brought to the fore the plunder of the country’s riches.

The city’s reputation had not always been so bleak. The town of a million people was located in the middle of the country at a bend in the Congo River. In the 1960s, it had been an attractive city laid out along grand avenues lined with jacaranda and mango trees. It is clear that the Belgians had had big plans for the jungle city: Italianate turrets and futuristic, Art Deco architecture; streets named after Chopin, Beethoven, and Belgian royalty; and a city divided by the great river into “Rive Droite” and “ Rive Gauche,” reminiscent of Paris.

Kisangani formed a trade hub with the eastern provinces by road and with Kinshasa by river. Roads branched out into the jungles to the north, where there were large ranches and coffee plantations, and merchants brought huge bags of rich palm oil down the river in dugout canoes. However, Mobutu’s kleptocracy had reversed the flow of time in the town, as buildings crumbled and the jungle reclaimed land. The novelist V. S. Naipaul portrayed the demoralizing aura of the city in his 1979 book,
A Bend in the River
:

The big lawns and gardens had returned to bush; the streets had disappeared; vine and creepers had grown over broken, bleached walls of concrete or hollow clay brick.... But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and worked towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life.
¹

The country had only further decayed since Naipaul had visited it. Throughout my travels in the eastern Congo, I would come across overgrown train tracks, phone poles devoured by termites and moss. In remote valleys, entire villas complete with horse stables and swimming pools had been reclaimed by nature.

The war had further sapped the life out of Kisangani. The whitewash had faded from the Art Deco facades, the pavement was cracked and overgrown with grass, and most shops were boarded up and empty. River traffic had all but ceased, as no boats were allowed up the river from Kinshasa into rebel-held territory. With no fuel or spare parts available, the only motorized traffic on the streets were a few dozen vehicles belonging to humanitarian organizations. The only means of leaving the town—unless you wanted to trek on foot for a week through the forest—was by plane, so all luxury goods had the cost of an air ticket slapped on their price tag.

The isolation had its impact on the locals. Almost 10 percent of children were severely malnourished, retarding their physical and mental development and making them prone to disease.
²
The inhabitants now had to rely on the tens of thousands of
toleka
(“let’s go” in Lingala), the bicycle taxis with cushions bolted onto their baggage racks for passengers. Except for the parish and several hotels, which had diesel-run generators that sometimes worked, the city was left in the dark after sunset. Kerosene lamps and candles flickered in bars at the roadside. The beer factory was one of the only businesses to stay open during the war, churning out a watered-down, overpriced product.

Kisangani became the graveyard of Rwandan and Ugandan reputations, where the two countries’ lofty rhetoric gave way to another, more tawdry reality. Since the beginning of the first Congo war in 1996, the two countries had been able to maintain the pretense that they were involved in the Congo out of domestic security concerns. Even when this illusion became difficult to maintain—Why were their troops stationed three hundred miles from their borders? Why did they have to overthrow the government they themselves had put in place in Kinshasa to protect themselves?—they continued to benefit from staunch support from the international community, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom.

Then, in 1999 and 2000, the alliance between Rwanda and Uganda fell apart, as the two countries fought three battles in the streets of Kisangani. Thousands of Congolese died as the two countries sought to settle their differences on foreign soil. With this internecine violence, their pretext of self-defense crumbled.

But what was their real motive in fighting over the City on the River? To many, the battle in one of the region’s main hubs of the diamond trade was the final proof that the two countries were really just seeking self-enrichment. The reality was, as always, more complex. Yes, access to resources was increasingly supplanting ideology and self-defense as a motive in the conflict, but the root of the fighting was just as tightly linked to personality and regional politics.