Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (47 page)

The root of discord between Rwanda and Uganda can be traced back to the anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda around independence in 1962. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi fled to Uganda around this time, where they grew up in refugee camps as second-class citizens, not allowed to work and discriminated against by the Ugandan government. Within the squalid confines of the camps, they looked backwards to a more glorious past and forward to their children’s future, sending them to school on UN scholarships.

In the early 1980s, Ugandan youth gangs and paramilitary groups began harassing and abusing the Rwandan immigrants, accusing them of taking their land. Unwilling to return to Rwanda, where the Hutu-dominated government limited opportunities for Tutsi, and facing discrimination in Uganda, hundreds of these young Tutsi had joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebellion in the late 1970s. “These Rwandans were better educated than many of us,” a Ugandan army spokesman told me. “Many of them were put into military intelligence; that was where we could use them best.”
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Paul Kagame was one.

When Museveni came to power in 1986, Kagame became the head of military intelligence. Other Rwandans became defense minister, head of military medical services, and chief of military police. The relationships between Ugandans and Rwandans were deeply personal. The best man at Kagame’s wedding would become the chief of staff of the Ugandan army. Later, when Kagame launched his own rebellion in Rwanda, he and his fighters would cross into Uganda and eat and sleep at the house of President Museveni’s military advisor.
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A senior Ugandan intelligence official told me, “they had uncles, cousins, and brothers-in-law in our army.”
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The heavy Rwandan presence in the security services stirred resentment among Ugandans, and land conflicts involving the 200,000 Tutsi refugees living in southern Uganda were becoming a nuisance for President Museveni. Under pressure from his domestic constituencies, he was forced to backpedal on promises of resettlement and citizenship for these refugees, and many Rwandans in the army were demobilized. This rejection was tantamount to betrayal for Tutsi officers who had risked their lives liberating Uganda, only to be dismissed as foreigners. As one officer put it: “You stake your life and at the end of the day you recognize that no amount of contribution can make you what you are not. You can’t buy it, not even with blood.”
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The Rwandans were disappointed but were focused on other matters. Helping Museveni take power in Uganda had only been a stepping stone to overthrowing the government in Rwanda. Just one year after their victory in Kampala, the Rwandan Patriotic Front was formed. Museveni provided them with weapons, medicine, and a rear base from which to operate. For many Ugandans, their debt to their Rwandan allies had been repaid.

The Congo wars saw the Rwandans usurp the role of regional power from Uganda. From the beginning, they seemed eager to show their former mentors that they could do better.

The first, bloody shock came within several months of the initial invasion in 1996. Among the four Congolese leaders of the rebellion, the veteran rebel Kisase Ngandu was closest to Kampala. He had been supported by Museveni against Mobutu for years and slept, ate, and drank at a government safe house when he was in Kampala. Once in the Congo, however, Kisase had railed against “Tutsi colonialism” and had shown himself to be fiercely independent of Laurent Kabila, who as spokesperson was the leader of the group. In January 1997, Kisase Ngandu and his bodyguard were found dead by the road outside of Goma.

“The Rwandans killed Kisase. They didn’t want any competition,” a senior Museveni advisor told me.
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The Ugandans considered pulling out, but they hesitated, knowing that if they did so all the work they had put into the rebellion would have gone to waste. So they gritted their teeth and soldiered on, providing artillery support and mechanized units that the Rwandans, largely still a guerrilla-style infantry army, didn’t have. Nonetheless, the wars were led and executed mostly by Rwanda, which gave them a much stronger influence with the Congolese and gave Rwandan entrepreneurs preferential access to business deals.

The result of this complex history was a feeling of resentment from the Ugandans, who felt sidelined in Kinshasa when Laurent Kabila came to power. Above all, they accused Kigali of political immaturity in dealing with the Congolese rebellions. “I was worried about the direct involvement of the Rwandese troops in the combat role,” Museveni reflected later. Museveni preferred to let the Congolese develop their own rebellion: “Let them understand why they are fighting.”
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For the Rwandans, Museveni’s attitude smacked of hypocrisy. After all, they had helped him come to power and as recompense were told to leave the country. They liked to invoke a Swahili saying:
Shukrani ya punda ni teke
(The gratitude of a donkey is a kick). Even in the Congo, the Rwandans felt like the Ugandans were overbearing and constantly trying to teach them how to go about their business. “It was jealousy,” one of Kagame’s advisors told me. “Museveni couldn’t deal with the fact that we were now stronger and more successful than him. He forgot that we were no longer refugees in his country. He couldn’t order us around!”
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Wamba dia Wamba arrived in Kisangani on a Ugandan C-130 cargo plane in May 1999. He had fled Goma with a Ugandan military escort after his RCD colleagues had threatened to kill him. He had then met with President Museveni, who apologized to him for his clash with the Rwandans:“Wamba, you will die because of my mistake. I never thought our Rwandan friends could become our enemies!”
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Nonetheless, Wamba and Museveni decided he should return to Kisangani to try to launch a new rebellion, this time without meddlesome interference from Kigali. The elderly professor insisted on a slow, democratizing rebellion that would develop grassroots support and a firm ideological commitment. In the meantime, fighting should be kept to a minimum. “Unconditional negotiations with Kinshasa!” was Wamba’s slogan.

When Wamba arrived in the city, he found it divided into a Rwandan and a Ugandan zone, each with Congolese rebel allies. The two opposing commanders were taunting each other. The city streets in the center of the town were almost deserted. Pickups with anti-aircraft guns and heavy machine guns mounted on the back patrolled the town. It was a game of chicken, with each side ratcheting up the pressure to see if the other would blink. Rwandan soldiers hauled a Congolese man out of a Ugandan pickup by force, claiming he had defected from the RCD. In retaliation, Ugandan soldiers kidnapped the bodyguard of a top RCD commander while he was being lathered up in a barber shop.

General James Kazini, the Ugandan commander, was holed up in a timber factory on the edge of town, where he would spend his afternoons drinking Ugandan gin, chain-smoking, and commanding his units over a walkie-talkie on a table in front of him. He was a colorful character with a pug nose and a reddish shine to his cheeks where skin-lightening cream had burned him. To Ugandan journalists who visited him he complained about his twenty-seven-year-old Rwandan counterpart, Colonel Patrick Nyavumba, based just a mile away, “ Patrick? Patrick is just a boy. I am a brigadier. Who is he to discuss anything with me?” He told them the Rwandans were behaving like a colonial power in the Congo and pointed to Wamba’s defection from the RCD as proof that Kigali was trying to manipulate its Congolese allies by remote control. When the journalists pressed him on why Uganda was there, he explained, “Uganda is here as a midwife to Congolese liberation. The Rwandans want to have the baby themselves!”
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Even though the two armed forces were supposed to maintain a joint command in the city, Kazini soon began to make decisions on his own. He arrested the pilots of Rwandan aircraft arriving in Kisangani with supplies, accusing them of not notifying him of their arrival. One night, he ordered Ugandan tanks to parade through the Rwandan part of town for three hours after midnight, thundering an artillery barrage into the surrounding forests, “Just to show them that they were a professional army with tanks and the Rwandans were a bunch of bush fighters,” as one Ugandan journalist with him at the time put it.
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The Rwandan commander retorted, telling the reporters who visited him, “[Kazini and I] went to the same university, but now he thinks because I live in
manyatta
[straw huts], I am no good! Tell him that he is an
afande
[respected commander] but that I don’t respect his methods.”
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Almost as an afterthought, the same journalists visited Wamba, who had become a minor player in the standoff. “The answer for the problems of the Congo does not lie with the military, but in the enlightenment of the people,” he told them, sounding ever more like Candide.
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Then there were the diamonds. In dozens of riverbeds around Kisangani, locals pan for the gems, spending days knee-deep in water. As in much of central and western Africa, Lebanese traders had cornered the diamond trade, taking advantage of transnational family networks that reach from Africa to the Middle East and Belgium. While many other shops in Kisangani closed, the main streets were still lined with dozens of small diamond stores with huge, painted diamonds decorating their walls. Their names voiced the traders’ eclectic backgrounds and dreams of a better future: Oasis, Top Correction, Force Tranquille, and Jihad.

Only traders with close connections to the military commanders felt safe enough to keep their safes flush with hundred dollar bills to buy the rough stones from diggers. Between 1997 and 1999, official Ugandan exports of diamonds grew tenfold, from $198,000 to $1.8 million. Rwanda’s official exports leaped from $16,000 to $1.7 million between 1998 and 2000, even though neither country has diamonds of its own.
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The real value of exports is likely to have been much higher, as the gems were easy to smuggle in pockets and suitcases. One of the thirty-four diamond shop owners in Kisangani reported that over six months in 1998 alone, he paid $124,000 to various Ugandan commanders, and industry insiders suggested that both countries together bought up to $20 million in uncut stones a month.
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