Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (48 page)

The trade proved to be divisive, as each side brought in their own traders, lugging suitcases full of money counters, microscopes, satellite phones, and precision scales. For the Ugandans, it was the experienced Belgian trader Philippe Surowicke, who had spent years dealing diamonds with rebels in Angola.
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The Rwandans flew in a bevy of Lebanese traders. Each were protected by a phalanx of Ugandan or Rwandan soldiers, respectively. Not surprisingly, a standoff developed.

Wamba’s arrival put a match to this powder keg. Much to the chagrin of the Rwandans, who had just ousted him from the RCD leadership, he began holding rallies in downtown Kisangani to large crowds riveted by his demand for an immediate end to hostilities and talks with Kinshasa. He created a rebellion, dubbed RCD–Movement of Liberation, which would be free of Rwanda’s meddlesome interference. He was ferried around town in a Toyota 4x4 with tinted windows, followed by a pickup bristling with Ugandan soldiers. Thousands of people flocked to his rallies, and the
toleka
bicycle taxis accompanied him, ringing their bells, as he paraded through town. “ He was a poor speaker,” one Kisangani resident told me of Wamba. “ He sounded like a university lecturer. But he had denounced the Rwandans! For us, that was very brave.”
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Both the original RCD and Wamba’s new dissidents had set up radio stations that they used for trading insults and threatening each other. “Why do the Rwandans want to colonize the Congo? The population doesn’t want you—recognize it!”
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taunted Radio Liberté, Wamba’s station. Its rival station responded by accusing the professor of recruiting ex-FAR
génocidaires
into his army, the ultimate insult for the Rwandans. “ The Ugandans can’t even deal with a bunch of rebels in Uganda. How are you going to deal with the Rwandan army?”
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Day and night the population of Kisangani had to endure these insults being flung back and forth over the airwaves, raising tensions to a fever pitch.
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The fighting broke out following Wamba’s return from a two-week stay in Uganda on August 7, 1999. His radio announced a rally in front of his hotel, while the rival station warned people to stay off the streets. Ugandan and Rwandan troops deployed in force to the city center and soon heavy machine gun and mortar fire broke out as both sides fought from house to house in an effort to seize key strategic locations: the Central Bank, Wamba’s hotel, the two airports, and the Ugandan and Rwandan headquarters. The two sides traded insults over a shared walkie-talkie frequency. General Kazini taunted his Rwandan counterpart : “Just wait. I’ ll send just one company of men for you—they will bring me back your balls on a plate.”
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The fighting began in seriousness on Sunday afternoon around 2:30. Thousands of soldiers filled the broad avenues, taking cover in people’s living rooms, in sewage ditches, and in schools. Over six hundred people, mostly women and children, were stuck in the International Community of Women Apostles of God evangelical church for three days without food or water. A soccer team, dressed in cleats and jerseys and on its way to play its rivals across town, was forced to seek refuge in sewage ditches as bullets whistled overhead. Seven barbers and their clients were stuck in the Salon Maitre Celestin barbershop next to Hotel Wagenia in a room just twelve feet by twelve large. They spent three days without eating or drinking, forced to use a corner of the room as a toilet.

Pastor Philippe is a minister in a local Kisangani church and a carpenter. He is a small man with large, rough hands, a wispy grey beard, and a wooden crucifix around his neck. I visited him in his workshop, not far from the river, surrounded by hardwood shavings that gave off a rich aroma. He peered at me through huge, horn-rimmed glasses. He lost three children in the fighting, he told me, his voice barely changing in tone, his fingers interlocked.

When the war started, he had been at home, having just come back from church. He was listening to some church tapes on his stereo when he heard the first mortar hit the ground; the cups on the coffee table shook, and a picture of his wife on the wall fell down and shattered. Immediately the rat-a-tat cracks of the AK-47s started, whistling through the leaves of the mango trees outside. He and his nine children raced to lie face down on the floor of the corridor. They had experience in war, like many Congolese. They knew that AK-47s had enough power to go through a brick wall and still kill: “You really need two brick walls to protect yourself.”
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They lay in the corridor for the rest of the day, listening to the church tape wind down the batteries as the mortars fell around them. Their Tshopo commune was one of the worst hit: It was on the front lines between the two forces. Through the windows they saw soldiers moving house to house, crouching behind trees and in doorways for cover. They were in a Rwandan-occupied area, and the Tutsi officers frightened them. In 1997, the minister had worked in a small village south of Kisangani when the Rwandan army had passed through, chasing the fleeing Hutu refugees and militias. He saw them slit the throats of four Hutu soldiers and throw them into the river. “ You have to understand, the Tutsi are like a wounded leopard; it’s like they’re brain-damaged after what happened to them,” he said. “ They lash out at anything.”

Finally, after a full day of lying on the floor in the heat, the fighting stopped for several minutes. The only sound was of babies crying in a neighbor’s house. Through the window, they could see the bodies of several soldiers sprawled in the dust; blast craters had changed the look of their street and sprayed dirt onto the surrounding houses.

Two of his children—Sophie, sixteen, and Claude, twenty-two—decided to see if they could go out and try to find some water; the tap in their house was running dry, and they were all feeling faint for lack of water. There was a communal tap across the street, and they could see a woman filling a plastic jerry can. The minister watched his two children step out of the house just as a mortar hit the street in front of them. When Philippe picked himself up off the floor, he found Sophie’s body twisted in front of his house, her face a bloody pulp and her neck almost severed. Claude was moaning and grabbing his leg, which had been hit by shrapnel. Blood had completely soaked his pants and was oozing onto the street. The minister tied a tourniquet around his thigh, grabbed a wheelbarrow from the backyard, put him in it, and raced down the street to the health center run by the Red Cross. The fighting had started up again, and bullets were whizzing through the air, but he knew that Claude would die if he didn’t get him help.

At the health center, the nurses were lying on the cement floor, surrounded by patients with bandages soaked in Mercurochrome and blood, also lying on the floor. They helped Claude onto the ground and worked on stemming the blood loss from his ruptured artery. But they didn’t have surgical equipment or blood to help him; all they had left was some Novocain a dentist had brought. The hospital was a mile away.

The minister unclasped his hands and looked at me. “I saw him bleed to death in front of me. I buried him in my compound, right next to Sophie.” He paused for a long time, but his voice was steady. “ There was no time for a proper funeral. Actually, you can find hundreds of bodies buried in people’s gardens around the city for the same reason. We are living on top of our dead.”

Wamba himself was pinned down on the floor of Hotel Wagenia for three days. The Rwandan troops were more experienced in guerrilla tactics. Bolstered by the arrival of hundreds of additional troops in the early days of the fighting, they eventually gained the upper hand by cutting the Ugandan troops in town off from their headquarters outside of town. In a panic, the Ugandan officers stationed with Wamba evacuated him, carrying him piggy-back into an armored vehicle that, surrounded by special forces firing continuously in all directions, broke through Rwandan lines and reached the embankments of the Congo River. Wamba, hugging his leather briefcase with his documents and books in it, was rushed into a dugout canoe and paddled across the river to a textile factory, where the Ugandan army had dug in.

The scene at the factory complex was one of terror. The Indian-born director was holed up in his office, where he hid under his desk, while women and children lay on the floor in the bathrooms. Several mortar shells hit the building, blowing holes in the corrugated roofing and sending shrapnel flying. The Ugandans barricaded Wamba into a room lined with sandbags and told him to stay down; he almost collapsed from stress and dehydration.

Hrvoje Hranjski, a Croatian reporter for the Associated Press in Kigali, was embedded with the Rwandan army during the battle. He flew in on one of their flights and stayed in a small house behind their commander’s residence. He was friends with some of the Rwandan officers and spent the evenings drinking
waragi
gin, smoking, and talking with them. Most were well-educated and curious about international affairs; they discussed the similarities and differences between wars in the Balkans and those in Central Africa.

It was clear to Hrvoje that the Rwandans were better organized than their enemies. “ They were motivated and followed orders. The Ugandans didn’t seem to know why they were fighting.” The Rwandans were cut off from their base at the airport but quickly organized an air bridge with helicopters and infiltrated their soldiers through the jungle. The Rwandans, used to years of guerrilla warfare, fought their way from house to house with their AK-47s, dodging bullets. After battles, the Rwandans would always make sure to gather their dead and bury them, whereas the Ugandans often left their soldiers on the streets, leaving the impression that hundreds of Ugandans had died and almost no Rwandans. The Ugandans, for the most part, stayed in their trenches and in their armored personnel carriers. “ The Rwandans won the battle with guts,” Hrvoje said.

Hrvoje had good reason to admire them. Early on in the battle, he was hit by a Ugandan sniper while coming out of the Rwandan commander’s house. The bullet pierced his shoulder, went through his lung, and lodged next to his spinal cord. As the Rwandans did not have medics, they staunched the bleeding and waited until the fighting had died down before rushing him to a plane for Kigali. “ They saved my life, those guys.”

The siege lasted three days, after which the Rwandans controlled much of the city, although they had not been able to get to Wamba or conquer the textile factory. By the time the fighting was over, the air in the city had begun to fill with the stench of rotting flesh in the tropical heat.

Kisangani, round one, went to the Rwandans. Red Cross volunteers patrolled the town in their white uniforms, daubing the corpses with lime until they could get a truck to pick them up. They shook their heads: On the bodies of mostly young Ugandans, some had pictures of their mothers, others of their young wives.