Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (49 page)

Other than finger-wagging by diplomats, there were few consequences for the occupying forces. A joint investigation by the Rwandan and Ugandan army commanders arrived in town and agreed on taking steps to prevent further fighting, but little was done. The Ugandans moved their positions to the north of town but continued to beef up their arsenals. The RCD and Rwandans could not refrain from gloating, showing the bodies of Ugandans on Congolese television and warning spectators that this was the consequence of challenging them. They banned
toleka
riders—around 2,000 in the whole town—from working, accusing them of complicity with Wamba and the Ugandans. They even dismantled the famous scaffolding set up by the Wagenia fishermen in the Congo River; they said the fishermen had helped guide the Ugandans to safety during the fighting. The scaffolding, imposing thirty-foot-tall pieces of timber lashed together and anchored in the rapids, had been a tourist attraction in Kisangani since the first Belgian colonial postcards were made. The Rwandans certainly did not know how to make themselves loved.

The feuding had all the characteristics of typical sibling rivalry; camaraderie was never far from one-upmanship. At night, in the Gentry Dancing Club—a dingy, dark bar decorated with Christmas lights and cigarette advertisements—Ugandans and Rwandans mingled, sometimes even dancing together and paying for each others’ drinks. The bar was a study in stereotypes: the Rwandans were dressed in spotless camouflage fatigues and were reserved, clustering in small groups. The Ugandans were boisterous in their plain green uniforms and Wellington boots, mingling with the sex workers and singing along with the music. Their respective Congolese rebel allies were on the high end of the frivolity scale, sometimes even wearing makeup and nail polish.

The festivities could quickly turn sour, however. An altercation over a woman led to recriminations over who had won the last round of fighting. “ We can’t figure whether you Ugandans are real soldiers or just Boy Scouts,” one Rwandan teased. “ Have you seen our T-55s?” the Ugandans retorted, referring to their Soviet tanks. “ Maybe we should show you.” To make matters worse, the Rwandans sometimes paraded about town in captured Ugandan uniforms, boasting about the vehicles they had captured during the fighting.

Other factors added to the tension. After five years in power, the RPF’s authoritarianism was beginning to grate, resulting in high-level defections from the Rwandan government. Of course, given their historical ties to Uganda and the current frosty relations, it was only natural for these defectors to flee to Kampala. The speaker of Rwanda’s parliament and the former prime minister both fled across the border toward the north. A group of Tutsi university students followed after they were harassed by security officials.
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They were all welcomed with open arms in Kampala. Irked, General Paul Kagame accused his Ugandan counterpart of arming ex-FAR and Interahamwe to fight against him.

The accusations made little military sense. At the same time as their feuding in Kisangani was tying down thousands of troops, both countries were engaged in a push on Kinshasa through Equateur and Katanga, respectively, yet the vitriol reached a level never expressed toward Kabila. The strong friendship between Rwanda and Uganda had soured into a toxic brew. Museveni belittled his former allies as “those boys,” while Rwanda’s government spokesman fired back: “For a man surrounded by marijuana addicts and drunkards, Museveni has chosen the wrong analogy.”
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Finally, on June 5, 2000, the inevitable happened. Ugandan General James Kazini, who had been itching for months to get back at the Rwandans, launched a new offensive. This time, the Ugandans unleashed a far heavier artillery barrage on Kisangani, in complete disregard for the hundreds of thousands of civilians cowering in their homes. UN observers estimated that 6,000 artillery shells fell on the city over the following six days, accompanied by heavy machine gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. At the same time, residents in the Tshopo neighborhood, located along the river on the front line of the conflict, saw Ugandans and Rwandans storming their streets, digging trenches in their gardens, and breaking into their houses to fire through the windows. As the fighting began during the morning, thousands of schoolchildren were once again pinned down by the fighting, sometimes between the feet of soldiers, whose spent cartridges rained down on their heads.

The result was devastating. At least 760 civilians were killed during the six days of fighting, and 1,700 were wounded. According to UN investigators, 4,083 houses were damaged, of which 418 were completely destroyed, and forty-nine schools were badly damaged or destroyed. Water and electricity were cut off in the whole town, and doctors at the main hospital had to operate with flimsy flashlights in the dark, using muddy river water to wash their hands.

Pastor Philippe was not spared by the second round of violent exchange, which once again engulfed his Tshopo neighborhood. After losing two children the previous year, he had tried to school his children in how to act if the war broke out, but there was only so much he could do. People had to go on working, studying, and playing.

The fighting found him at home with most of his family. However, his son Jean-Marie had gone out to the market to buy rice and vegetables; for two days, they didn’t know where he was. Finally, a neighbor came to tell the minister that he had seen his son on Seventeenth Avenue and that he thought the youth had made it to the forest, where many had fled.

When the conflict finally ended, however, there was no sign of Jean-Marie. The minister went to Seventeenth Avenue to ask around for him. Finally, a Red Cross worker showed him a bunch of clothes and bags they had found alongside some bodies in a house. His son’s school satchel, caked in blood, was there. According to the Red Cross worker, the residents of the house where the bag had been found had gotten into an argument with a Rwandan soldier outside. What it had been about was anyone’s guess. The soldier had leaned into the house and sprayed the room with bullets. By the time the fighting had stopped, the bodies had decomposed so much that the Red Cross had to bury them immediately.

“I was sad I couldn’t bury my son next to his siblings,” Philippe said in a calm voice. “But we still remember his birthday every year. We eat fried catfish, his favorite.” He paused again for a long time. “ I was also angered by the arrogance of these two countries. Coming to settle their differences 300 miles from home, killing innocent civilians. What did we ever do to them?”

I asked him whom he blamed for their deaths. He shrugged. “ There are too many people to blame. Mobutu for ruining our country. Rwanda and Uganda for invading it. Ourselves for letting them do so. None of that will help bring my children back.”

17

SORCERERS’ APPRENTICES

Death does not sound a trumpet.

—CONGOLESE SAYING

EASTERN CONGO, JUNE 2000

In June 2000, a nonprofit charity published a mortality study that estimated that 1.7 million people had died as a result of the conflict between August 1998 and May 2000. This study, conducted by the epidemiologist Les Roberts for the International Rescue Committee, shocked the world. Further studies, published in respected medical journals and confirmed by other epidemiologists, were conducted in subsequent years; in 2004, the charity estimated that 3.8 million had died because of the war since 1998.
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Roberts was rigorous in his methods: He sent out teams to six separate sites throughout the eastern Congo where, using a random GPS selection of households within a grid on a map, the researchers approached huts and asked whether anyone had died during the past year. After interviewing 2,000 people, the researchers obtained an average mortality rate for the area. They subtracted from this the rate of deaths from before the war and obtained an “excess death rate”—in other words how many more people died than was normal.
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The number of deaths is so immense that it becomes incomprehensible and anonymous, and yet the dying was not spectacular. Violence only directly caused 2 percent of the reported deaths. Most often, it was easily treatable diseases, such as malaria, typhoid fever, and diarrhea, that killed. There was, however, a strong correlation between conflict areas and high mortality rates. As fighting broke out, people were displaced to areas where they had no shelter, clean water, or access to health care and succumbed easily to disease. Health staff shuttered up their hospitals and clinics to flee the violence, leaving the sick to fend for themselves.

Almost half of the victims were children—the most vulnerable to disease and malnutrition. A full 60 percent of all children died before their fifth birthday. Step out of a car in many areas of the eastern Congo during the war, and you were often confronted with children suffering from
kwashikor
, or clinical malnutrition. It was a bizarre sight to see such listless children surrounded by lush hills. Congo is not Niger or Somalia, where famine and malnutrition are closely linked to drought. Here, the rainy season lasts nine months a year in most parts, and the soil is fertile. But the harvests were often stolen by hungry militias, and farmers were unable to access their fields because of the violence.

So how did Congolese experience the violence? Many Congolese never did; they only heard about it and suffered the economic and political consequences. But for millions of people in the east of the country, an area roughly the size of Texas, daily life was punctuated by confrontations with armed men.

By 2001, fighting along the front line in the middle of the country had come to a standstill as a result of several peace deals. The east of the country, however, had seen an escalation of violence, as local Mai-Mai militias formed in protest of Rwandan occupation. This insurgency was fueled by rampant social grievances and by Laurent Kabila, who supported them with weapons and money. The Mai-Mai were too weak to threaten Rwanda’s control of main towns and roads, but they were able to prompt a violent counterinsurgency campaign that cost Rwanda whatever remaining legitimacy it once had.

It was this proxy war fought between Kigali and Kinshasa’s allies that caused the most suffering for civilians. Without providing any training, Kinshasa dropped tons of weapons and ammunition at various airports in the jungles of the eastern Congo for the Hutu militia as well as for Mai-Mai groups. The countryside became militarized, as discontented and unemployed youth joined militias and set up roadblocks to “tax” the local population. Family and land disputes, which had previously been settled in traditional courts, were now sometimes solved through violence, and communal feuds between rival clans or tribes resulted in skirmishes and targeted killings.

The RCD rebels, Rwanda’s main allies in the east, responded in kind. In both South Kivu and North Kivu, governors created local militias, so-called Local Defense Forces, to impose rebel control at the local level. By 2000, at least half a dozen such forces had been created by various RCD leaders. But instead of improving security, these ramshackle, untrained local militias for the most part just exacerbated the suffering by taxing, abusing, and raping the local population. Local traditional chiefs, who were the de facto administrators in much of the hinterlands, either were forced to collaborate or had to flee. In South Kivu, half of the dozen most important customary chiefs were killed or fled. In some areas, new customary chiefs were created or named by the RCD, usurping positions that had been held for centuries by other families.

The Rwandan, Ugandan, and Congolese proxies eventually ran amok, wreaking havoc. These fractious movements had not been formed organically, did not have to answer to a popular base—after all, they had been given their weapons by an outside power—and often had little interest other than surviving and accumulating resources. The dynamic bore a resemblance to Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice: As with the young magician’s broom, the rebel groups split into ever more factions as rebel leaders broke off and created their own fiefdoms, always seeking allegiances with regional powers to undergird their authority. According to one count, by the time belligerents came together to form a transitional government in 2002, Rwanda, Uganda, and the Congo had over a dozen rebel proxies or allies battling each other.
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