Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (52 page)

Mass violence does not just affect the families of the dead. It tears at the fabric of society and lodges in the minds of the witnesses and perpetrators alike. A decade after the violence, it seemed that the villagers were still living in its aftershocks. They had all fled after the massacre; no one wanted to stay in town. They fled deep into the jungles, where they crossed the strong currents of the Luindi River. It was only on the other side that they felt safe. They lived in clearings, where they built grass huts. There was no place to start farming, and no one had the energy to cut down the brush and trees to start planting cassava and beans, so they ate what they could find: wild yams, caterpillars, forest mushrooms, and even monkeys when they could catch them. Exposed to the cold at night and deprived of adequate nutrition, many newborns and old people died. A scabies infestation ravaged their makeshift camps, and they couldn’t even find the most rudimentary medicine for their various afflictions. They would sometimes visit their homes along the main road, but they would do so like burglars, at night and quickly, for fear of detection.

Some of them had radios, and they gave the nickname “Kosovo” to their hometown of Kasika after they heard of the war and massacres in the Balkans. The main difference, of course, was that the press was giving the small Balkan region, barely a sixth the size of South Kivu Province, nonstop coverage, while no foreign journalist visited Kasika for a decade.

Social life was deeply affected as well. The death of their traditional chief, along with the only priest, left the community without any leaders. “They killed our father and our mother,” one villager told me. The church closed down, and the chief’s family was embroiled in a succession battle that the RCD finally put an end to by imposing someone of their choice, much to the chagrin of many community members. Again and again, the villagers told me how the chief’s death had affected them much more than anything else. The well-being of the community was vested in the chief; he presided over harvest ceremonies, gave out land, and blessed weddings. Who would call for
salongo,
the weekly communal labor, to be performed? Who would reconcile feuding families and solve land conflicts?

The community felt orphaned in other ways too. After the massacre, not a single national politician came to visit them and hear their grievances. While Kasika featured in thousands of speeches that lambasted Rwanda and the RCD, no investigation was ever launched, and no compensation was ever offered for any of the victims. The lack of justice had allowed the villagers to stew in their resentment and had made their anger fester into more hatred.

“I hate the Tutsi,” Patrice told me. “If I see a Tutsi face, I feel fear.”

I ask them if they could ever forgive the soldiers for what they did.

“Forgive whom? We don’t even know who did it,” someone outside Patrice’s house said.

In Kilungutwe, I met with some local elders at an open-air bar on the main street, not far from where Michel had hidden on the night of the massacre. The meeting turned into a popular assembly, as people heard what we were talking about and gathered around.

“We are still living through the massacre,” one elder who had lost his wife and two children told me. “There has been no justice, not even a sign on a tree, or a monument in the honor of those who died that day.”
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“We all lived in the forests like animals for five years,” said a man in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap. “Our children are all illiterate because of this. Go to primary school here, and you will find fifteen-year-olds sitting on the benches.”

The conversation turned toward Nyakiliba, the Mai-Mai militia commander who had commanded the fateful attack on the rebel convoy that had sparked the massacre. After the violence, many youths joined the Mai-Mai.

“What else were they supposed to do?” an elder said. “They wanted to avenge their families.”

“Avenge?” another man retorted. “They were unemployed and hungry—a weapon made them a man. Don’t think they were any better than the Tutsi!”

A chorus erupted from behind the men. “Yes, they were just as bad!” After the massacre, the RCD rebels had fought running battles with the ramshackle militia. When the population fled into RCD territory, they were accused of being Mai-Mai, while in Mai-Mai territory they were accused of being RCD spies.

“It was all nonsense,” several people said at once. “They just wanted to rob us, all of us.”

“For years, you couldn’t find a single chicken, goat, or guinea pig in our homes. That was the Mai-Mai’s food,” a woman piped up from the back. A group of young men loitered about at the back of the crowd muttering among each other. This was the Mai-Mai demographic: young, unemployed, and disaffected.

I had heard from many men, but the longer we talked the more women also gathered around on their way back from the fields, balancing hoes on their heads, faded cloths wrapped around their waists. Given the preponderance of sexual violence in the region, I wanted to give them a chance to speak but didn’t want to embarrass them in front of the men.

“I just want to give the women a chance to speak, as they are often the ones who suffer the most,” I started cautiously. “Does any woman want to talk about her problems?”

I had barely finished when a woman at the back cried out: “
Baba!
All of us, all of us here have been raped! Every single one of us!”

A dozen other women raised their voices in angry agreement as the men looked at their feet, shaking their heads.

A woman in a green headscarf and pink sweater pushed her way to the front. “I have a child from rape. My husband doesn’t like me anymore because of it. And the men who did it to me are around still in this village! They are our own children who joined the Mai-Mai!”

According to United Nations reports, over 200,000 women have been raped in the eastern Congo since 1998. Demographic surveys suggest that up to 39 percent of women have experienced sexual violence, at the hands of civilians or military personnel, at some point in their lives.
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Given the nature of sexual violence, it is difficult to know how pervasive the phenomenon really is and what exactly is at the root of this epidemic, but there is no doubt that the situation is extremely dire.

Back in Kinshasa several months later, I brought up the Kasika massacre with Benjamin Serukiza, the former Munyamulenge vice governor of South Kivu. He had been friends with the slain Commander Moise and was personally accused of having ordered the revenge killings. He was driving me home in his battered Mercedes. On his dashboard, there was a sticker proclaiming “I ♥ Jesus Christ”—he was a devout, evangelical Christian, he told me, like many Banyamulenge.

Of course, he denied any personal involvement in the massacre, so I changed tactics and asked him whether in retrospect the war had been good for the Banyamulenge. He seemed tired—shortly afterward he would be diagnosed with a brain tumor and was hospitalized in South Africa—and was obviously unhappy with the question.

“You act like we had a choice. We didn’t. We had to save ourselves,” he said as he navigated the potholes in the road. After a long pause, he added, “The war was good and bad for us.” Measuring his words carefully, he said, “But so many of us died. If you go to the high plateau, you won’t see a cemetery. But every family there has lost at least one child, if not more, to the war. Our dead are buried across the Congo. We have nowhere to go and mourn for them.”
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He estimated that up to a quarter of all youths joined the war. Very few of them had returned to the high plateau.

The first to join and those who rose the highest in the rebellion were from the small number of educated youths who had left their homes in the high plateau to study in high schools and seminaries in the region. They were almost all under thirty-five: The RPF wanted young, dynamic blood that would be loyal to them. They experienced a double sense of estrangement: from their families and their traditional way of life and from their fellow students, who made fun of them precisely because they were backward and Tutsi. This alienation attracted them to the ideals and promises of the RPF. This elite, with the help and at the prompting of the Rwandan government, then returned at the beginning of the war to rally to the cause their cousins, brothers, and friends in the high plateau.

As always, these youths had many motivations. There were the ones they talked about incessantly: the longing to be accepted as Congolese citizens, to obtain land rights, and to be represented in local and provincial administration. Of course, many of the youths also wanted to succeed, to obtain power and fame. As with Serukiza, the careers of many ambitious Banyamulenge had been blocked by the discrimination and favoritism fostered by Mobutu.

But had this war been successful for them? The young class of Banyamulenge was extraordinarily successful in the short run. The difference between 1994, when there had barely been a single Munyamulenge in public office, and 1998 was dramatic. During the RCD, hundreds of Banyamulenge obtained high-ranking positions in the intelligence services, army, provincial administration, and police. Azarias Ruberwa, who had studied in Kalemie and become a lawyer in Lubumbashi, was the president of the RCD; Bizima Karaha, who had studied medicine in South Africa, became the powerful minister of interior and security chief; Moise Nyarugabo, who had also studied law in Lubumbashi, became the minister of justice. For a short period, they had succeeded in controlling the odious state apparatus that had been their bane for decades.

Their ascendance, however, only further soured relations with other communities. It was as if the RCD wanted to coerce the population into reconciliation. When confronted with resistance from local militias and civil society, which opposed what they perceived as Rwandan aggression, the RCD responded with repression. This merely fueled local resistance, and the region descended into vicious, cyclical violence.

In South Kivu, where this violence was perhaps the worst, it was often Banyamulenge who were in charge of intelligence offices, army brigades, and the police. The worst stereotype of the Congolese was confirmed: that of the treacherous and brutal Banyamulenge, nestled next to the cockroach, snake, and vermin in their bestiary. Commenting on the similar conundrum of military rule by the Tutsi minority in neighboring Burundi, former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere observed, “The biggest obstacle is that those who are in power, the minority ..., they are like one riding on the back of a tiger. And they really want almost a water-tight assurance before they get off the back of the tiger because they feel if they get off the back of the tiger, it will eat them.”
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There will be long-term repercussions of the Banyamulenge’s participation in the two rebellions. In 2002, a opinion poll asked people whether they thought Banyamulenge were Congolese. Only 26 percent thought so.
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In 2004, when a Munyamulenge commander led a mutiny against the Congolese army in the eastern border town of Bukavu, the population there reacted by launching a vicious witch hunt against Tutsi in town. The United Nations had to evacuate the entire Tutsi population, around 3,000 women, men, and children with mattresses and bags piled high on UN cars, from town. In 2007, when rumors spread in the southern town of Moba that a convoy of Banyamulenge refugees might be returning home from Zambia, local politicians provoked riots, protesting the “return of foreigners to our country.” These resentments are in part bred by opportunist demagogues but are also grounded in the brutal rule by the AFDL and RCD in the eastern Congo between 1996 and 2003.