Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (53 page)

As I was about to get out of the car, I pressed Serukiza again whether he thought the war had been worthwhile.

He sighed. “I’m sure we didn’t have a choice. For some, it was self-defense. We couldn’t sit around and not do anything. But people hate us almost more today than before; it is just that they are tired of fighting. So no, it was a failure.”

18

THE ASSASSINATION OF MZEE

KINSHASA, CONGO, JANUARY 17, 2001

On January 17, 2001, Laurent Kabila’s military advisor Colonel Edy Kapend was sitting on the lawn outside of Kabila’s office at the official residence.
¹
They had made it into a new year, he thought to himself, which was an achievement in itself. The Rwandan army had almost taken their mining capital, Lubumbashi, but had been stopped at the last moment. Now the president was trying to transform himself politically by forcing a Burundian Hutu rebellion, which had been supported by Kabila against the Tutsi military junta in their country, to go to the peace table with the Burundian government, which would improve Kabila’s international reputation. Later that day, he would fly to Cameroon to announce those talks; then he would fly to Washington to try to rebuild bridges with George W. Bush’s incoming administration. Things were looking up—at a New Year’s gathering, the president had even given some of his closest staff presents of 100,000 Congolese francs, which, even though the rising inflation meant that the gift was only worth around $500, was a highly unusual gesture for tight-fisted Kabila.

As Kapend waited outside, Kabila was speaking with his economic affairs adviser, Emile Mota, about his upcoming trip. The president was wearing his habitual safari suit—off-white this time—and was in a good mood. Across town, a large peace rally was being held at the national stadium, and the gloom of the past year seemed to have lifted from the capital. The French doors were open to the terrace—Kabila did not like air conditioning—so that a breeze from the Congo River could blow through. Rashidi Kasereka, one of Kabila’s bodyguards, clicked his heels together at the door to ask for permission to enter. It was lunchtime, and security was lax, as some bodyguards had gone to eat.

Like most of the president’s bodyguards, Rashidi was a former child soldier—
kadogo
—from the Kivus, who had been with Kabila for years. Kabila was used to Rashidi approaching him, so he wasn’t taken aback when the young man bent down to whisper something in his ear. As Rashidi stepped up, he pulled out a pistol and fired three times, hitting the president in the neck, abdomen, and shoulder. Another bullet lodged in the sofa next to where Emile Mota was sitting, terrified.

Briefly stunned in shock outside, Colonel Kapend grabbed the gun of one of the presidential guards and ran around the building, to the patio outside the president’s office, only to find another bodyguard standing over Rashidi’s dead body. Furious, Kapend shot another round of bullets into the corpse.

Inside, Kabila’s secretary, Anny, ran through the corridors, screaming that
le chef
had been shot. The president lay sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood, still clutching some documents in his hand. Within several minutes, the president’s Cuban doctor and the minister of health had arrived, ripped open his shirt, and tried to resuscitate him. He had clenched his tongue between his teeth, and Kapend thought he could hear him moaning still.

Finally, a helicopter pilot was located to fly the president to the Ngaliema medical clinic nearby. The doctors and soldiers tore down the long velvet curtains from the windows to transport him. “He was so heavy that even four of us had a hard time lifting him,” an aide remembered.
²

Immediately, the president’s closest associates called an emergency meeting, together with the military representatives of the Angolan and Zimbabwean armies.
³
They had no idea who was behind the assassination, but they worried that dissidents within the army would take advantage of the power vacuum. They decided to keep the assassination a secret until they could decide what to do.

They bundled Kabila’s corpse, together with all the nurses, doctors, and cleaning staff from the clinic, into a presidential airplane and flew them to Zimbabwe. Colonel Edy Kapend went on television that afternoon ordering the army high command to stay calm and maintain discipline. He did not say a word about the coup that many in the capital assumed must be under way. The next day the government put out a clipped statement, saying that the president had been injured in an assassination attempt and was in Harare for treatment. In the streets, Angolan and Zimbabwean soldiers patrolled and manned key roadblocks.

When he was finally pronounced dead several days later, the news stunned the capital. Mzee, as most Kinois refer to him, had been the overwhelming figure of Congolese politics since his arrival in Kinshasa, no matter what one thought of him. Congolese had become used to his weekly television and radio appearances, his long, verbose, and often funny harangues about domestic and international politics. Within his own cabinet, it was Mzee’s metronome that kept the beat and made sure that all the disparate interest groups stayed in line and were prevented from infighting. It was as if the conductor had died in the middle of a symphony and now the horns, strings, and percussion were vying for primacy.

No one had been a more insistent augur of Kabila’s death than the man himself. “He spoke about it all the time,” Information Minister Didier Mumengi remembered.
⁴
The president had thought that it would be a western conspiracy, that he had prevented foreign corporations from getting at Congo’s resources, and that they would eliminate him. He saw himself as Patrice Lumumba, the independence hero who was gunned down in a Belgian-American plot almost exactly forty years to the day before Kabila’s own assassination.

Kabila was paranoid but not necessarily wrong. There was good reason for western corporate interests to be angered. Kabila had reneged on several mining contracts, most notably with Banro, a Canadian company, and with Anglo American, a London-based mining giant.

But Kabila was an obstacle to more than just corporate interests. Three years after he had taken power, his war machine was failing, Congo’s economy was in tatters, and he had failed to carry out any meaningful reforms. At the beginning of the 1998 war, the social misery had been made bearable thanks to the upsurge in patriotism that the Rwandan aggression had provoked. Just after the Rwandan attack on Kinshasa in August 1998, 88 percent of people polled in Kinshasa said they had a favorable impression of their president, a leap of 50 percent from a year before.
⁵
For a brief period, the capital forgot about its misery and hunger and channeled its energies into supporting the government. When asked about the reasons for the war, a full half of Kinois answered that they thought it was “a conspiracy of western powers,” while 19 percent thought it was due to “Tutsi hegemony in central Africa.”
⁶
Few cared about the incompetence of their own government.

The euphoria had been short-lived, however. The war bankrupted the country and undermined Kabila’s ambitious development plans. By 2000, inflation had risen to 550 percent, and civil servants were barely paid. Long lines of cars gathered in front of gas stations, waiting for fuel; the only reliable providers of gasoline were black-market hustlers—the so-called Ghadaffi, named after the oil-rich Libyan leader—who set up shop under broad-rimmed umbrellas along the streets with their jerry cans and siphons. Mutinies broke out in the capital’s military barracks when poorly paid soldiers refused to go to the front line. On several occasions, Kabila’s motorcade in Kinshasa was stoned in the densely populated shantytowns. As he passed by, women lifted their colorful blouses to show him their stomachs, crying that they were hungry. Several billboards with Mzee’s picture, exclaiming, “It’s the man we needed!” had to be taken down, as they became subject to regular pelting with rotten fruit.

Inflation, corruption, and general administrative stagnation: These were the characteristics of Laurent Kabila’s regime. In retrospect, Kabila’s supporters blame all of his regime’s woes on the war. In reality, however, Mzee helped bring his problems on himself through a slew of incoherent and poorly executed initiatives.

The government’s monetary and fiscal policies were a case in point. In order to hoard much-needed foreign currency, the government decreed that all monetary transactions would take place in Congolese francs, and it kept the currency at an artificially high value. Traders had five days to exchange their U.S. dollars and euros for Congolese francs or face sanctions. They then had to pay all of their taxes according to the official rate. Since the rate at the Central Bank was four times lower in 2000 than that on the black market, incomes of businesses and civil servants were devastated. Of course, the few government employees who were allowed to buy foreign cash at the official rate made a killing, encouraging them to keep inflation high.

“Mzee wanted solutions
now
, not two years in the future. We would go to him with elaborate plans for the economy,” his information minister remembered, “but he would say ‘Two years! I will be dead in two years. Bring me projects that can bring us cash in two weeks!’”
⁷

The war scuttled all plans for long-term reform and prompted quick fixes that only further debilitated the state. The diamond industry was another example. With the former cash cows of the economy—the state-run copper and cobalt companies—moribund, the government was almost solely reliant on diamonds and oil, which made up 75 percent of exports.
⁸
However, Kabila’s monetary policy prompted diamond sellers to smuggle most of their goods to neighboring countries to avoid transactions in Congolese francs. To make matters worse, in August 2000 the president granted a monopoly of all diamond sales to Dan Gertler, a young Israeli tycoon, in return for $20 million a year. The move was intended to provide the government with some much-needed cash, but as a result Kabila crippled the sector and alienated the powerful Lebanese diamond trading community in Kinshasa. Without smuggling, the entire diamond market in the Congo was estimated to be worth $600 million. Under Kabila’s whimsical policies, Congolese exports shrunk to barely $175 million.
⁹

In the meantime, the news from the front line was consistently bad. All Congolese belligerents and their foreign allies had signed the Lusaka Cease-fire in August 1999, but—invoking Mao Tsetung’s dictum “talk/fight, talk/fight”—Kabila was determined to fight to the end. He consistently blocked the deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission, believing it would prevent his military triumph.