Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (54 page)

By August 2000, however, Kabila was alone in still believing in victory. The war had stumbled fitfully into its third year. The Ugandan-backed MLC (Movement for the Liberation of the Congo) rebels routed the government’s troops in the north of the country, pushing down the Congo River toward the regional hub of Mbandaka, just several hundred miles up the river from Kinshasa itself. In the center of the country, Rwandan troops and their RCD allies had surrounded the garrison city of Ikela, cutting off Congolese and Zimbabwean troops and slowly starving them.

The government readied itself for a decisive standoff in the small fishing village of Pweto, on the southeastern border with Zambia. “For Mzee, Pweto was a symbol of resistance,” a presidential advisor told me. “He wanted to defend it at all costs.”
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If Pweto fell, little would stand in the way of Rwanda from taking Lubumbashi, the country’s mining capital and Kabila’s hometown.

The leader of the Burundian Hutu rebels in the Congo at the time remembered Kabila calling him in August 2000. “He said: ‘This time we will break their back,’ and told me to get ready for a new offensive.”
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Kabila freed up $20 million for the operations and moved his army command to Pweto, entrusting the offensive to General John Numbi, an electrical engineer and former head of a Katangan youth militia.

Many officers didn’t share Kabila’s optimism. General Joseph Kabila, the titular head of the army since 1998 and the president’s son, told the Burundian rebel commander in private he didn’t believe they would succeed. Zimbabwean commanders muttered similar doubts and said their soldiers would just hold defensive positions. The Burundian rebel leader himself had been let down on several occasions, taking control of towns only to wait in vain for reinforcements that Kabila had promised him. He also shared the general skepticism regarding General Numbi’s competence: “He spent his time elaborating plans on his laptop and drawing sketches that nobody paid much attention to. He wasn’t a real soldier.”

Like much of the state, the Congolese army was a hulking, decrepit edifice. Although the president claimed to have 120,000 soldiers, most diplomats put the real figure at around 50,000, a mix of former Mobutists,
kadogo
recruited during the first war and trained by Rwandans and Ugandans, Katangan Tigers, and new recruits. Some foreign military analysts put precombat desertion rates—those who fled even before fighting had begun—as high as 60 percent; only front line units received regular pay and food. In Kinshasa, families of soldiers on the front line were routinely evicted from their houses so new recruits could be lured by offers of free lodging. Even then, the army was hard-pressed to attract new soldiers and by 2000 had begun to enlist the young children of soldiers to send to the front.
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While many officers had significant expertise, much like his predecessor President Kabila valued loyalty more than competence and left many important operations in the hands of old
maquisards
(bush fighters) or inexperienced Katangans. Even where competent officers were deployed, the president often micromanaged operations himself and used parallel chains of command, confusing his own offensive.

Given this shambles of an army, Kabila had to rely on his allies. Zimbabwe had increased its deployment to the Congo to 11,000 troops, while Angola and Namibia had smaller contingents, tasked largely with defending Kinshasa. There were also 15,000 to 25,000 Burundian and Rwandan Hutus who were working for Kabila on a mercenary basis.

It was just north of Pweto, in the small village of Mutoto Moya, that, amid the long elephant grass of the savannah, one of the war’s most important battles took place. Located in the middle of gently rolling plains, the village stood at the gateway to Lubumbashi, the capital of the mineral-rich province, just four days away by foot along good roads.

Around 3,000 Rwandan and Burundian troops had been held at a stalemate for months by twice as many Zimbabwean and Hutu soldiers. The two forces stared at each other across 8 miles of twin trenches, separated by a one-mile stretch of empty land.

Mutoto Moya was one of the only instances of trench warfare in the Congo. Both sides had dug man-high trenches that meandered for miles. Inside the muddy walls, one could find kitchens, card games, makeshift bars, and cots laid out for soldiers to sleep. This was one of the few instances when Africa’s Great War resembled its European counterpart eighty years earlier.

For the Rwandan and Burundian soldiers, many of whom had grown up in cooler climates, the conditions were poor. It was hot and humid, and huge, foot-long earthworms and dung beetles shared the space with the soldiers. When it rained, the soldiers could find themselves standing knee-deep in muddy rainwater for hours, developing sores as their skin chafed inside their rubber galoshes.

Many came down with malaria and a strange skin rash they thought was caused by the local water supply. Termites from the towering mounds nearby ate into the wooden ammunition boxes, and jiggers lay eggs under soldiers’ skin. Luckily for the Rwandan staff officers, every couple of months they could go for much-needed R&R on a nearby colonial ranch, where there were dairy cows, electricity, and a good supply of beer.

It was telling that the most important front of the Congo war was being fought almost entirely by foreign troops on both sides. “The Rwandans didn’t trust the RCD with such an important task,” remembered Colonel Maurice Gateretse, the commander of regular Burundian army troops. “They had behaved so badly that we radioed back to their headquarters, saying they should be removed. They would use up a whole clip in thirty minutes and come and ask for more. These guys were more interested in pillaging the villages than fighting.”
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A cease-fire negotiated between the two sides held until October 2000, when Laurent Kabila unilaterally launched his offensive. In an effort to prevail by sheer numbers, the Congolese cobbled together a force of over 10,000 soldiers, including many Rwandan and Burundian Hutu soldiers. With the support of armored cars and Hawker fighter aircraft from the Zimbabwean army, the Congolese forces overran the enemy trenches and pushed their rivals back to Pepa, a ranching town in the hills some thirty miles away. There, Laurent Kabila’s troops took control of the strategic heights overlooking the town. Zimbabwean bombers pursued and bombed the retreating troops, forcing them to hide during the day and march at night.

Back in Kigali, President Kagame was furious. He radioed his commander on the ground, an officer nicknamed Commander Zero Zero, who was known for his brutality and his love of cane alcohol. Kagame told him that if he failed to retake Pepa, “don’t even try to come back to Rwanda.” The Burundian commander, Colonel Gateretse, received a similar warning from his commander back home, who told him he would have to walk back to Burundi—three hundred seventy miles through the bush—if he lost.

In order to retake Pepa, they would have to scale a hill with almost no cover and with thick buttresses prickling with heavy machine guns and mortars at the top. “It was like those movies I saw of the Americans at Iwo Jima,” the Burundian commander commented. “We would have to hide behind every hummock and bush we could find.” They received reinforcements over the lake from Burundi: An additional 6,000 Rwandan and Burundian troops arrived on barges for the onslaught.

They launched their challenge early in the morning. Thousands of young soldiers clambered up the steep slopes toward the fortifications above. There was little brush for cover; this was cattle country, and all the trees had been chopped down for pasture. “It was a massacre,” Colonel Gateretse remembered. Kabila’s army “sat at the top with their heavy machine guns and just mowed the kids down. You would hear the mortars thunder, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns and screams as our boys fell.” One by one, the walkie-talkies of their officers trying to scale the hill went dead.

After two days and hundreds of casualties, the Rwandans and Burundians sat together to rethink. They decided to send a light, mobile battalion around Kabila’s position to attack from the rear, while the bulk of the troops continued their frontal offensive to distract their adversaries. The flanking maneuver, however, was risky, as the terrain was difficult and the Congolese had patrols throughout the surrounding areas. The soldiers would have to cover forty miles by foot in one night to catch them by surprise, a tough feat even by their standards. They forced some unlucky locals at gunpoint to serve as guides for them and set out at nightfall at a light trot with little equipment other than their AK-47s, several clips of ammunition, and a few rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

It worked. After a morning of catfights up the mountain, incurring even more casualties, suddenly the machine guns at the top of the hill went silent, then turned around, and began firing the other way. The flanking expedition had broken through Kabila’s rear guard, sandwiching the remaining troops. In a desperate surrender attempt, Kabila’s soldiers put up any white material they could find over their sandbags: tank tops, tarps, underwear. It didn’t make much difference. “We didn’t take many prisoners, we were too angry, and, anyway, where would we have put them?” Colonel Gateretse remembered. It was their turn to mow down the enemy.

Most of Kabila’s forces, however, escaped, and began running back toward Pweto, toward their army’s forward operating base. Much of the Congolese top brass had assembled there, including General Joseph Kabila.

What followed was a three-week-long road battle as the Congolese, Hutu, and Zimbabwean forces retreated under constant fire. The road wound through the bucolic cattle country, lined with eucalyptus trees planted by Belgians decades before. The Rwandans had the tactical advantage: They were highly mobile, carried only the essentials, and ambushed the Congolese at every turn in the road. The Congolese were encumbered by their artillery, tanks, and armored vehicles; they sought refuge on the high ground to the sides of the road, using bunkers and foxholes they had dug there. But inevitably, the Rwandans would outpace them and cut off individual units.

A
Washington Post
journalist who visited the road later reported: “The road south toward Pweto remained speckled not only with green and white butterflies, but with corpses—here the body of young man cut down clutching an AK-47, here a splayed green poncho topped by a skull.”
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In the meantime, panic was breaking out in Pweto. The government’s coalition had made the fatal mistake of bringing the bulk of its armory across the Luvua River. Only one ferry, however, was available for transport, and there wasn’t enough time to evacuate their equipment before the Rwandans arrived. Worse still, under duress, Congolese logistics broke down. “President Kabila told me that they had run out of ammunition,” one of his commanders remembered. “It was very suspicious. All of a sudden, we ran out of everything—fuel, ammunition, money.”
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With the Rwandans just a few miles away, the army high command, including General Joseph Kabila, tried to board a helicopter to flee back to Lubumbashi, only to find that there was no fuel for that either. “It was like Mobutu all over again,” a presidential aide told me. “Someone had sold all the helicopter fuel to make a profit. We were the victims of our own ineptitude.”
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The group of generals had to scramble to the ferry—aptly named
Alliance
, a dirty-pink, rusty contraption—along with their Zimbabwean colleagues and flee across the Zambian border. When the ferry got back to the Congolese side, soldiers tried frantically to load a forty-ton Soviet T-62 tank on board. They misjudged the balance, and the ferry sunk in the harbor along with its precious cargo.

It was a fitting end to the rout of Congolese forces. When the Rwandans arrived in the fishing town hours later, they found a neat line of thirty-three tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, and one ambulance lined up in front of the ferry and charred a crispy black. The fleeing soldiers had doused the equipment with diesel and set it alight. Unopened syringes from the medical kits cracked underfoot. Amid the jettisoned equipment, they found a note left by a fleeing officer that read: “
Attaque
.”
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