Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (55 page)

President Laurent Kabila, who had been following the fighting from Lubumbashi, two hundred miles away, was devastated. For twenty-four hours he had no news from his son Joseph, whom he considered the closest member of his confused, sprawling family network. When he heard that his son and the rest of the army command had fled to Zambia, he had them all arrested, including Joseph, and brought back to the Congo.

Kabila urgently flew to Zimbabwe to obtain assurance that they would prevent Lubumbashi from falling, but President Mugabe was visibly upset. One Zimbabwean official commented: “[Kabila] is like a man who starts six fires when he’s only got one fire extinguisher.... The fire fighters are the Zimbabwean Army.”
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The war in the Congo was costing Mugabe $27 million a month and a consistent battering by Harare’s newspapers, which complained about the costly war in the Congo while at home there were food riots. Shortly before the Pweto debacle, Mugabe lost a key referendum to amend the constitution, while the opposition made huge gains in parliamentary elections. “Enough,” he told Kabila. “Negotiate with your enemies.”

Desperate, Kabila flew to Angola, where he met with President Edouardo Dos Santos. There, the message was even more severe. By the end of 2000, the Angolan army, which had never sent many troops to the front line, had badly thrashed Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels in the north of the country and was no longer so dependent on Kabila’s military collaboration. One of Kabila’s aides recalled: “Dos Santos told him to liberalize the diamond trade, float the exchange rate, and meet with his opponents.”
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In other words: Everything you have tried has failed. The stick hasn’t worked; you have to try with some carrots now.

In order to ram the message home, the Angolan president confided that western intelligence services were conspiring to get rid of Kabila and that several of his generals had been contacted. But then he smiled and patted his counterpart on the back: “I told them not to do anything—better a scoundrel we know than one we don’t.”

Kabila was deeply affected by this conversation. “He talked about it for days after he got back to Kinshasa,” his aide said.
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The president knew that he didn’t have the finances or the military domestically to prop up his dysfunctional government and that without the backing of Angola and Zimbabwe his days were numbered. Kabila asked his staff to draw up a list of opponents he could negotiate with, but nobody had faith in dealing with him anymore. He sunk into an insomniac depression, canceled all his meetings, and withdrew to his presidential palace. Stubble began appearing on his usually clean-shaven face, and he told his aides, “If Lubumbashi falls, I will kill myself.”
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So who ordered the killing of Mzee? Congolese imagination is knotted around Kabila’s death, entangled in multiple narratives and histories that compete to explain why the scrawny bodyguard shot the president. Part of the problem is that there were too many people who had a reason, who stood to benefit from his death. As the
Economist
quipped, fifty million people—the country’s entire population—had a motive. By the time of his death, Kabila had managed to offend or alienate not only his enemies but also most of his allies.

There are two main theories about his death. The first, the one supported by the Congolese government, lays the blame squarely at Rwanda’s doorstep, saying that Rwanda had acted through a gang of discontented former child soldiers from the Kivus close to Anselme Masasu. When Edy Kapend had informed Joseph Kabila of his father’s death, the twenty-nine-year-old reportedly teared up on the phone, and before Kapend could fully explain what had happened, he blurted out, “Those people from the Kivus killed my father.”
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Anselme Masasu—known as “Toto” to his friends, for his youthful appearance (
mtoto
means “child” in Swahili)—had grown up along the border between Rwanda and the Congo, the son of a father from the ethnic Shi community and a Tutsi mother. He had many Tutsi friends, and when they left school to join the RPF rebellion in the early 1990s, Masasu, eager for adventure, joined up as well. He was twenty and rose to the rank of sergeant in the Rwandan army. His charisma and keen wit brought him to the attention of his superiors, and he was chosen as the fourth member of the AFDL leadership in 1996. The Rwandan army hoped that he would be able to encourage non-Tutsi youth in the eastern Congo to join what they feared might be perceived as an exclusively Tutsi affair. Even before the AFDL invasion, Masasu infiltrated and began enlisting children and young men to the cause. He was considered the commander of the
kadogo
, always present on the front line, eating beans and corn with his “children.” Years later, many former
kadogo
I spoke to still referred to him with respect and love—he had been their father after they had left home.

Masasu remained close to Colonel James Kabarebe, even after the Rwandans had been kicked out of the Congo. As one of the original founders of the AFDL, Masasu often exaggerated his position, calling himself commander in chief of the army and granting himself the rank of general. “He rose from sergeant to general in nine months,” recalled former Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya. “I think it went to his head.” In the ethnically fuelled politics of Kinshasa, Masasu represented the Kivutian wing of the army and was seen as a threat by Katangans close to Kabila.

In November 1997, President Kabila had Masasu arrested and put out a press statement, accusing him of “fraternizing with enemies of the state” and clarifying that he was not a general. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, of which he served fifteen months, some of it in solitary confinement in a cell one square yard in size. When
kadogo
protested and signs of a possible mutiny appeared, Kabila allowed him to go free.

Nevertheless, as soon as Masasu was set free, he began criticizing Kabila again in the foreign press, claiming that he had been unjustly imprisoned. In Kinshasa, the security services became convinced that he was recruiting former
kadogo
to attempt to overthrow the president. They accused him of holding meetings with 1,200
kadogo
as part of an effort to start a new insurgency. A witch hunt for
kadogo
from the Kivus was launched in Kinshasa. Security services stripped detainees bare and searched for ritual scarification on their chests and backs, claiming that Masasu was anointing his adepts with traditional medicine to make them invincible to bullets. Unfortunately, many soldiers from the east carried such scars from when traditional healers had treated them for pneumonia or bronchitis as infants.

Masasu was arrested along with over fifty other soldiers. Several weeks later, on November 27, 2000, he was executed on the front line at Pweto.

Young recruits from the Kivus constituted up to a third of Kabila’s army of 50,000. Since the early days of his rebellion, Kabila had surrounded himself with child soldiers, much to the chagrin of visiting diplomats and dignitaries, who were often accosted by the youths asking for a couple of dollars or some cigarettes. When one visiting foreign businessman, a friend of the president, warned him against using these
kadogo
, Kabila replied, “Oh no, they could never hurt me. They’ve been with me since the beginning. They are my children.”
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In another frequently described incident, the
kadogo
prevented Kabila’s wife from leaving the residence, protesting that they hadn’t been paid and were hungry. In order to shut them up, she opened up the chicken coop behind the residence and allowed them to help themselves to the hens and eggs.
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Masasu’s execution prompted riots in military camps in Kinshasa, and hundreds of
kadogo
were arrested or fled across the river to Brazzaville. Although details are murky, at least several dozen were executed by firing squad in the capital.
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It was then, according to interviews of
kadogo
carried out by a French journalist, that a fateful meeting was held among the young Kivutians who had remained in the president’s bodyguard.
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“I will kill him,” Rashidi Kasereka is reported to have said, furious over the killing of his friends, to a group of twenty other presidential guards, who cheered their approval.

After the assassination, a group of
kadogo
fled across the river to neighboring Brazzaville. According to the Congolese authorities, they had been part of the plot to assassinate Kabila. The president of the neighboring Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, who didn’t want to appear to be sheltering coup plotters, promptly arrested them and had them brought back to Kinshasa. Several of them had been close to Masasu—they included his former chief of staff and military advisor. According to Kabila’s security services, when they interrogated these prisoners, they admitted to being part of a plan to kill Kabila. The
kadogo
said they had received money to organize the coup from Lebanese businessmen; the security services had already suspected their involvement and had executed eleven Lebanese. The businessmen had allegedly been incensed by Kabila’s grant of the quasi-monopoly of diamond sales to the Israeli trader. “It was strange, though,” remarked Kabila’s national security advisor, who had followed the interrogations. “They were very calm during our questioning. They said that they knew they would soon escape.”
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Sure enough, shortly afterwards, the leaders of the Masasu group engineered a break from the Makala prison through an inside job.

The
Le Monde
journalists, who spoke with several of the fugitives, concluded that the assassination had been the work of a bunch of bitter former child soldiers who were seeking revenge. This is possible. However, the whole affair—the lax security at the presidency, the escape from prison, the murder of the Lebanese—seems to be too well choreographed, too slickly greased to have been the doing of a few renegade bodyguards. There are several indications that Rwanda was directly involved. First, according to the Congolese security services, before fleeing, the Masasu crew admitted to being in cahoots with Kigali. Second, when they did flee, along with several affluent Lebanese businessmen, they made their way directly to Rwanda, where some were eventually given influential political and business positions by the government. Last, a former Rwandan security official told me that he had seen Colonel James Kabarebe on the day of the assassination. Kabarebe, who was still running Congo operations for the Rwandan army and would soon be promoted to become head of the army, reportedly slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Good news from Kinshasa. Our boys did it.”
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