In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (28 page)

As the generals jousted, myriad elite forces sprang up, each answering directly to Mobutu. Every general sought to shore up his position by recruiting as many young men from his own village as possible and pressing for repeated upgrades. Promotion came at a stratospheric pace. By 1997 the armed forces had become ludicrously top-heavy, boasting fifty generals and over 600 colonels.

Riding the tiger, Mobutu's role was more that of a Mafia ‘capo dei capi', focal point of several highly tribalised gangs, than supreme commander of the armed forces. He allowed one elite to be built up, then, when it seemed in danger of posing a real challenge, switched resources and patronage to another. Hence the multiplication of special units and security organisations, often vying for identical duties: the DSP, the Garde Civile, SARM, the Kamanyola division, the paracommandos, the 21st brigade, the 31st brigade, SNIP, and, bringing up the rear, the gendarmerie, police and regular Forces Armées Zairoises (FAZ). Despite the sheer size of the country, most of these elites were kept close to Kinshasa, rather than patrolling the borders. Their positioning reflected their role. The Zairean army was not aimed at resisting external attack. It was an internal security machine whose sole
raison d'être
was protecting the president.

If the elites at least enjoyed high pay, decent equipment and the social respect born of fear, the regular army was treated like dirt. The Ngbandi generals could never muster much military experience between them, but they knew how to make money. And the simplest method was to appropriate the contents of the trucks which arrived with the troops' salaries each month. The practice explained the curious fact that no one ever knew how many men in uniform Zaire actually boasted. The generals demanded pay for 140,000 men, almost double the 80,000 estimate of most experts. The government knew it was being cheated. But when Ngbanda, as newly appointed Defence Minister, tried to organise a head count to end the double-billing, he discovered what formidable opponents the generals could be. The generals told their troops the new minister had suspended their pay for indiscipline, then warned Mobutu a mutiny was about to explode. Mobutu begged Ngbanda to abandon the idea.

With weapons but derisory levels of pay, the soldiers behaved as could only be expected. They emerged from their barracks to prey on their own citizens, building on a tradition firmly established by the Force Publique. Encouraged by its president to ‘live off the land', the FAZ gradually disintegrated into a force adept at hijacking cars and stealing beer but utterly unskilled in the business of war. For those who have not lived in a country fallen victim to a rogue army, the extent to which the phenomenon transforms a society is impossible to imagine. The heart of a white, middle-class Westerner does not automatically miss a beat at the sight of a military uniform. After my time in Kinshasa, mine did. I had made the necessary mental leap, from viewing an army as a society's shield to regarding it as a testosterone-charged time-bomb, primed to blow apart its own community.

These angry young men in their pimps' sunglasses, Kalashnikov cartridge clips Scotch-taped together, trousers held up with bootlace, infiltrated every aspect of life—Article 15 at its ugliest. At ‘roadblocks' consisting of a frayed piece of string stretched across the tarmac they lounged drunk, levying ‘taxes' on traders taking goods to market. In bars they ordered customers to buy them beers, at taxi stops they clambered fully armed into cabs, forcing ‘protection' on frightened passengers.

Each month, tension would rise as the troops' paltry salaries were exhausted and the scrounging became more blatant. Then came an uncertain few weeks of rumours. So-and-so knew for certain the army had been paid. But so-and-so said the troops were unhappy over the amount. All it took was a power cut, and panicking businessmen would be on the Telecel, warning that another round of pillaging had begun.

Like a surly adolescent who bullies his own parents, the army held Zaire hostage. And the Zaireans, so proud of their tradition of non-violence, so steeped in passivity, tolerated it. ‘The Zaireans must take a large part of the blame,' said a doctor who worked sixteen years in Kinshasa. ‘If just a few of those soldiers swaggering around the Cité had had their throats cut in the night, it would have made a difference. Instead, the Zaireans let the soldiers live amongst them.'

But Mobutu also eventually paid a price for such sabotage. He was like a poker player with a worthless hand, hoping no challenger would be gutsy enough to call his bluff. His own courage was never in doubt. An expatriate who accompanied him to several war zones remembers him standing broad-shouldered as the bullets whizzed around, shaming quaking soldiers into action. But in the list of the FAZ's military engagements, victories take some finding. So rare was the event, in fact, that when it did occur, it was commemorated with nauseating frequency. The presidential yacht, an army division and Kinshasa's sports stadium were all named after the eastern town of Kamanyola, where in 1964 Mobutu and his men captured a rebel-held bridge.

He rendered the FAZ so incompetent, he had to rely on outsiders to do his real fighting. Moise Tshombe, who recruited ‘les affreux' (the terrible ones) to back up his post-independence Katangan secession attempt, set a precedent Mobutu was happy to follow. When the going got tough, US, French, Belgian, Cuban, South African and Rhodesian mercenaries got going. Know-how was not the only thing Mobutu was after when he signed up the likes of Colonel Bob Denard and Jean Schramme. He was also hiring a myth, a concept of ruthlessness, because he believed the colonial experience had left most African troops imbued with a colossal inferiority complex, convinced a white man with a gun would always be the equivalent of twenty home-grown fighters.

But renting mercenaries was only necessary when Mobutu's foreign friends could not be counted on to win his wars for him. And most of the time they obliged. In 1977, when just 1,500 Katangan rebels routed the FAZ in the strategically key south, France flew in Moroccan troops to win the First Shaba War. When a similar attempt was made a year later, it was snuffed out by French foreign legionnaires and Belgian paratroopers, followed up by a pan-African peace-keeping force. And when the army itself seemed about to unseat Mobutu in 1991 and 1993, French and Belgian troops once more helped save the regime, with the former patrolling the streets of
Kinshasa while the latter lined up along the Brazzaville frontier, sending a message anyone planning to seize the opportunity to topple Mobutu could not misunderstand.

But the two ‘pillages' were a sign that the tactic of divide and rule had run its course. The anarchy Mobutu had nurtured in self-protection had reached a point where it risked bringing the whole regime crashing down. It was a message, Ngbanda claimed, Mobutu decided not to hear. Instead of reigning in the generals, he doled out promotions. Rather than discipline the mutinous troops, he granted salary increases—a fairly pointless exercise given that few ever saw their full pay packets.

His nemesis was to take the shape of a small clique of men sporting generals' stripes that owed more to links of marriage, friendship and family with the president than professional experience. Popularly referred to as the Inseparable Four, they were in fact a group in which two generals, Nzimbi Ngbale, Mobutu's cousin and head of the DSP, and Baramoto Kpama Kata, commander of the Garde Civile, were the brightest stars, with General Eluki Monga and Admiral Mavua Mudima as smaller satellites. Once Mobutu was conveniently absent in Gbadolite, the Inseparable Four swiftly emerged as the real powerbrokers in Kinshasa. ‘They went everywhere together, from official appearances to private gatherings,' commented one general, Ilunga Shamanga, who as a Kasaian remained outside the magic circle. ‘What seemed a wonderful example of solidarity and cohesion was in reality nothing more than a criminal association.'

In a slip that particularly irked Ngbanda, Mobutu had allowed the generals to wrest control of the intelligence services in 1990. It was an error with enormous long-term consequences, because it meant they could feed the president with misleading data about conditions on the borders and troop morale. From then on, the neutral information the president needed to take sober decisions was tainted. While opposition newspapers obsessed about Mobutu's motives and even foreign diplomats seemed entranced by the myth of presidential power, the story had already moved on. Rolling around town in jeeps
with tinted windows, the generals had their hand in every financial scam, from diamond dealing to the importation of forged zaire notes. They were even pushing for direct political involvement.

For the Terminator, the moment when he realised it was the Inseparable Four, and not his boss, who now called the shots, came when the generals took umbrage at not being consulted over who should head the central bank and state enterprises, potential sources of illicit income. They sent troops and tanks to surround each building, preventing the new chief executives from reaching their offices. Fuming, Mobutu summoned the generals to his residence. ‘Either you free up those offices or I resign,' he shouted. They obliged, but the way Mobutu had delivered his ultimatum shocked his entourage into stunned silence. ‘He had not threatened to sack the generals or discipline them for insubordination. Instead he was the one who had threatened to resign,' recalled Ngbanda. ‘I understood something had changed in his relations with the generals: the balance of power. I had the profound conviction that the death knell had sounded for Marshal Mobutu's regime.'

More significant in the grand scheme of things than the generals' thwarted political ambitions were their commercial interests, particularly the chutzpah they showed in selling off the contents of the national armoury. General Ilunga recorded the near-comic moment in September 1995 when he learned that Zaire's fleet of Mirage fighter jets, nominally sent to France for maintenance, had been quietly sold a year earlier. When Mobutu asked him to investigate, he was told the Mirages had been surrendered to allow the president's helicopter fleet to be modernised. The new helicopters never made an appearance.

But usually, the trade was less ambitious: ammunition and rifles, sold to the guerrilla movements who had established their bases on Zaire's barely policed frontiers, irrespective of their friendliness or hostility to the Mobutu regime. There is something of the inspired insanity of
Catch-22
's Milo Minderbinder—the mess officer so obsessed with a bargain he arranges for American bombers to flatten
their own air base on the Germans' behalf—about the way in which commanders in Kivu, despite clear signs a conflict was looming, happily sold arms to the very AFDL insurgents who would eventually chase them from the area, then set fire to storage warehouses to conceal the hole in supplies. Showing all the far-sightedness of a man handing a neighbouring arsonist a canister of petrol and some matches, the generals could not resist clinching the shady deal, even when it meant jeopardising their own futures.

As the AFDL began crossing the country in what was to prove one of the swiftest campaigns in modern African history, the generals called for defence budgets to be upped, then siphoned off the best of deliveries, leaving the FAZ with ammunition that did not match its rifles, second-hand equipment from Eastern Europe long past its prime. Maybe the generals had begun to believe their own reassuring report to Mobutu. Maybe they were too stupid to think through the consequences of their actions. ‘To us that kind of behaviour seems incomprehensible,' marvelled an ambassador. ‘They were sabotaging their own campaign. But you have to regard these people as gangsters rather than politicians. And a gangster tries to make money until the very last moment.'

The trade was not only damaging because it emasculated the FAZ. Mobutu's long-standing support for such guerrilla groups—particularly his close friendship with Angolan rebel chief Jonas Savimbi—had been a sore topic with neighbouring nations for decades. Affected countries assumed that either this arms trade was taking place with Mobutu's backing, or that the generals were acting on their own behalf, a sign he no longer controlled the situation. Either way, it was time for Mobutu to go.

Lambert Mende, Transport Minister in Mobutu's last administration, logged how seven companies owned by the generals and members of Mobutu's entourage were still flouting a government ban on arms flights into UNITA-held territory as the AFDL rebellion gathered ground. ‘The Angolans said “if this continues we will join the war”. But they continued, and the Angolans joined the war.'

So it was that first Rwanda, then Uganda and finally Angola were eventually to join forces with the AFDL in a momentary coalition of regional interests never before witnessed in Africa. Zaire became the terrain on which alien forces worked out ancient grudges, with the locals swept along for the ride. Tutsi troops from Rwanda hunted down the interahamwe in the equatorial forests, killing untold numbers of Hutu refugees in the process. Angolan soldiers seized an opportunity to track down the UNITA fighters who used Zaire as a rear base. Zambia co-operated by letting the AFDL cross its land to win access to the south; Zimbabwe and Eritrea supplied arms and Tanzania turned a blind eye to the rebel training camps on its territory.

When the rebel campaign first began, Zaireans waited for Mobutu to send the elite forces they had heard so much about to the east. No one, after all, could expect the FAZ to stand up to protagonists fuelled by the loathing Rwanda's ethnic divide seemed to breed. As a waiter in Kivu once confessed to me, in one of those endearing Zairean moments of self-insight: ‘We Zaireans may be thieves. But those guys over there,' he said, jerking his head towards the border, ‘those guys are killers.'

They waited and waited. Was Mobutu playing some kind of clever tactical game? Was he saving the DSP for later? The answer was much simpler, according to the Terminator: despite repeated orders from Mobutu, not one of the Inseparable Four ever agreed to follow the example set by the youthful Mobutu and go to the eastern battlefront. They had no intention of risking either their own lives or the forces they regarded as priceless tools of financial extortion.