by James Steel
‘Err, no, I …’
‘Hey, he’s Hunde!’ the man calls to the other soldiers in the market and they start moving towards them. A crowd is forming around them, a sea of angry faces straining for an outlet for their misery.
The soldier is right up close to him – he’s big and his face is dark with anger. He shoves Gabriel in the chest. ‘You are Hunde and you come into my market with no permit to trade!’
The crowd gives an angry growl; they are mainly Shi people like the soldier.
‘We are confiscating your property!’ He grabs the handlebars of the tshkudu.
‘Hey! That’s mine!’ This can’t be happening, it’s all his worldly wealth.
The crowd closes around Gabriel, sensing his weakness. A hand shoots out and grabs a sack.
‘Hey, get off, that’s mine!’
Gabriel’s face is contorted in desperation and fear. He is surrounded; he tries to pull the handlebars back from the soldier and pushes a woman grabbing at his goods at the same time. She shrieks and slaps him across the face.
The petrol vapour ignites in a flashover.
The crowd roars and a frenzy breaks out. The soldier brings up the butt of his rifle and smashes it into his face. His nose breaks and blood gushes down his front. He falls backwards and the crowd punch and kick him.
His scooter falls over and there is a mad scramble as people yank open sacks and clamber on top of each other to get at the goods on the ground, shouting, screaming and clawing. Combs, batteries, cigarettes, condoms scatter everywhere. His bamboo display table is smashed to pieces.
Gabriel curls up in a ball on the ground, his arms over his head. He’s in the middle of a tornado, a mad whirl of screaming, kicking, spitting mayhem. Blows rain down on his arms, head, back and legs. Every part of his body is being battered.
Through it all the pain is still mind-shattering, it feels like his face has been smashed into the back of his head.
This is it … I’m going to die.
And then it stops.
The fire burns out as quickly as it started. The mob vent their anger, tear him down to their level of misery and then just as quickly lose interest in him and drift back to looking at the piles of bananas and tomatoes.
One of soldiers puts his heavy black boot on the side of his head and presses it down into the earth. He tastes the mud in his mouth mixed with the metallic tang of his own blood.
‘That will teach you to come into an authorised area without a permit from the Person Responsible! You have learned your lesson today!’
The soldiers pick over the remains of his stock but everything has either been stolen or smashed – someone has even wheeled the tshkudu away. The troops look at Gabriel’s inert body lying in the mud, laugh and wander off, lighting up some of his cigarettes.
He lies still for ten minutes, dazed and winded with broken fingers, busted lips, cracked ribs and a broken nose. People walk past him and carry on chatting. He doesn’t exist. They don’t see weakness: after decades of fighting and lawlessness there is no pity left in Kivu.
Slowly he pulls his hands away from his head and looks out. One eye is closed from a kick and his whole face is swelling from the rifle butt. He sits up, sways and looks around. Painfully, he eases himself up onto one hand and then gets his legs underneath him and creaks upright, his back bent from a kick in the kidneys.
He keeps his eyes down on the ground and shuffles away from Pangi market towards the trail he came in on, his clothes ripped and covered in blood and dirt. It is going to be a long and painful walk back to the refugee camp.
What will he say to Eve when he gets there? He has lost everything. What will she think of him now?
As he shuffles past the soldiers sitting on the log one of them is trying to make his transistor radio work but it has been trodden on. He gives up, throws it on the ground, smashes the casing with the butt of his rifle, pulls the batteries out and pockets them.
They don’t even look at him as he staggers past.
Chapter Five
‘You stink of piss.’
Eve’s older sister, Beatrice, looks at her askance and waves the flies aside that are buzzing around them.
Eve’s pagne is soaked in urine and the wetness has spread up through the cloth and into the waist of her tee shirt. She has no more clean clothes to wear; she has gone through all the ones given to her by her family in the two weeks since the rape. She feels dirty and uncomfortable, she is wet when she lies down to sleep at night and she is wet when she wakes up in the morning. The smell of sour piss is the constant companion in her life now.
Her rape was violent, involving four men and the barrel of a rifle; the metal foresight cut her deeply. It is part of the practice of warfare in Kivu province, an attempt to destroy women and smash the society they traditionally hold together. It has left her with a fistula, a tear in the wall of her vagina into her bladder so that urine constantly seeps out.
Her family look after her but their patience is finite – many victims of rape are rejected by their husbands and thrown out of their houses. She feels lucky that her family has not done that. She is broken and ruined and knows that it is her fault. Eve’s head sinks lower and she shuffles away from Beatrice.
Where is my baby?
The thought recurs in her mind at least once a minute.
The two women are squatting on the ground on a low rise overlooking the refugee camp, rows and rows of palm-leaf shelters, covered in white plastic sheeting in a sea of dark brown mud. It is morning, with a cold, grey overcast sky, there is dew on the ground and people’s breath smokes. They hear the chopping of wood, a babble of voices, the hawking and spitting of old men. It smells of mud, shit and wood smoke from the cooking fires.
People are packed into the view everywhere, clothed in a clashing kaleidoscope of patterns: red, yellow, blue, green, tartans, stripes, every possible combination of brash local styles and Western cast-offs.
Women wash naked children as they stand in battered metal bowls, making them blow their noses into their fingers and then deftly flicking away the snot. Older people stand around in groups with their arms folded and talk quietly, the men dressed in tattered old suit jackets to try to maintain some dignity. They look gloomily at what their lives have become: forced by the endemic warfare from their home villages into the camps, they cannot work and have no control over their destiny.
Everywhere there are kids, running around the shacks, playing, laughing and chattering. For them this is normal life, it’s what they have grown up with. They are dressed in rags, adult tee shirts that are stained and ripped and drag in the mud. All are barefoot, their feet and ankles covered in purple ulcers from cuts that weep pus. It is a noisy, hectic, dirty place to live.
Worst of all though is the fear. They have food from the UNHCR and other NGOs but they have no law and order and the constant uncertainty is etched in deep worry lines on people’s faces. Militia groups can wander in from the bush at any time, just as the Kudu Noir did with Eve.
They have no protection from them. The Congolese army, the FARDC, all are as bad as the militias, which is what they were before they were put into another uniform and then not paid by the central government. As former President Mobutu famously said to those generals who asked him for salaries: ‘You have rifles, why are you asking me for money?’
Rape is another one of the FARDC’s specialities. As for the police, the PNC, they don’t get out this far into the bush; they stay in the towns and anyway are just unpaid bandits who live on bribes.
When the Kudu Noir had finished with her, Eve couldn’t walk. She crawled under the piece of corrugated iron that had been her front door to hide. It did then provide some protection for her; to cover their tracks the Kudu Noir fired a white phosphorous mortar over where they had been – the airburst shell split the night with a white flash and showered burning pieces of felt soaked in the chemical. The ground around her was covered in an impossibly bright light that spewed white smoke
. Wherever the pieces touched huts they burst into flame. Peering out from under the metal sheet she could see figures running around lit by orange flames and the banana palm leaves on the edge of the camp twisting in the heat.
Her hut was burnt to cinders and with it all her possessions: a short-handled hoe for tilling her vegetable patch, a plastic basin for washing, a metal cooking pot, two pieces of pagne cloth, a comb, a small piece of soap, some dried cassava, three cooking utensils, a candle stub, a tee shirt. That was it, that was her life.
Eve gets up and moves painfully away from her sister. She thinks about her boyfriend Gabriel: what will he say when he gets back from his trading trip? Will he reject her like her husband?
She rubs her forehead as if she has a terrible headache.
Where is my baby?
Fang stops shouting into his BlackBerry, hangs up and returns to his armchair, facing Alex as if nothing has happened.
He shakes his head. ‘I have a steel shipment on a freighter getting into Port Sudan and the harbour master is a pain in the ass. We pay him too much already and he wants more – we go to Mombasa if he don’t like it.’
Alex feels slightly bemused by this but doesn’t show it. ‘You were saying about the Rwandan involvement in the project?’
‘Yes, it’s delicate because they carried out massacres in Kivu when they invaded it in the main war between 1997 and 2003. So the people there hate them and they can’t send troops back in on a permanent basis. That was a big part of the international treaty at the end of the main war, that all the eight countries involved would get their troops out of Congo.’ He shrugs. ‘There are no good guys in Kivu. So now they have to try this.’
‘So what is “this”?’
‘Well, they have agreed to provide logistical support for the military operation from Rwanda. Because of the international pressure they have been under in the past and their activities in Kivu, the Congolese would not accept them just sending troops into Kivu on a long-term basis. They have been very clear about this in our negotiations.
‘We are envisaging a large Battlegroup operation that cannot just appear in Kivu – it will have to be established in secret in Rwanda first and have a supply chain running through there to the Kenyan ports.’
Alex nods. His military mind is attracted by the idea; it sounds feasible. Suddenly he stops himself.
What the hell are you doing? This is not something you are going to get involved in.
He throws out more objections to try to rubbish the plan.
‘OK, but what about the UN? I mean, they have substantial forces in Kivu and they are not just going to say OK to this sort of deal. It is unprecedented in modern times; the US will go mad on the Security Council. They can’t just let China grab a chunk of the middle of Africa.’
He looks at Fang in exasperation, sure that he has found a way to stop the flow of smooth certainty.
Fang nods to acknowledge the point but continues undaunted.
‘Yes, you are right, there are about five thousand UN troops there but the Congolese government won’t tell the UN in advance of the deal. In terms of the UN troops, they are allowed into a country only at the invitation of that country’s government, they don’t invade places. The Congolese president will simply withdraw their invitation as part of the lease agreement and they will be confined to base and then have to leave. It will just be presented as a fait accompli and there is nothing that the UN or the US will be able to do about it. If a sovereign state decides to lease some of its territory then it can do it.
‘You are right though – they won’t like it. But China and Russia will veto any action that the US want to take through the Security Council. The Americans don’t have any troops anywhere near the area; there is nothing they can do about it. The Congolese President will issue a decree and sign the province over to us and then it is Year Zero for the Republic of Kivu. We’ll have free range to start again and build a new country.’ He shrugs. ‘Although we may keep some UN troops on to continue policing work – we will see how it goes because they could be useful. No one in Kivu is very keen on them. They have been there since 2003 and they haven’t stopped the fighting. They stop it blowing up into an international war but they have been pretty ineffectual at bringing law and order. The province is just a series of fiefdoms run by different local groups.’
At this point Alex gets annoyed. ‘Well OK, but what about the local people? I mean, have you consulted them about this?’
Fang makes a moue but continues, ‘Well, the project is being developed with local political partners, the whole government will be run by them. We have found a local politician without links to any of the militias and he has agreed to be our front man.’ He looks at Alex pointedly and then adds, ‘I mean, you have to be realistic here, Mr Devereux – there really is very little government in Kivu. That’s the problem. There is some control in the areas around the main towns but outside that it is anarchy. There are thousands of rapes there every year. For most people government just doesn’t exist. This operation will establish law and order and give them the hope of a bright economic future.’
Alex sighs: he isn’t getting very far with puncturing the plan. He holds up his hands in acceptance of this.
‘All right, all right, I accept all that. But why does China want to be there in the first place? I mean, if it’s so awful?’
‘Ah, well. You see, you have a very Western view on Africa. Your media portrays it only as a basket case, a land of poverty and starvation or, even worse, a place full of smiley people who dance a lot.’
Alex has to nod ruefully; the shallow and patronising nature of most Western media coverage of African issues is a bugbear for him.
‘But in China, we see Africa as a long-term investment opportunity. The main thing we want in Kivu are minerals. The trade in tin, gold and coltan is worth about two hundred million dollars a year at the moment because it is all artisanal mining, just guys with hammers and spades. But once we get in there and mechanise it, it will be worth billions.
‘The main mineral we want is coltan: columbite-tantalum. We need the tantalum for pinhead capacitors in things like mobile phones, laptops and game consoles.’
Fang grins, thinking about the future. ‘When we get going, the profit margins will be immense! But apart from that, we have big plans to develop the agriculture export trade in Kivu. It’s very fertile and has a great climate. We want to use Goma airport as an export hub for cut flowers, fruit and veg to the Middle East and Europe. We’ll come to rival Kenya pretty quickly and the return on capital will be very attractive.
‘The other big draw for us is that we are building the Chinese corridor from Tanzania to Sudan, up through the middle of Africa to open the whole continent up to trade, and we can’t put the railway through Kivu at the moment because of the fighting so we need to pacify the province first.’ He grins and points at Alex. ‘That’s your job, Mr Devereux.’
Joseph has just raped a woman.
He has never had sex before and is not sure what he thinks about it. His confusion is not helped by the fact that he is drunk on home-brewed beer. He staggers back across the bumpy ground following Lieutenant Karuta towards the firelight. It is dark and the FDLR troops have made a big campfire in the centre of the village to accompany their ongoing celebrations. He can see figures around it silhouetted in the firelight and hear them singing and shouting.
Everyone in the platoon is drunk, they have been eating and drinking all afternoon, stuffing themselves after months hiding out in the deep bush in western Kivu province.
Joseph stumbles along, doing up his trousers. Lieutenant Karuta regards what has just happened as a rite of passage for an FDLR soldier and led the initiation on the woman that he had hamstrung in the maize field in the morning. She had only crawled a few hundred yards by the time they got to her in the evening and it was easy to follow the marks on the ground and the bloodstains smeared on the maize stems. More men are finishing their business behind
them.
They rejoin the main group and the men leer and wink at Joseph. He’s the youngest in the platoon and a new recruit. He’s a rather gormless-looking boy, heavily built and with shaggy hair from months in the bush. They giggle and pass him a gourd; he sits down on a log looking dazed, drinks deep and then stares into the bonfire.
After a while, the initiation continues – they blindfold him and make him walk around the fire. The soldiers have fun shouting and pushing him about and he feels scared.
‘Now you do target practice, boy!’
‘What?’
He feels Lieutenant Karuta’s hot, sweaty arm around his shoulder and his beery breath in his face. ‘Come on, you fought well today but you need to learn how to fight better.’
He leads Joseph away from the fire and then a rifle is shoved into his hands. He fumbles around, gets hold of it properly and slips his finger onto the trigger.
‘Whoa, whoa! Careful!’
Men around him laugh.
‘I can’t see.’
‘Doesn’t matter, just point the gun here.’
Karuta’s rough hands guide his so that the rifle is pointing slightly downwards.
‘Now select automatic.’
He clicks the small lever on the casing downward, proud that he can do it blindfold.
‘OK, now give it the magazine.’
Joseph pulls the trigger and thirty bullets blast out.
A howl of laughter goes up around him and Karuta claps him on the back.
‘Heh! Well done, Hutu boy!’
Joseph grins, not sure what he has done, and tentatively pushes up the blindfold.
Sitting on the ground in front of him with her back propped up against a log, her hands tied behind her and a rag stuffed in her mouth is the woman from the maize field. Her body is riddled with bullet holes, her face looks ridiculous with the mouth wedged open with rags but there is an expression of terror frozen in her eyes.
Joseph stares at her aghast.
Karuta carries on laughing. ‘You see how easy it is to kill someone! Come on!’ He throws his arm around him again and wheels him back to the fire where there is another huge cheer as he stumbles in.
