Dying to Live

by Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga

  During the last week of the year, delegations of NGOs such as Caritas Spain, Doctors of the World, Doctors Without Borders, and international organizations such as WFP and UNICEF, based in Kisangani, began to arrive to assess the situation. To see the figure of a white man in the depths of the jungle provided a glimmer of hope. Meanwhile, food and medicine began to reach us. Distribution of food, consisting initially of biscuits, milk and enriched flour for porridge, and then beans, peas, corn flour and oil was slow to get going, but by mid-January 1997, the situation improved. Little by little, life settled into a routine, but there were lasting effects from the traumas of the previous months. Many people were very sick and very weak, emaciated, hopeless and helpless.

  Along the north side of the landing strip, offices for the NGOs, a hospital and a clinic were built, and further west, a filtering system for drinking water. The medical staff, consisting of expatriates and refugees, worked day and night to treat the many ailments in the camp, especially the rapidly spreading diarrheal diseases that killed more than fifty people a day, not to mention malaria.

  In addition to these facilities, nutritional centers were built to distribute biscuits and enriched porridge to the most vulnerable, especially children, pregnant or lactating women and the elderly. The staff responsible for the distribution had their work cut out for them to differentiate between men and women or young and old. Because of fatigue and hunger, women had no breasts or buttocks. For practical reasons, they had cut their hair, or had seen it fall out from carrying nylon bags on their heads under the hot sun. In addition, they had exchanged their traditional grass skirts for pants, more convenient under the circumstances. Under these conditions, there was little that distinguished one person from another. Adolescent girls and boys had the profile of an old person. Within the refugee community, everybody had wrinkles. To move about, most of us had to use walking sticks, like old folks. It didn’t take much to transform yourself into whatever you wanted to look like. So when they called for old people to come and receive their ration of enriched porridge, everybody showed up. As for me, I didn’t really have a problem getting served, despite my thirty-five years of age.

  The distribution of food and medicine significantly reduced the number of daily deaths, even if people continued to die, especially those who had been most severely affected by these events. Transport of food and medical products was mainly provided by Soviet-made Antonov aircraft, which had the ability to take off and land on short runways, but also by smaller aircraft mostly provided by Doctors of the World.

  “Refugees dine on rumours and eat them while they’re hot.” That was our motto in the camps. Living under constant fear, information was of paramount importance. Thus, when the sun was setting I, like everyone else, went around the camp in search of fresh news, reliable or not. Every night from Monday to Friday at 6 p.m., we gathered around the radio to listen to a BBC show called Gahuzamiryango, broadcast in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, the languages of the refugees. The news from this station was widely respected because it was one of the few stations that more or less objectively reported the conflict between Kabila’s rebels and Mobutu’s soldiers. Voice of America was also followed, but less widely, not only because broadcasts in our language took place early in the morning, at 5:45, but because the Americans were less trusted, especially after they opposed sending peacekeepers to our rescue. French-speaking refugees could listen to Radio-France Internationale and to a lesser extent, the Voice of Germany and Vatican Radio.

  The western powers, the UN and its agencies, NGOs, the media, all these people continued to argue about how many refugees were wandering in the forest, how to help them and how to protect them against the killers who threatened them. It was in this context of total impasse that Tingi-Tingi received the visit of the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, Emma Bonino, whose coming we heard about a few days before from Caritas Spain. As she descended from the airplane on Sunday, February 2, she was greeted by a crowd of thousands of emaciated refugees who, hands forming visors over their sunken eyes, looked at her like children waiting for their mother to feed them. Faced with so much misery, which she qualified as inhuman and unacceptable, she could not hold back her tears. She also acknowledged the mistakes of the international community, which had claimed that all Hutu refugees had returned to Rwanda. The visit of this compassionate woman in whom we invested our hope of survival had some positive impact, although it was not as great as we had wished for. After her visit, we noticed an improvement in the quantitative distribution of food and medical care, as well as in the general media coverage of our ordeal.

  On February 7, it was the turn of Sadako Ogata, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to visit Tingi-Tingi. She was preceded by an extensive distribution of food. But unlike her predecessor, she did not receive a warm welcome. For a long time, the UNHCR had been the refugees’ sworn enemy: for seemingly siding with the new Kigali regime, for depriving the refugees of food to force them to return to Rwanda, or for having prohibited the creation of schools for the children in the camps. Whereas Emma Bonino had shed tears when confronted by the misery at Tingi-Tingi, Sadako Ogata showed few signs of humanity when viewing the dying old people and children who were presented for her attention. Was it because she was trying to control her emotions or was it because she had expected what she encountered and it made little impression on her? Instead of alerting the international community, she focused her speech on the return of refugees to Rwanda, refugees she had herself condemned to death by characterizing them as practitioners of genocide. After she left, only a few hundred people went down to the UNHCR office in Tingi-Tingi to sign up for the “voluntary return to Rwanda,” the vast majority preferring to shun the call of the High Com­missioner and to rot and die in the jungle rather than be butchered in Rwanda. Despite this, the UNHCR and the Rwandan government continued to claim that the refugees were hostages of the former soldiers from the Rwandan Armed Forces and the Interahamwe.

  In any event, these visits did not result in major changes to the lives of the refugees, except perhaps to lift our hopes, since we believed these people would do something, at the very least, to prevent us from being massacred as we had been over the previous months.

  In the camp, the services that people needed were provided by refugee volunteers who performed the functions of doctors, nurses, social workers, civil engineers, day labourers, etc. In return, they received from the NGOs food supplements, such as biscuits or flour for porridge, or tarpaulins. One of the most needed services was for funerals! The bodies were wrapped in blankets and handed over to a team that would make all the funeral arrangements. Since the blankets were new and very nice, they would be recovered before the burial and then sold at a good price to local people. Which turned out to be very lucrative, considering the number of deaths per day and the money that could be made on every blanket sold! You were lucky if you were selected to join the team. I was never successful, despite several attempts.

  At the beginning of February 1997, I was designated to work as a day labourer on the team of construction volunteers: responsible for such things as cutting and transporting timber, developing the land and digging latrines. In exchange I received the generous bonus of two boxes of biscuits at the end of the long day. For me, the chance to get away from my hungry children for a few hours was a more important motivation.

  With the setup of the food distribution sites, my wife had the opportunity to work serving porridge, which also benefitted us since at the end of the day she was able to bring home a good amount of sosoma flour porridge (i.e., soybean, sorghum, maize) and biscuits. All this made my family one of the lucky few. Since servers and waitresses had the right to eat on site, I was also able to eat a little extra by replacing Françoise once or twice a week (claiming she was ill), with the help of the manager of the distribution site, Samuel Muzigirwa, a former classmate.

  Our digestive systems had seemingly forgotten how to function on a full-time basis so it was
hard for us to adapt to our new situation—that is to say eating—a practice that had ceased to be a daily routine over the past several months. To make up for the weeks of forced fasting, we ate corn, beans, peas, biscuits and porridge in excessive quantities, only to finally end up spending sleepless nights suffering from bloating, diarrhea and stomach aches related to the change in diet. Hence the expression “eating like someone from Tingi-Tingi” (Kurya nk’ab’i Tingi-Tingi), used in the Rwandan community to refer to people who eat too much and too fast.

  After a few weeks of intensive distribution of the fortified food, smiles began to reappear on people’s faces, it once again became possible to differentiate the sexes, children regained their strength and resumed playing. One day, while playing with other kids in the small mazes formed by the shelters made out of branches that we called blindées or armoured vehicles, since they were as strong as a tank, my youngest daughter Emmérence tripped over a root sticking out of the ground and fractured her lower right arm. Fortunately, the medical services were already functioning when the accident occurred and we were lucky to have her arm put in a cast the same afternoon. Nevertheless, it was the last thing we needed in our situation!

  In mid-February, to our great relief, my sister Thérèse and her husband Joseph arrived at Tingi-Tingi, accompanied by the little orphan they had adopted at Birava and my younger brother Athanase, who had also fled Rwanda. They had stayed in Chimanga when we went to the camp at Inera in March 1996, but they too had to leave their camp in a hurry after the outbreak of the Banyamulenge rebellion, evacuating to the interior of Zaire. As the RPA soldiers and rebels advanced, they had travelled west through the cities of Kingurube and Shabunda, then north towards Kasese, Punia and Lubutu. By the time they reached Tingi-Tingi, they were all in a state of physical disrepair. Unfortunately, they would have little time to rest and recuperate, because all too soon we would be once again packing our bags.

  CHAPTER 5

  Destruction of Tingi-Tingi

  After the fall of the towns in the east, the Zairean authorities, operating in their new command center in Kisangani, prepared a lightening counterattack. Once again, the efforts of the refugees were solicited.

  Towards the end of January 1997, many young Rwandan refugees were recruited and trained by former Rwandan Armed Forces officers, who were convinced that the Zairean Army was ineffective and unwilling to fight the RPA and the rebels. Their training lasted one week, after which the recruits were sent to one of the region’s two battlefield fronts. Some were taken by road to Oso River, the border between the provinces of North Kivu and Maniema. The others were transported by helicopter to the southeast front near Kindu.

  Fighters returning to the camp spoke of the intensity of the fighting and assured us that the enemy had been severely challenged despite its material superiority, especially in heavy weapons. But the lines between the two fighting forces had not changed for some time. It seemed that the RPA and the rebels had no intention of invading the rest of Zaire and would be satisfied holding the conquered provinces of North and South Kivu. The illusion that we were safe at Tingi-Tingi was fuelled by statements from both sides, who claimed together to be committed to a negotiated solution, but also by the apparent determination of the Zairean government to win the war. This commitment resulted in the recruitment of foreign mercenaries equipped with formidable hardware, such as Apache helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft and MIG21 bombers, which, as they returned from combat missions, performed acrobatics in the sky over Tingi-Tingi as if to reassure us!

  By mid-February, things had begun to shift. The Amisi refugee camp, located about sixty kilometers east of Tingi-Tingi and inhabited by people who had arrived on site in very bad shape, was forced to move as the fighting drew near. Its occupants reached Tingi-Tingi after a long three-day walk. The stories they told were anything but reassuring. They told us about the stampede of Zairean soldiers as they deserted, leaving behind the Rwandan recruits, underequipped, who tried to hold back the RPA and the Banyamulenge in order to give the refugees more time to flee. Once again, panic washed over all of us; we were convinced that sooner or later, we would be forced to resume our journey.

  Meanwhile, the helicopter that transported troops from Tingi-Tingi to Kindu broke down and sat on the airstrip, out of service. Contact was therefore cut with the poor Rwandan recruits fighting on the southeastern front who had been dropped into the forest without any chance of being resupplied, reinforced or relieved. They were never to have the opportunity of returning to Tingi-Tingi and even today we do not know their fate.

  It was in this climate of fear and uncertainty that an aircraft belonging to a Kenyan private transport company managed to land twice in Tingi-Tingi to pick up refugees who could afford to pay the six-hundred-dollar fare for a flight to Kenya. Despite this enormous sum, there weren’t enough seats for all the passengers who wanted to get on the first flight. Even though the price of a seat on the second and final flight increased first to eight hundred dollars and then to a thousand, these wealthy people were once again reduced to jostling one another to grab the last chance to fly far away from Tingi-Tingi. Money is king, even deep in the jungle! As for myself, I watched all of this rather passively. With just seven hundred dollars to my name for a family of five, there was no point in dreaming. The purchase of a ticket, or rather a seat since nobody actually received any tickets, was transacted at the airplane’s door. Even though they had jammed passengers into every possible space, including the toilet, the plane, which had already swallowed more than two hundred people into its small belly, could not accommodate all the candidates waving wads of greenbacks. Noting that the flight attendant was continuing to admit passengers, the pilot, visibly worried, intervened to tell him that the plane could not take off carrying so much weight. But nobody wanted to get out, and with all that money in his pocket, the flight attendant did not demand it. Just as the door closed, the plane, overloaded with the weight of the excess passengers, took off, though not without difficulty, taking with it a part of the roof of a straw hut about a hundred meters from the runway. Pieces of glass from the left wing signal lights remained behind and left the spectators that we had become confused and worried. Fortunately, the plane reached Kenya safely.

  On February 24, the refugee conscripts fighting on the Oso front near Amisi, returned in large numbers to Tingi-Tingi. They had received permission to join their families in the camp and prepare to evacuate. Even though there had been no official statement about this, their presence raised the anxiety level in the camp. The soldiers knew about the evacuation plan, but were forbidden to disclose the secret, except to their relatives. Through them the rumours were confirmed and we began to prepare ourselves for departure. Depending on the capabilities and strength of each member of my family, we selected what would be most useful for the two-hundred-kilometer voyage that separated us from Kisangani, our next destination. Priority was obviously given to food and basic supplies such as a tarp, pans, water containers, a machete, etc.

  The NGOs, more informed than we were, had all closed up shop, once again leaving the refugees to fend for themselves. The morning of the evacuation, camp leaders, former soldiers from the Rwandan Armed Forces and dignitaries whom we commonly called “security,” ordered the distribution of all remaining food and supplies into the hands of the refugees, to deny them to the enemy. In the afternoon, when former soldiers and dignitaries had finished picking through everything of value, the warehouses were opened to the public, and people rushed to snatch up the last pieces of canvas on the administrative buildings and claim what they could find, such as containers. Meanwhile, people started to destroy their shacks and fold up their tents, so that by around 6 p.m., what had been in the morning a large city was reduced to nothing more than ruins, from which plumes of smoke were drifting from home fires left burning by their owners when they fled.

  To avoid the risk of being spotted by the enemy, who we could smell but could not see, the signal to begin had be
en issued at nightfall along with the order to maintain total silence as we moved out. From our previous experiences, we had learned that moving in such a human tide was not easy, especially for those of us with children. To guard against being separated in the crowd—maybe forever—we attached ourselves to each other with vines and pieces of cloth.

  Once the marathon was underway, the enormous number of people thronging the road made it impossible for us to move very fast. The situation was further complicated by the refugee soldiers and their families who claimed the privilege of walking in the middle of the road, pushing all others, that is to say the civilians, aside. At any moment you had to step aside to let a lieutenant or a captain and all his family pass by or receive a rain of blows for having blocked their way.

  We walked in absolute silence and in total darkness, like a river with no rapids, content to listen to the song of the cicadas and the night howls of the wild animals in the distant forest. Suddenly, shouts were heard from somewhere behind us. The driver of one of the 4x4s still in the camp, with who knows what kind of devil chasing him, had accelerated right into a column of refugees, killing seven people and injuring several others. Once the surprise was over, we continued on our way as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened!

  On the morning of March 1, 1997, after twelve hours of walking, we came to a halt at the banks of the Lubutu River, about ten kilometers from Tingi-Tingi. For some unknown reason, unless it was in collusion with the enemy, Zairean soldiers had constructed a metal barrier on the dam that spanned the river, forcing the caravan to stop in its tracks. To hold us back, they fired into the air like deranged persons and if anyone stepped the least bit out of line, they turned their guns on him. Refugee soldiers who had not had enough time to supply themselves before leaving the camp took the opportunity to extort biscuits from the crowd, which were the most valued commodity and the easiest to transport. They searched us under the pretext of looking for ammunition that would expose us as rebel spies.