Week after week, though, the American Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, had been countering Simpson’s view, issuing diplomatic cables that backed Rwanda’s view of the war: No Rwandan troops were in Zaire, there was no refugee problem, there had been no massacres of Hutu, or at least no proof of massacres.
Mobutu had been America’s trusty surrogate in Africa for so long that Simpson, a veteran of multiple tours in the country, had found it difficult to realign his thinking. The turnabout could hardly have been more stark, though. Rwanda and Uganda were now suddenly America’s best friends in this neighborhood, and Washington was even courting its old enemies, the former Marxists who ruled Angola. Uganda was an eager partner in American policy to support anti-government rebels in its huge neighbor, Sudan, which was run by a dreadful group of Islamic fundamentalists. As I said earlier, Uganda had also become a much-touted “success story” of the World Bank. Support for Rwanda, meanwhile, had taken the form of penance by Washington for having turned a blind eye to the anti-Tutsi genocide.
This realpolitik flip-flop was dressed up with flashy slogans. The United States said it was promoting an “African renaissance” under a generation of new leaders. But whatever one made of the rationale, it was clear that America’s longtime favorite African dictator, Mobutu, was being replaced as top dog by two newer, but by no means freshly minted, authoritarians, Museveni of Uganda and his former protégé, Paul Kagame, in Rwanda.
Just as it had done with Mobutu, beginning in the 1960s, when the young colonel was asked to fight a covert war on our behalf in Angola, Washington was beginning to entrust the new renaissance gang with the security of a vast swath of the continent. While Museveni walked the beat in southern Sudan, Rwanda was given the lead—and a free hand—in sorting out the nasty Hutu problem in Zaire. America was interested in Angola purely for its resources. The country has lots of oil, and most of its reserves are offshore, securely insulated from the region’s chronic political instability. By comparison, Zaire’s huge storehouse of mineral wealth is entombed not just by the country’s red earth but by the country’s horrendous corruption, interminable secession bids and political uncertainty.
Only gradually did it dawn on Ambassador Simpson that the argument in Washington was over, if there had ever been an argument. In an odd replay of the country’s civil war in the 1960s, Mobutu had hired a couple of hundred Serbian killers, led by an international war crimes suspect named Yugo Dominic, from Krajina, to mount a last stand.
Thirty years earlier, Kisangani had been held by the Simbas, rebels who had been loyal to Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister Mobutu had overthrown and helped kill. Then, with help from the CIA, the ruthless young Mobutu hired Cuban mercenaries who were honing their skills for the failed attack on the Bay of Pigs to oust the Lumumbist faithful. This time around, the Serbs had three helicopter gunships and a couple of ground attack fighter planes, and the ambassador seemed to hold out some hope that the rebels might stub their toe for the first time, perhaps changing the war’s course.
With the fall of Kisangani, though, Simpson, too, would make a full conversion, turning his thoughts and affections to Kabila. Compared to the ambassador, my best American intelligence source, a man I’ll call John, had been far more closely attuned to Washington’s true thinking from the very beginning. John knew or suspected that the American shift of African clients that was under way had been well planned, and he understood that the rebellion that was steadily building up steam like a tropical storm on its long route to Kinshasa was far too big a challenge for a few dozen mercenaries—even if they were Serbian war criminals.
“Do you know how many helicopters the United States lost in Vietnam?” he asked me over beers in a low-slung Kinshasa villa one evening. “Five thousand. The mercenaries might put up some resistance, but once the attack on Kisangani gets going, I expect them to commandeer whatever aircraft they can and get the hell out of there.”
John couldn’t get over the rebels’ tactical proficiency. He knew Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, or AFDL, was no hodgepodge group of tribal fighters and child soldiers hastily thrown together and dressed in Wellington boots, as the official story would have it. “They’ve got an Eisenhower- or a Montgomery-type putting together a very impressive, very methodical campaign.” The tactics, he said, even included sophisticated psy-ops, or psychological operations. One recent trick involved calling the confidential satellite phone numbers or radio frequencies of Mobutu’s top generals and telling them the time to make a deal was running out.
As no American diplomat would, John acknowledged that this war was about one thing alone: counter-extermination. The Hutu had their day in 1994, killing the 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates during the Rwandan genocide. Now, Rwanda’s government, led by the small Tutsi minority, was butchering Hutu refugees in Zaire. The United States had eagerly avoided intervening in the first genocide, and its subsequent guilt over that decision kept it out of this campaign of slaughter, leading to the same kind of tragic results.
John maintained the diplomatic fiction that Kabila’s army was mostly Zairian, or at least mostly the Tutsi pastoralists, the Banyamulenge, from the east of the country. All pretense ended, however, when it came to saying who was leading the insurgency, and what that group’s aims were. “The original AFDL column came from Rwanda, passed through Burundi and entered Zaire near Cibitoké,” he said. “They started taking on a lot of volunteers, but this was a Rwandan-trained and Rwandan-led force, and when they set out on the Walikale-to-Lubutu axis, it was with the express purpose of breaking up the Hutu camps and hunting down refugees.
“Some of the Hutu fought back, for sure. There was some very brutal fighting in the early stages, but the worst killing was in the moppingup operations. Those forests out in the east have witnessed some real horrors, but luckily for the Tutsi, trees can’t talk.”
The official American line on the war effectively forbade anyone, whether diplomat or intelligence officer, to be quoted saying anything like this, not even on background. And for the most part, the media followed the official narrative. As Kabila’s rebellion swept westward, almost no reporters made it to the front to witness actual combat, or to check the rebels’ claims of victory or of popular support. Kabila or, more likely, his minders in Kigali were savvy enough to understand the paramount importance of controlling journalists’ access. The peril of the war zone and the sheer impenetrability of the terrain also deterred most of those who might have been tempted to strike out on their own.
Even after the fighting had moved on—until the final stages of the war, at least—rare was the reporter who sought to determine the toll, or to dig into reports of atrocities, either. The death of large numbers of Hutu refugees was accepted with a journalistic shrug, as perhaps a sad but inevitable consequence of being on the wrong side of Central Africa’s ugly history.
For more than three decades, Mobutu was not just America’s best friend in Africa, he was a larger-than-life thief and scoundrel, a man who had bad guy written all over him just as clearly as the spots on his leopard-skin cap. Kabila’s greatest public relations advantage, in fact, was Mobutu’s incorrigibly negative image. To be sure, the sixty-something rebel leader sometimes seemed like a campy joke, roly-poly and all too jovial in his brief encounters with the Western press. But good and bad, or at least better and worse, had already been sorted out. The only story that mattered was the countdown to the overthrow of the mythical dictator in Kinshasa, and the inclination of the press to cheer the rebellion along only grew in strength as the weeks passed. There were plenty of well-informed sources on the slaughter of Hutu refugees that was unfolding in the east, but almost no one was listening to them.
As well as anyone else, Guillaume Ngefa, the head of the Association Zairoise de Droits de l’Homme, or AZADHO, understood what was happening on the ground. A slight man, he always spoke in careful sentences that reminded me of a clinician, except that even his weightiest thoughts were al
ways eventually punctuated with an unexpected joke delivered absolutely deadpan, and followed up with a devilish grin. Ngefa was one of those almost recklessly courageous figures who had somehow proliferated and thrived—if intermittently—during the long, dark years of Mobutu’s rule.
Ngefa received me late one afternoon in March 1997 in his office on Avenue Mutombo Katsi, and we chatted for a few minutes on the terrace, overlooking downtown Kinshasa in all its shabby glory. His description of what was going on was succinct and without appeal.
“You can call it a war, if you like, because there is some combat, and yet anyone who follows the itinerary of the rebels knows that this is a campaign to exterminate the Hutu refugees. The Tutsi thesis is that all of these people are Interahamwe [the Hutu militia that carried out the Rwandan genocide], and now, those who suffered a genocide are committing one in their turn,” Ngefa told me. “The international community only sees one thing, the fate of Mobutu, so the rebels are free to kill whoever they like. The error here is that these crimes will not be forgotten. You can’t march hundreds of thousands of people across the breadth of this country, killing them at every turn, and expect they won’t seek vengeance someday.”
For the relief agencies and for the refugees, the press had become a frail and final reed. On the last leg of their march toward Kisangani, the rebels had taken a telling detour at Pene-Tungu, a desolate jungle crossroads town, heading southwest instead of northwest, and they were going fifty miles out of their way to reach the Zaire River, within sight of Ubundu on the opposite bank. Awaiting them there was the largest surviving concentration of Hutu refugees still wandering the Zairian wilderness. There had been 150,000 of them less than two weeks earlier at Tingi-Tingi, but a third of their number had been picked off in machine-gun ambushes and artillery attacks during their desperate eight-day flight from a town where the United Nations had promised they would be safe.
The rebels were about to apply the brilliant military tactics that John had praised, executing the revenge genocide Ngefa had warned of. The only safe way across the river for the Hutu was in a rusty steamboat, an African Queen–style affair that could carry a few hundred passengers at a time, but even this ferry had been shut down by the government, which feared a flood of refugees into Kisangani, about seventy miles up the road. The river was unnavigable from here. Just downstream lay the tremendous cataract, where furious whitewater cascades and immense boulders had clashed without cease for an eon. In the invitingly calm tea-colored pools near the banks, crocodiles swam thick among the clots of water hyacinth, and were sure to devour anyone foolish enough to attempt to make it across.
The United Nations put on a flight from Kinshasa a small number of reporters, doubtlessly hoping that the pictures and stories of the scene at Ubundu would bring some kind of international action. Fifty tons of food were needed each day to feed the Hutu. There were five hundred tons, or a ten-day supply, stockpiled in Kisangani, but fighting in the area had rendered delivery nearly impossible. Even if the ferry service were restored, it would take three months of nonstop crossings for the creaky steamer to get all of the Hutu stragglers across the river. The only hope was a ceasefire. The Security Council was indecisive about the crisis, largely because of American and British resistance to any condemnation of Rwanda and Uganda.
The French called for an international humanitarian intervention, but they were virtually alone in clamoring for strong diplomatic action. Their arguments were weakened, too, by Paris’s transparent preoccupation with its loss of empire. The only meaning the war had for the French, one sensed, was the erosion of their prestige and influence. In France, Rwanda and Uganda were seen as the spearheads of what Paris called Anglo-Saxon power.
From Kinshasa we flew to Kisangani, and the scene on the ground at the airport there could not have been more different from a couple of weeks before. The Serbian mercenaries had taken over the airfield, and here and there an advance team of French operatives were collecting intelligence and consulting with the Zairians about the defense of the city.
As we piled into a smaller plane to fly onward to the far bank of the Zaire River, beyond Ubundu, a French agent slipped in among us. I overheard him telling a French reporter that in a few days the foreign legion would be here, hopefully at the head of an international force, and the entire flow of the war would change. The French, he said, had already been building up their forces across the Zaire River from Kinshasa, in Brazzaville.
Twenty minutes later, after we had circled over Ubundu and done a quick flyover of the landing field, the plane plowed to a stop in a broad grassy field bordered by two thick stands of trees. After an exhausting day’s travel from Kinshasa, we were told by UN officials that we had only forty-five minutes on the ground, because of approaching nightfall and the possibility of attack.
Piling out of the airplane, I immediately found myself surrounded by a sea of desperate faces. Incredibly, some of them had seen me in Tingi-Tingi and called out eagerly for me to acknowledge the extraordinary coincidence. This was a hopeless, broken population. Where there had been a proper settlement at Tingi-Tingi, carved out of the wilderness with the expectation of semi-permanence, and above all, of survival, the shattered people in the field near Ubundu saw themselves for exactly what they were: inmates in a death camp awaiting their summons to the chamber. Few had even bothered putting up makeshift shelters. Bundles of ragged clothing and whatever other belongings people had managed to bring this far sat in desolate piles. Babies tugged at the shriveled breasts of their mothers, who could do nothing but watch their children dying with downcast eyes.
“We are hungry and we are sick, but above all, we have lost all morale,” said Imaculée Mukarugwiza, a widowed schoolteacher from Butare, Rwanda. She had walked eight days from Tingi-Tingi with her own two children and five orphans she had picked up along the way. With the sting of a summation, Imaculée asked me, “Are all of us guilty of genocide, even these little children?”
In the few minutes I had to wander in this desperate crowd, many of the refugees insisted on recounting the stories of their flight from Tingi-Tingi. As they did so, they assumed an almost beatific air, and some of those describing the horrors glowed with the strange smiles of miraculous survivors as they spoke. Each concluded darkly, though, that he or she had only feinted death, not escaped it. “We heard the first gunfire around eight o’clock, and it just kept growing in intensity,” said a thirty-one-year-old Hutu doctor from Bukavu, Zaire, who gave his name as Camille as he asked for my card. “Most people fled during the night, but there were nine of us and we stayed put. With sunrise they marched into the camp, and they shot at anything that moved. It was a total rout.” Camille said he had survived only by playing dead alongside a pile of cadavers. When things finally went quiet in the settlement, he managed to find nine members of his extended family, everyone except his frail grandfather.
As he was a young man, the presumption of guilt for having participated in the 1994 anti-Tutsi genocide hung heavily over Camille, but after eight days of terrified flight through the forests, he had decided he would be better off going home to Tutsi-ruled Rwanda and facing his fate there. “All the world is willing to do is feed us, but that is of no use if we have to keep running like this. Take us home, but give us protection.”
A man named Christophe stepped forward and spoke impassionedly to describe how he survived a previous ambush by Kabila’s rebels, who, he insisted, were precisely what the Western diplomats were still denying—members of the Forces Patriotiques Rwandaises, Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated army. His first brush with slaughter, he said, had come in 1995 during an attack on his first refugee camp, in Kibeho, in southwestern Rwanda, where the United Nations itself had estimated that eight thousand Hutu were massacred.
“I was nearly killed in Tingi-Tingi because I took Madame Ogata at her word, that we would be protected. In fact, the world has done nothing for us,” Christophe said. “They did nothing to save people in Rwanda and they have done nothin
g to save us here. But dying here at least has one merit. If people like you bear witness, sooner or later the international community will have to accept its responsibility.”
I flew back to Kinshasa in an intensely dark mood. Kabila’s fighters and the crocodiles would soon be sorting the refugees out, and whatever Christophe believed about the stories I and others would write, since there were no television crews here, the world, by and large, would be spared the disturbing images.
In the course of the war, I never saw fresh killing fields. But the faces of innocent people about to meet violent deaths stay with you. Having just been served up true desperation in crowd-sized doses, now I felt I truly knew what it meant to be haunted.
Mobutu had left the country again—this time, quietly—shortly after his faux-triumphal return from cancer surgery a few months before. For a man vain and depraved enough to sleep with, and then wed, his wife’s identical twin sister, the hormonal castration that is a routine element of prostate cancer treatment was more than he could contemplate.
As Robert and I transited through Kisangani again after returning from Ubundu, Mobutu’s commander on the ground exuded confidence, telling me that his defenses, bolstered by the mercenaries, were rock solid. “You can drive one hundred fifty miles out of town and you won’t encounter any trouble,” General Kalumé said. Kalumé, a tall, proud man whose warm, rounded features seemed to bespeak integrity and even kindness, may already have been working for Kabila. In any event, two days later, the rebels launched a well-planned attack on Kisangani.
Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa Page 25
