Finally, more than a decade after the massacres, a UN team went back to investigate some of the worst massacres of the Congo wars, including those against the Hutu refugees. They interviewed over a hundred witnesses of the refugee massacres, including people who had survived and some who had helped bury the victims. They concluded that Rwandan troops and their AFDL allies killed tens of thousands of refugees, mostly in cold blood. These were not people caught in the crossfire: The report details how the invading troops singled out and killed the refugees, often with hatchets, stones, or knives. “The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who posed no threat to the attacking forces.”13 Controversially, the report concludes that the Rwandan troops may have been guilty of acts of genocide against the Hutu, given the systematic nature of the killing.14
One of the few places where refugees were killed in plain sight of hundreds of Congolese eyewitnesses was in Mbandaka, where the Congo River separates the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the smaller, former French colony, the Republic of the Congo. The Rwandan army and its Congolese allies had by this time pursued the refugees for over 1,000 miles over mountains, through jungles and savannahs. At Mbandaka, the refugees were blocked by the expanse of the Congo River, which is over a mile wide at that point.
A curious sight greeted the Rwandan troops and the AFDL: Throngs of locals waved palm fronds and sang joyously, while thousands of refugees made a run for the river, trying to board a barge. Others threw themselves into the river, trying to swim across the swiftly moving water, preferring to face crocodiles and hippos than RPF soldiers. The welcoming committee watched in horror as their “liberators” drove the refugees off the boat, made them kneel on the embankment with their hands behind their heads, and executed over a hundred of them. Many were bludgeoned to death with rifle butts or clubs. A local priest saw AFDL soldiers kill an infant by beating its head against a concrete wall. In Mbandaka and another nearby town, Red Cross workers buried some nine hundred bodies. “The alliance fighters told us they only killed former soldiers guilty of murdering many Tutsi people in Rwanda,” a Red Cross worker told another journalist. “Yet with my own hands I buried small children whose heads were crushed by rifle butts. Buried those poor little ones and women, too.”15 Bodies of others who had probably drowned were seen snagged in the floating clumps of water hyacinth in the Congo River. In total, between 200 and 2,000 were killed on the banks of the river.
The inescapable truth is that tens of thousands of refugees were killed, while more probably died from disease and starvation as they were forced into the inhospitable jungles to the west. No thorough investigation has ever been carried out. Most of the victims don’t have graves, monuments, or even a simple mention in a document or a report to commemorate them.
Why did the Rwandan soldiers kill so many refugees? There were certainly some individual cases of revenge, as there had been in Rwanda when the RPF arrived. After all, many RPF soldiers had lost family members and wanted payback.
The Rwandan army, however, was known for its strict discipline and tight command and control. It is very unlikely that soldiers would have been able to carry out such large-scale executions as in Mbandaka, for example, without an order from their commanders. Attesting to that possibility, a Belgian missionary told a journalist: “The soldiers acted as if they were just doing their job, following orders. They didn’t seem out of control.”16 In other words, even if these were revenge killings, they were carried out systematically, with the knowledge and complicity of the command structure. UN investigators also concluded that in many cases the massacres were carried out in the presence of high-ranking Rwandan officers and by those following orders from above.
Other scholars—such as Alison Des Forges, one of the foremost chroniclers of the genocide—believe that the RPF was trying to prevent another Rwandan refugee diaspora from being created that would one day, much like the RPF in its own history, return to threaten its regime.
Papy Kamanzi, the Tutsi who had joined the RPF in 1993, was deployed in the “clean-up operations” against the ex-FAR to the north of Goma. He recalled: “Thousands returned to Rwanda on their own. But there were some remaining in the area, those who couldn’t flee and couldn’t return home. The sick and weak. We lied to them. We said we would send them home; we even cooked food for them. But then we took them into the forest. We had a small hatchet we carried on our backs, an agafuni. We killed with that. There was a briefing, an order to do so.” He showed me the place at the back of the skull, just above the nape of the neck.
Shortly afterwards, Papy was deployed to Goma, where he worked for the Rwandan army’s intelligence branch. He considered it an honor. It was an elite group of sixty young soldiers, mostly Congolese Tutsi, who were charged with hunting down “subversives.”
They were put under the command of the Rwandan intelligence chief Major Jack Nziza, a discreet, sinister character. His definition of “subversive” was broad: people who were known to have supported Habyarimana’s government; members of any of the various Hutu militias; people known to oppose the AFDL; people who had personal conflicts with Rwandan officers. Sometimes, just being a Rwandan refugee—women and children included, Papy specified—was enough. They would take them to two sites they used, a house belonging to Mobutu’s former Central Bank governor and a quarry to the north of Goma. There they would interrogate them and then kill them.
“We could do over a hundred a day,” Papy told me. I had a hard time believing him; it seemed so outrageous. “We used ropes, it was the fastest way and we didn’t spill blood. Two of us would place a guy on the ground, wrap a rope around his neck once, then pull hard.” It would break the victim’s windpipe and then strangle him to death. There was little noise or fuss.
I asked Papy why he did it. It was an order, he replied. Why did your commander want to do it? He shrugged. That was the mentality at the time. They needed to fear the AFDL. They had committed genocide. It was revenge, he said. But it was also a warning: Don’t try to mess with us.
Beatrice spent fourteen months crossing the Congo, forced to hide for months in jungle villages where Congolese families took her in. Finally, at the end of 1997, a Belgian friend who had been looking for her for over a year managed to find her with the help of a local Congolese organization. In early 1998, four years after she had fled Rwanda, she arrived in Belgium. She had lost many of her friends and family. It took years for her body to recover, although she would never be free from the nightmares that plagued her. “I still dream of what happened sometimes. I feel guilty for having survived, for leaving my friends behind.” 17
Sixteen years after the Rwandan genocide, it remains difficult to write about Rwandan history. For many, the moral shock of the Rwandan genocide was so overpowering that it eclipsed all subsequent events in the region. Massacres that came after were always measured up against the immensity of the genocide: If 80,000 refugees died in the Congo, that may be terrible but nonetheless minor compared with the 800,000 in Rwanda. The Rwandan government may have overstepped, but isn’t that understandable given the tragedy the people suffered?
In addition, many argued that accountability would destabilize Rwanda’s fledgling RPF government, so it was better to sweep a few uncomfortable truths under the carpet than undermine its fragile authority. This kind of logic would crop up again and again throughout the Congo war: War is ugly, and you can’t build a state on diplomacy alone. If we push too hard for justice, we will only undermine the peace process. An American diplomat asked me, “Did we have prosecutions after the American Civil War? No. Did the South Africans ever try the apartheid regime? Not really. Why should we ask them to do it here?”
The dour shadow that the genocide cast over the refugee crisis was evident already in April 1995, when RPF soldiers opened fire on a camp of displaced Hutu peasants in Kibeho, Rwanda, killing between 1,500 and 5,000 people. At the time, the American defense attaché in Kigali remarked, “The 2,000 deaths were t
ragic; on the Rwandan scene the killings were hardly a major roadblock to further progress. Compared to the 800,000 dead in the genocide, the 2,000 dead was but a speed bump.”18 A similar logic drove the U.S. ambassador in Kigali to write a confidential coded cable to Washington in January 1997, with the following advice regarding the Tingi-Tingi refugee camp: “We should pull out of Tingi-Tingi and stop feeding the killers who will run away to look for other sustenance, leaving their hostages behind.... If we do not we will be trading the children in Tingi-Tingi for the children who will be killed and orphaned in Rwanda.”19
When I met her in Belgium, Beatrice seemed tired of this kind of reasoning. “Why do they have to measure one injustice in terms of another?” she asked. “Was the massacre of thousands of innocent people somehow more acceptable because hundreds of thousands had been killed in Rwanda?”
10
THIS IS HOW YOU FIGHT
BUKAVU AND LEMERA, ZAIRE, OCTOBER 1996
Kizito Maheshe was one of the thousands of children who made up the bulk of Laurent Kabila’s Congolese fighters.1 When the war began, he was sixteen years old and lived in the Panzi neighborhood of Bukavu, a muddy suburb of bumpy streets and loud bars. Like most of his friends, he had dropped out of high school because his father couldn’t afford the five-dollar monthly fee. In any case, he didn’t see the point in studying. In 1996, Bukavu was a town of 300,000 people with only a few thousand jobs that required a high school diploma. If you were lucky, you could get a job in either the nonprofit sector, which worked mainly in the refugee camps and had the best-paying jobs; the private sector, including the beer factory and the quinine plant, where antimalarial medicine was produced; or the civil service, perhaps the largest employer but where workers relied on bribes and embezzlement to make a decent living.
Kizito had listlessly followed his friends’ path, without much hope for a decent future. After he dropped out of school at sixteen, he wandered around town, looking for work but mostly just hanging out with friends at soccer games, in neighborhood bars, and at church. He had six siblings at home, and his father, a low-level accountant, was deep in debt. The power company had cut their electricity because of nonpayment, and the pipes in their neighborhood had burst, so he helped his sisters and mother carry jerry cans of water for cooking and washing several hundred yards from the pump to his house.
When the AFDL rebellion arrived in Bukavu in October 1996, Kizito hid at home like everyone else. Through their windows and cracked doors they saw Mobutu’s soldiers stripping off their uniforms in the streets and running for the hills. “For us, soldiers had been like gods. They had all the power; they were terrible,” he told me. “When we saw them running like that, we were amazed.”
A week after the battle for Bukavu, Laurent Kabila arrived in town. Over the radio, the soldiers called the population to the post office, a run-down, fourstory, yellow building that filled up a whole block in the city center. Thousands of people turned out to see Kabila, a man most had only heard vague rumors about. After a long wait, he stepped up to the podium, dressed in his signature safari suit and sandals, and spoke in a mixture of Tanzanian-accented Swahili and French. Kizito remembered him as fat, with a big smile and sweat pouring down his neck. One of his bodyguards, a Rwandan, carried a white towel to wipe off the perspiration.
He spoke about the need to get rid of Mobutu and to allow the Congolese people to benefit from the riches that lay beneath the soil. Then he spoke to the question that was on everyone’s mind: Was this a foreign invasion or a Congolese rebellion?
“If you see me here with our Rwandan allies,” he told the crowd, “it’s because they agreed to help us overthrow Mobutu.” His podium was being guarded by a mixture of Tutsi and other soldiers, all well-armed and wearing Wellington boots. “But now we have a chance to build our own army. Give me your children and your youths! Give us 100,000 soldiers so we can overthrow Mobutu!”
Anselme Masasu, a twenty-four-year-old half-Tutsi from Bukavu, was in charge of mobilization and was popular among the youth. New recruits would get a hundred dollars a month to overthrow Mobutu. A hundred dollars a month! Kizito remembered. That was five times the monthly rent for their house. A few months with that salary and you could even buy a decent dowry and get married. Masasu began buying off youth leaders to mobilize young men and bring them to recruitment centers. He approached Boy Scout leaders, karate instructors, and schoolteachers, giving them money if they agreed to help enlist youths in the rebellion. Hundreds of street children, unemployed youths, and pupils heeded Kabila’s call.
“It was obvious for me,” Kizito told me. “I had no future in Bukavu. They were offering me a future.”
Like most youths and children who joined the AFDL, he didn’t tell his parents. He and a group of friends went to Hotel Lolango, a run-down building close to the post office where the rebels had set up a recruitment office. A soldier used a naked razor blade to shave A, B or C into the recruits’ heads to mark which brigade they would join. Kizito was put into the B group; his scalp burned from the scrapings. He handed over all of his belongings—a watch, a few Nouveau Zaire banknotes, and his ID—to a recruitment officer for safekeeping and got into a waiting truck. “It was like a dream,” he remembered. “I was so excited.”
The AFDL’s first training camp was in Kidote, a hamlet in the hills overlooking the Rusizi plain, just a few miles away from the Lemera hospital where the rebels had carried out the first massacre of the war. In March 2007, I convinced Kizito to take a day off from his job as a driver for a local development organization and take me to the place where he had been trained.
He hadn’t been back since he had finished boot camp there. As we crossed the ridge and the parish came into view, he rolled down the car window and looked around in a daze. “This whole hill was full of sentries,” he said, reliving the moment of his first arrival there. “You wouldn’t have been able to approach—they kept the whole area blocked off.”
Kidote wasn’t even a village. A cluster of school buildings and an abandoned church, all with rusted, corrugated-iron roofs, were set into hills dotted with banana groves and eucalyptus trees. The buildings were surrounded by a flat area, perhaps the size of four football fields, with shoulder-high, dense elephant grass. There were no more than a dozen huts and no sign of movement in the school buildings. “We cut down all that grass. They gave us machetes, and we spent the first week just clearing the pitch. This whole plain was a training ground,” he said. “The hills behind the school were all full of bivouacs made out of banana leaves that we slept in.”
We parked the car and walked down to the church. It had been abandoned for a decade. Even the benches had been pillaged, probably for firewood. One of its walls had been sprayed repeatedly with bullets. Did they execute people here? I asked Kizito. “No,” he said; he didn’t think so. He pointed at a lone eucalyptus sapling in the middle of the meadow to our left. “It was down there.”
After being recruited, Kizito’s initial excitement waned quickly. The living conditions were harsh. The new recruits slept in the open for a week until they were given tarps with UN logos—they had been taken from the dismantled refugee camps—to build small lean-tos they could crawl into and sleep. They weren’t given uniforms, and the heavy labor tore their clothes. After several weeks, fleas infested the camp, and many soldiers preferred to burn their clothes than to stay awake at night, itching. “We would throw our rags into the fire and listen to the fleas pop,” Kizito said, smiling and imitating the popping sound. Kidote is around 6,000 feet high, and even huddling together in their tiny huts at night, the youths froze.
There were over 2,000 recruits in Kizito’s training camp. They were the first graduating class, he remembered proudly, almost all under twenty-five, with some as young as twelve. “Some kids were shorter than their guns,” he recalled, laughing. They came from different social and ethnic backgrounds but were mostly poor, unemployed, and uneducated. Morale, however, was high at the beginning. “They
told us that we would finish the training and get money and have beautiful girls,” Kizito remembered, laughing. “What did we know about beautiful girls? We were very young.”
Their diet consisted almost solely of vungure, a tasteless mix of cornmeal and beans that often didn’t have any oil or salt. Soldiers cooked the mixture over firewood in large steel vats that had been used for boiling clothes at the nearby hospital. The food made their stomachs knot up; many suffered from diarrhea. They ate once a day, at 11 o’clock, placing banana leaves in holes in the ground to use as plates. In the evening, they were given some tea with a little bit of sugar.
The commander of the camp was a tall, light-skinned Rwandan officer called Afande Robert,2 who spoke accented Swahili mixed with English. He was quiet but ruthless and feared by the recruits. They called him Mungu (“God”). After clearing the bush for the camp, Robert began the “introduction.” Kizito recalled, “If you lived through that, it was by God’s will.”
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 17
