Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  The introduction was a hazing ceremony that consisted of three days of grueling exercises on the training pitch. The recruits, or bakurutu in the local slang, were divided into groups of twenty-five and surrounded by circles of Tutsi soldiers with long canes. Robert would then yell out “Roll around!” or “Snake forward!” and the soldiers would descend on them and begin beating them. Viringita was one of the worst exercises. Next to the pitch was a waist-deep swamp, thick with reeds. The recruits were ordered to get into the water and do somersaults as fast as they could as the soldiers beat them and insulted them. Kizito saw youths have their eyes poked out and noses broken; some were knocked unconscious by the thrashing.

  Parts of the hazing were bizarre. In one exercise, called “drinking beer,” recruits would stand on one leg and put one arm under the other leg and their finger in their mouth. “Maintain position for ten minutes,” the order would come. In another exercise, they were forced to roll around on the ground as fast as they could for several minutes, after which their squad commander would yell, “Run!” and they would spurt off vertiginously in all directions, banging into each other. In another exercise, a commander would tell a group of sixty recruits to fetch a stick he threw in the middle of the pitch. “The first to get it doesn’t get beaten!”

  If you couldn’t keep up with the strict regimen, you were punished. After committing a minor infraction, Kizito was told to step in front of his fellow recruits and dig a small hole in the pitch. “‘This is your vagina,’ the commander said. ‘Take out your dick and fuck it!’” Kizito told me, blushing and looking down. In front of all of his fellow recruits, he was forced to hump the hole until he ejaculated. “In front of all those people, it was almost impossible,” he muttered. At sixteen, he was still a virgin.

  He once made the mistake of reporting sick. At the health center, he told the medic he had a headache, joining a long line of sullen soldiers with various ailments. The medic nodded and turned to a soldier, who then ran at them, beating them over the head with his cane. The medic laughed as they scattered into the bushes. “You aren’t sick! See—you can still run!”

  After the three-day induction course, Afande Robert addressed his recruits on the pitch. He was wearing a sweatsuit and sneakers and was holding a cane. Over a thousand soldiers stood in silent formation in front of him. “Bakurutu, the army is your family now. The army can be good, but you need to know that you can die at any moment. Have you ever seen people die? No?” He waved at one of his officers. “How many prisoners do we have in jail? Bring me six.”

  The officers brought out six weak and dirty prisoners. They were recruits like the rest of them who had been captured trying to desert the camp. Robert ordered his men to blindfold one and tie him to a eucalyptus tree on the edge of the clearing. They lined up in a “firing squad”—Kizito struggled with the English word he had obviously heard more than once in the army—and riddled the prisoner with bullets.

  “Good!” Robert barked. “Now I will show you precision marksmanship!”

  They brought out the next blindfolded prisoner and tied him to the same tree. Suku, a Rwandan officer known for being an expert shot, stepped forward and counted twenty-five paces from the tree. He pulled a modern-looking pistol from his holster, took aim, and shot the prisoner between his eyes.

  “Good!” Robert then gave orders for four officers to pin the next prisoner down by his hands and legs. Another officer took out a hunting knife, pinned his chest to the ground with his knee, and slit his throat—“ like a goat,” Kizito remembered. The officer completely severed the head from the body, then brought it to the recruits, who were told to pass the bloody object around. “When I held the head, I could still feel his muscles twitching,” Kizito said.

  “Who is a good kurutu and thinks he can kill, too?” Robert cried out. A few brave soldiers put their hands up, eager to please. He called them forward and gave them knives. They slit the throats of the last three prisoners as their peers watched. The induction was over. From now on, Robert announced, they would be called soldiers, not kurutu.

  The training settled into a kind of exhausting normalcy. Kizito spent four months at Kidote, although he says it felt like a whole year. Every morning, they would rise at 4 o’clock and go jogging for about six miles, singing songs as they went. At 6 o’clock, they would begin the military drills back at the camp. They would practice deploying in offensive formations, laying ambushes and crawling up hills. “Our commander would mount a machine gun in the ground behind us and shoot over our heads as we snaked up the hills. If you raised your head a bit, you were dead.”

  At 11 o’clock, the soldiers would come back to camp and eat their one meal of the day before heading back into the hills for more military drills. At 4 o’clock, they returned to learn how to take apart and reassemble guns, as well as to learn military tactics. In the evening, the officers gave them time to socialize and tried to teach them about the history and goals of their struggle—they called this utamaduni , or culture. At around 9 o’clock, most of the soldiers retired to their tents, exhausted, to sleep. In their newly learned military slang, this was kuvunja mbavu, “breaking your ribs.” At night, Kizito would hear kids in other tents sobbing or reading the Bible in whispers.

  The AFDL made an effort to instill their revolutionary doctrine in the recruits. The Rwandan and Ugandan officers who led the rebellion all started off as members of leftist insurgencies in East Africa. Knowledge of Marx, Mao, and Fanon had been de rigueur for their leaders, and these teachings filtered down to the lowest level. Kizito remembered them asking questions the recruits didn’t understand:“‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you believe in?’ ‘Why does a soldier fight?’ It was the first time we had thought about such things.” The teachers explained to them how Mobutu had ruined the country, how he had made people corrupt and tribalist. Higher-ranking officers and political cadres received more nuanced lectures, often in Kigali or Goma, about dialectical materialism and planned economies.

  All recruits received a copy of Kabila’s Marxist-inspired pamphlet, Seven Mistakes of the Revolution, which explained why the 1964 rebellion had failed. The pamphlet was more or less unchanged from its original 1967 version.

  First mistake—During the first revolution, we did not have precise political education....

  Third mistake—We waged a war without goal or sense, without knowing why we were fighting and who our real enemy was. We rushed to seize large towns and forgot to first take small villages and to work with peasants and workers....

  Fifth mistake—Due to lack of discipline and collaboration, we fought over ranks and fame.... Also everybody wanted to be in charge and to get positions for himself and his relatives.

  Given the nature of the AFDL, some of the points seemed out of place. The second mistake was: “We relied too much on external support and advice.” To the recruits, who were being trained by foreigners, the pamphlet was more of a diagnosis of the current rebellion’s faults than a critique of the past. “It was Rwandans teaching us how to be patriotic, telling us to sacrifice ourselves for our country,” Kizito reflected, shaking his head. “It was weird.”

  Twelve years later, Kizito seemed to have remembered little of the ideological training. The reason for their struggle was apparent for him and all other recruits: Mobutu needed to go.

  Despite the misery, the training did produce camaraderie. Some of the recruits had not even reached puberty, and for many of them the army did indeed become their family. Back in Bukavu, we gathered one evening at Kizito’s uncle’s house, along with another former child soldier who had been at Kidote after Kizito. Both of them shook their heads and sucked their teeth when they remembered the extreme brutality and pain of boot camp. However, when I asked them to sing AFDL songs for me, smiles began to warm their faces, and they tentatively started to clap.

  Jua limechomoka, wajeshi weee The sun is coming out, oh soldiers

  Kimbia muchaka Go and run

  Askari eee vita ni yey
e A soldier’s work is war

  Anasonga corporal, sergeant, platoon commander He moves from corporal, to sergeant, then platoon commander

  Anavaa kombati, boti, kibuyu ya maji He wears a uniform, boots, and a water flask

  Their favorite one appeared to be:

  Kibonge They are strong

  Vijana walihamia msituni The youths have moved into the jungle

  Watatu wakufe Even if three die

  Wanne wa pone, waliobaki watajenga nchi Four will remain to build our country

  Kibonge! Strong!

  After four months of training, a column of trucks pulled into camp, each marked with the name of a different town. Afande Robert called the soldiers together for one last assembly, then told them they were going to fight the enemy. The soldiers lined up in front of the trucks, where each was given an AK-47. They were told to load the gun, fire in the air, and jump into the truck. Kizito climbed in a vehicle with “Bukavu” written on the side. All he had was his gun and an extra clip of ammunition. It was March 1997; Kisangani, the third largest city in the country, had just fallen to the rebellion.

  In town, the soldiers arrived in time for the inauguration of the new governor in the courtyard of the large Jesuit school, Alfajiri College. They paraded in front of the crowd. “It was like coming back from another planet,” Kizito said, remembering seeing many of his friends and relatives again for the first time in four months. After the ceremony, they feasted on pots of beef stew, rice, and potatoes. It was the first time they had had meat in months. Before he gave them leave for the weekend, Kabila gave another speech, telling the soldiers that they were about to taste the fruits of their long training, that they would now be able to help liberate their country. Finally, he told them to shoot in the air three times before they entered their houses to scare away evil spirits. “The old man had funny ideas sometimes,” Kizito remembered. “He was superstitious—‘Don’t wear flip-flops at roadblocks.’ ‘Don’t ride a bicycle if you have a gun.’” That night, people in Bukavu thought another war had broken out. An hour after the soldiers left the schoolyard, shooting broke out all through town as the recruits chased away evil spirits.

  Kizito’s description of induction was grisly but confirmed much of what other AFDL recruits reported of their experiences in Kidote and other training camps. The rebellion needed recruits fast. The harsh basic training was intended to instill discipline and weed out those physically too weak for the upcoming war. It was as though the Rwandan officers wanted to beat out the corruption, idleness, and selfishness that had become, in Mobutu’s own words, le mal zairois. Like Kizito, many of the recruits who went through this training were under eighteen years old—children according to international conventions. Diplomats estimated that 10,000 child soldiers (kadogo in Swahili) participated in the AFDL rebellion.3 The rationale for child recruitment was simple: Many commanders consider that children make better, more loyal, and fearless soldiers. One commander of a local Mai-Mai militia told me: “You never know who you can trust. At least with the kadogo, you know they will never betray you.”4 Given the lack of discipline, the amount of infighting, and the regular infiltrations by their enemies, it was understandable that commanders wanted to have an inner security buffer of people they could trust.

  For the most part, the kind of combat that soldiers engaged in was guerrilla warfare, involving risky ambushes and close-quarter fighting with the enemy. Soldiers did not have protective gear, and artillery was in scant supply. If you wanted to hit the enemy, you needed to be close enough to be effective with an AK-47—within two hundred meters of the target. Children were often the only soldiers who had the guts to engage in many of the operations, who actually obeyed orders, and whose sense of danger was not as well developed as that of older soldiers. The use of children as vanguard special forces meant also that they made up a disproportionate number of fatalities on the battlefield. A Mobutu commander who had organized the defense of the town of Kindu told me:“The first time I saw the AFDL troops, I thought we were fighting against an army of children! Through my binoculars I saw hundreds of kids in uniforms racing through bush, some carrying grenade launchers bigger than them.”5

  According to Kizito and other kadogo I interviewed, they often formed the first line of defense or offense. One such interviewee told me that in the battle for Kenge, in the west of the country, he had looked around to see dozens of his fellow kadogo, small children in oversized uniforms, sprawled dead on the battlefield. 6 No one has conducted a survey of battlefield casualties during the war, but it is safe to assume that thousands of child soldiers died during the Congo wars.

  11

  A WOUNDED LEOPARD

  After me will come the deluge.

  —MOBUTU SESE SEKO

  KINSHASA, ZAIRE, DECEMBER 1996

  The war caught Mobutu wrong-footed, off guard. When news of fighting in the eastern Congo broke, the Enlightened Helmsman—one of the many titles he had coined for himself—was convalescing in a hospital in Switzerland.

  Initially, it was news of their leader’s illness that preoccupied most Zairians more than war in the faraway Kivus. The first rumors appeared to have been influenced by the official press: Mobutu had been the victim of a savage toothache, an abscess perhaps. Conspiratorially, the CIA wrote to headquarters that he was suffering from AIDS.1 It was the foreign press that managed to get the real story from the hospital: He had been operated on for prostate cancer. Again the rumors boiled up in Kinshasa, relegating the fighting in the east to the back pages of the newspapers. He had fallen into a coma along with his wife, they said. The voice on the radio, saying he would soon return, was really that of an actor, impersonating the Old Leopard quite admirably.

  Initially, Mobutu was not worried about the fighting. “Kabila? I know Kabila,” he told his French lawyer. “He’s nothing. He’s a petty smuggler who lives in the hills above Goma.”

  “Maréchal,” the lawyer responded, “I think we need to be aware of the danger. I don’t know Kabila, but he’s at the head of organized, determined battalions. Behind him are the Rwandans, the Ugandans, and I think the Americans!”2

  Even his bitterest enemies had a hard time believing that the all-seeing Guide was fatally sick. Over thirty-one years he had fashioned himself as the spiritual, political, and customary chief of the country. Two thirds of Zairians had known no other ruler. His face was on every banknote and countless T-shirts, tablecloths, and album covers. Schoolchildren sang his praises every morning before class: One country, one father, one ruler, Mobutu, Mobutu, Mobutu! The evening news on state television began with Mobutu’s head descending from the heavens through the clouds.

  With his silver-tipped black cane and leopard-skin hat, he was the modern version of a traditional king; no one could defy or even supplement his authority. “Does anybody know of a village with two chiefs?” he liked to ask.

  His chieftaincy was not just symbolic. In 1980, during his fiftieth birthday celebrations, he was named King of the Bangala during an opulent coronation ceremony.3 “Only God is above you,” the officiator announced. He was hailed as Mobutu Moyi, or Mobutu Sun King.4 That was not his only similarity with King Louis XIV of France. Through the 1974 constitution, he became head of all branches of government and could legislate by decree and change the constitution at his discretion. In some years he personally disposed of 20 percent of the budget. He was truly the father of the nation: He often presided over ceremonies where he cut ribbons on road projects or brought medicine to a hospital, magnanimous gifts from the father to his children. Visitors to Mobutu’s palace—even foreign diplomats—could often expect to walk away with thousands of dollars in “presents.”5

  His health became a national concern on the street corners in Kinshasa, where people gathered around the newspaper stands and self-made pundits debated the impact of cancer treatment on the sixty-six-year-old. He had been castrated, some said. No, his penis had now swollen to twice its original size, enhancing his notorious sexual p
rowess.

  In reality, the aging autocrat had fallen victim to his own bizarre beliefs. Long an acolyte of traditional healing and magic, he had allowed himself to be treated with natural herbs and tonics until the cancer spread through his body and forced him to seek help abroad.

  Finally, on December 17, 1996, his presidential jet arrived at Njili airport. The political uncertainty and fear of a civil war (and probably cash handouts) drove tens of thousands to the airport and the street leading into the city. It was a taste of the good old days: Marching bands played; a phalanx of women danced, their dresses emblazoned with Mobutu’s face; and people waved thousands of tiny Zairian flags. “Father has come! Zaire is saved!” they shouted.

  Despite the widespread disdain for Mobutu and his rule, the uncertainty of what the rebels would bring fueled genuine acclamation for the despot’s return. The clergy, the army, and even some opposition figures hailed his return to defend the nation against the “Tutsi conspiracy to create a Hima empire,” as some newspapers put it.6

  Mobutu ensconced himself in his residence at the center of the capital’s largest military camp and tried to resuscitate his regime. He fired the head of the army and replaced him with a more competent officer. He arranged for several hundred French mercenaries to come to his aid, along with Serbian and South African soldiers of fortune. His generals met with Rwandan ex-FAR commanders, who were trying to regroup their soldiers who had been dispersed when the refugee camps broke up.

  The Old Leopard, however, no longer had the power he used to. Since he had lifted the ban on political parties in 1990, he had slowly been relegated to a more symbolic role in politics. He spent most of his time in his jungle palace in Gbadolite, five hundred miles from the capital, and left the day-to-day running of the country to his prime minister. For years, Mobutu had carefully pitted Zaire’s leading business and political leaders against each other to prevent them from challenging him. In the end, however, Mobutu’s divide-and-rule tactics had left him with a splintered, ineffective shell of a government.