As the plane touched down, a few Kabila loyalists managed to shoot its nose tire out, but the commander of the airport battalion quickly defected to the Rwandan side as planned and brought his men under control, allowing the troops to disembark.
The airport was taken with barely any casualties. Back in Kinshasa, Kabila fumed as he heard about the airlift. “What kind of country is this?” he asked his advisors, imagining the airplane flying overhead. “We don’t even have an air force?” The advisors called their commander in Kitona to order him to stop the landing in Kitona, but the seditious officer only responded with insults.14
It was a huge victory for the Rwandans, who could now send reinforcements to take Kinshasa. Overjoyed, Butera set up his satellite phone on the tarmac and called back to Kigali.
Sometimes even the Rwandans foul things up: Butera had forgotten to take down the pin code for the satellite phone, without which it was useless. In Kigali, his commanding officers waited in vain for word from the young soldier, while he tried frantically to punch in different six-digit combinations. No luck. (The correct code was apparently 123456.) The pilot also failed to reach Kigali on his ham radio.15
Butera had to find the closest means of communication: an oil rig in the nearby town of Banana. Finally, after hours of searching, he found an oil engineer with a satellite phone who, with a bit of coaxing, allowed him to call home. Sheepishly, he told his bosses he had made it.
Who had made the first move in sparking the war? From interviews with Rwandans and Congolese involved in planning the war, it is not clear whether Kabila began recruiting ex-FAR before Kabarebe began deploying his boys to the east. What is clear is that, after only a few months of Kabila being in power, both sides realized that their relationship was going sour, driven by Kabila’s paranoia and Rwanda’s obsession with control. Didier Mumengi remembered, “The Rwandans in Kinshasa were a time bomb. It was clear that they were a problem, but at the same time they helped us keep the country together. It was going to be hard to get rid of them and still maintain a grip on the army and intelligence services.”
For Kigali, at a time when the northwest of Rwanda was consumed by the resumption of a bitter civil war, Kabila’s recruitment of its enemy constituted a strategic threat as well as a personal betrayal. Its reaction, however, was a prime example of the hubris that had come to characterize the regime. Instead of creating a buffer zone in the east of the country and using multilateral pressure to deal with Kabila, Kigali decided to single-handedly remove him from power, presumably to install a new, friendlier proxy in his place.
It is surprising that Rwanda apparently did not confer with Angola, which had played a major role in toppling Mobutu, before launching an operation just miles from its border. According to President Dos Santos, President Museveni informed him of his government’s plans several days after the Kitona operation. Although the Rwandan government insists that it did have the green light, other Angolan officials and foreign diplomats agree that, at the very most, Kigali had informed Angola but had not tried to obtain their approval or collaboration.16 When Kabarebe landed several thousand Rwandan soldiers within earshot of Angolan territory, the reaction in Luanda was, according to the U.S. ambassador there at the time, “What the hell are these Rwandans doing? That’s our backyard.” 17 Some Angolan commanders had been rubbed the wrong way by the Rwandans after helping bring Kabila to power a year earlier. “It had been everybody’s victory, not just Rwanda’s,” commented an Angolan officer who wanted to remain anonymous. “But they acted like they were in charge in Kinshasa.”18
With a mutiny festering in the slums of Kinshasa, and rebels advancing rapidly from the west, Kabila knew that he would not be able to hold out without the support of the region. A regional summit of the South African Development Community was quickly called, and Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Angola, and Zimbabwe glowered at each other across a table without coming to a conclusion.
It was a decisive moment in the war. In 1996, almost the whole region had jumped on the bandwagon against Mobutu, while world powers looked the other way. It had been a continental war, inspired by security interests but also by ideology. In 1998, the odds were stacked differently. The region split down the middle, with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi on one side and Angola, Namibia, Chad, and Zimbabwe on the other.
This time, the motives for deployed troops were less noble. Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, for example, was of the same generation as Laurent Kabila and had provided arms and money for the first war effort; Kabila still owed him somewhere between $40 and $200 million dollars for this first engagement. 19 More importantly, his own besieged government was fraying at the edges after eighteen years in power. A mixture of corruption, poor economic management, and the expropriation of 1,500 white farms had prompted food riots, a fiscal crisis, and international opprobrium. As expensive as the military adventure in the Congo was, it also offered many much-needed business opportunities for Mugabe’s inner cabal. Shortly after toppling Mobutu, his state ammunition factory obtained a $500,000 contract from Kabila’s government, a Zimbabwean businessman extended a loan for $45 million, and businessmen close to Mugabe began negotiating potentially lucrative transport, food, and mining deals with the Congolese.20 When Rwanda attempted anew to overthrow the regime in Kinshasa, this time without rallying a regional alliance around them, Mugabe saw his investments in jeopardy.
Angola’s interests were much more related to its twenty-three-year-old civil war with UNITA. For decades, the rebels had maintained rear bases in Kinshasa, where Savimbi had frequently met with Mobutu and CIA operatives and had sold tens of millions of dollars of diamonds. In May 1998, Jonas Savimbi’s rebels had scuppered a peace process that they saw as increasingly biased toward the government. They launched attacks throughout northern Angola, close to the border with the Congo. In addition, another Angolan rebel movement, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), appeared to be making inroads in Cabinda, a tiny Angolan enclave just north of the Kitona airbase, where around 60 percent of Angola’s oil is drilled, providing it with about half of all national revenues. According to French government officials, FLEC had been in touch with the Rwandan government before the Kitona airlift.21
The diplomatic tug-of-war continued for several days, with South African president Nelson Mandela attempting to mediate between the two sides to prevent a continent-wide war breaking out. His attempt earned him the scorn of Mugabe, who told him to shut up if he didn’t want to help defend the Congo. Kabila’s office was equally blunt, suggesting that “age had taken its toll” on the venerable African leader.22
At Malik Kijege’s makeshift headquarters at the Tshatshi military camp, he began receiving distress calls from Tutsis hiding in Kinshasa. According to the reports he received, Kinshasa was quickly succumbing to the throes of anti-Tutsi frenzy. Once again, leaders had resorted to ethnic diatribe to rally the population behind them.
Kabila addressed a march in downtown Kinshasa, where he whipped up the crowd against the Tutsi invaders. The demonstration was full of histrionics. “They want to create a Tutsi empire,” the president announced, dressed in military fatigues. His information minister, Didier Mumengi, also dressed in a green uniform, told the crowd that the Tutsi rebels had “embarked on the extermination of the Congolese people of Bukavu.” Tshala Mwana, a famous singer and allegedly the president’s mistress, led the parade dressed in white, tugging two goats on a leash with signs identifying them as Deo Bugera and Bizima Karaha, the two most famous Tutsi in Kabila’s government who had defected to join the rebellion. Some of the marchers brandished signs:“We will make Rwanda the twelfth province of the Congo,” and “No to Tutsi expansion in the DRC and Africa.” As the cheering crowd looked on, the famous, brawny wrestler Edingwe—he could often be seen jogging and singing with his followers along the Kinshasa streets at dawn—stepped up and slit the animals’ throats.23
Kabila promised that he would distribute guns to the population so that
it could defend itself against the aggressors. Soon, thousands of youths, including many street children and delinquents, were streaming into recruitment centers in Kinshasa. Every day, several hundred young men filed into the Martyrs’ Stadium, learned how to use a gun, and sang songs. One of the standards was:“You Rwandans, God has not chosen you. If you want dialogue, we’ll have dialogue. If you want war, we’ll have war.”
The line between the Rwandan government and the Tutsi people as a whole was quickly blurring. Demagogues in Kinshasa bore a heavy responsibility in whipping up ethnic animosities in the capital. But they didn’t have to work too hard. Rwandan troops had humiliated and angered residents in the capital during their year-long stay. Kinois—as the inhabitants of the capital were known—had been working for years against Mobutu’s dictatorship. They had marched in the tens of thousands and had seen their brothers and sisters tortured and killed, only to see their victory snatched away by a bunch of foreigners. As Kinois often quip: “We put Mobutu in the ambulance. All Kabila did was drive the corpse to the cemetery.” Then the new rulers, who didn’t speak their language and didn’t look like them, began beating them and telling the women they dressed like prostitutes. They felt emasculated and abandoned to hunger and poverty.
Kabila gave orders for soldiers to shoot any Tutsi found with a weapon. Among the people, there was little distinction between a Tutsi civilian and a Tutsi soldier. “When the fighting starts, they all pull guns out from under their beds,” Congolese would often tell me. “The Tutsi in school with me yesterday are in the streets today in uniform.” Congolese soldiers stormed a U.S. embassy compound in Kinshasa, where American families were waiting for evacuation. They harassed several African Americans they suspected of being Tutsi in disguise, stole some money, and left. Another gang raided the upscale Memling Hotel in downtown Kinshasa, where many wealthy families had sought refuge, and went from room to room looking for high cheekbones and hooked noses.
After several days, the government organized a systematic round up of all remaining Tutsi, ostensibly for their own protection, and created a camp for them next to a military barracks in town. Hundreds of Tutsi were crammed into squalid quarters with little food, water, or medical supplies.
Back at the Tshatshi military camp, Malik Kijege fielded calls from Tutsi soldiers around the country. Congolese Tutsi had been left in military bases around the country after the Rwandans left. As soon as the rebels announced their insurgency against Kabila, these Tutsi were seen as Rwanda’s fifth column and were attacked. In Kisangani and Kalemie, dozens were killed. Over a hundred Tutsi officers in a training camp in Kamina, in the southern Katanga Province, were rounded up and executed. It was as if the mobs believed treason was genetically encoded in Tutsi identity.
Other messages were coming in to Malik’s command post from Tutsi stranded in various Kinshasa neighborhoods: five trapped in a garage in Kintambo, an elderly woman who couldn’t walk hidden with a non-Tutsi family in Bandal. He formed small squads to venture out into Kinshasa on foot and try to rescue them. They still had their government-issued walkie-talkies and were on the same frequencies as Kabila’s soldiers. The rival sides insulted each other over the static crackle.
“War is weird,” Malik later told me with a laugh. “In order to prevent them from understanding us, we resorted to a pig Latin we used when we were kids. “We said words backwards:‘Teem su ta eht sag noitats’—meet us at the gas station. Or added syllables: ‘Meetzee atzee gaszee stationzee.’” Congolese Tutsi babbled their way through the treacherous downtown streets at night, sometimes walking twenty miles in a single expedition, raiding banks and pharmacies for money and medical supplies. Finally, they succeeded in shepherding dozens of Tutsi civilians to the embassies of France, Belgium, and the Republic of Congo. From there, convoys were organized to bring the Tutsi in speedboats across the river to neighboring Brazzaville.
After his incendiary speech, Kabila had retreated to Lubumbashi, 1,000 miles from Kinshasa and near the border with Zambia. It looked to be a good place from which to flee the Congo—if he had to, which seemed ever more likely. From there he continued his diplomatic offensive to bring in Angolan, Namibian, and Zimbabwean troops. He left a confused war council behind in Kinshasa: a bunch of his ministers, mostly civilians dressed in military garb, who appeared on national television and tried to calm the population. “Our army had disintegrated,” Didier Mumengi remembered. “Our best units had gone westwards to stop the advance of the rebels. We were left with a bunch of policemen.” Mumengi himself was seen almost daily at press conferences, looking out of place in his green fatigues.
It seemed impossible to stop the Rwandan advance. They were moving twenty miles a day, capturing army stockpiles and sending government soldiers scattering. Commander David, who had been in charge of President Kabila’s bodyguard, was part of the rebel advance. He had kept an address book with telephone numbers of Kabila’s ministers and advisors. As the rebels advanced, David would make taunting phone calls to Kinshasa.
“Mumengi, you better pack your bags—we will be in Kinshasa tomorrow night,” he told the information minister when they were still two hundred miles away. He rang other ministers to give them updates on how far they had reached and to ridicule the Congolese army’s feeble efforts.
Kabila ordered his entire cabinet to Lubumbashi. Senior members of government, especially those from Katanga, heeded his call, packing their families into SUVs. At the airport, luxury vehicles crammed the tarmac, unloading mattresses, suitcases, and entire wardrobes to send to Lubumbashi. Didier Mumengi, who didn’t know anyone in Lubumbashi, decided to stay, against the pleas of his wife, who implored him to flee. He resorted to giving his distressed family sleeping pills so they could sleep through the night.
Then, without warning, the lights went out throughout the city. The Rwandan offensive had captured the Inga Dam, the huge hydroelectric power plant on the Congo River a hundred and fifty miles west of Kinshasa. The city of five million people went dark, with only a few hotels and office buildings lit by backup generators. Even those generators were soon winding down, as the rebels also cut the pipeline bringing fuel to the city. People were stuck in elevators, food rotted in freezers, doctors in some hospital emergency rooms had to operate with flashlights, and water pumps stopped working. When the energy minister, Babi Mbayi, gave a phone interview to a foreign journalist, saying that they had some technical problems with the electricity supply, Commander David called him from his satellite phone and said, “Babi, you think this is a technical problem? Wait till we reach Kinshasa.”
Rwanda’s decision to cut electricity to the capital sticks in the memory of Kinois to this day. That the rebels would jeopardize the lives of sick hospital patients and hamstring water and fuel supply was the last straw for many and only further justified their violent hatred of the Tutsi.
The city’s fate was looking increasingly sealed. The ministers who had stayed behind in Kinshasa held an emergency meeting at the ministry of planning. As a sign of how dire the situation had become, the army commander sent soldiers to provide security for the ministers, but they showed up without guns, loafing about sheepishly. One of the army generals took the floor and solemnly told his colleagues that they wouldn’t be able to defend the city. The finance minister then cleared his throat and, somewhat embarrassed, announced that he had made the decision to empty the state’s coffers. “I have tallied the money left in the Central Bank,” he told the stunned room. “There is $22,000 for each of us. I have put it in sacks in a truck outside. Use it well.”
Finally, just as the city had lost hope, the tide turned. On August 18, seeking international legitimacy for intervening, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe convened a meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) security committee, an organ over which he presided. They hastily approved a military intervention to support Kabila against “foreign aggression,” although they did not have the quorum or the mandate to do so. The decision also deepened a
row between Mugabe and President Nelson Mandela, who advocated a diplomatic approach.24 Mugabe, with typical gusto, told Mandela, “Those who want to keep out, fine, let them keep out. But let them keep [their] silence about those who want to help.”25
By the morning of the following day, four hundred Zimbabwean troops were digging trenches around Kinshasa’s Njili airport, and several attack helicopters patrolled the skies. Two days later, Angolan president Dos Santos, who had been sitting on the fence, made up his mind that it was better to have the devil you know ruling Kinshasa than a political unknown.26 Thousands of Angolan troops began streaming across the border with tanks and armored personnel carriers to recapture the Kitona military base from the Rwandans. The Angolan military, which brought with it attack helicopters and MiG 23 fighter bombers, began raining bombs and artillery fire down on the Rwandan-led troops. Malik Kijege remembered the Angolan air force hitting an oil pipeline, sending a plume of fire into the night, illuminating the scattering rebel forces.
As the Angolans moved in from the west, cutting off the Rwandans’ rear base and supply chain, Zimbabwean and Congolese forces squeezed them from Kinshasa. “It looks like there will be a Banyamulenge sandwich,” a western diplomat commented, lumping all of the invading troops—Rwandans, Ugandans, Congolese—into one generic term.27
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 23
