Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  Comcell prompted Jean-Pierre’s first foray into politics. As the young entrepreneur set up transmission towers across Kinshasa, he met with sharp resistance from the political heavyweights surrounding Miko. They tried to undermine his nascent company and prevent customers from signing up with Comcell. In response, Jean-Pierre mounted his first military operation, using a gang of presidential guards to sabotage a Telecel antenna in Kinshasa. “To be in business back then, you had to have muscle to protect you,” recalled José Endundo, who at the time was as influential as the Bemba family. Jean-Pierre Bemba got used to driving around Kinshasa behind tinted windows, escorted by two vehicles with bodyguards. A friend of his remembers getting into the passenger seat of his car around that time, only to find a grenade at his feet.

  As the Zairian economy capsized, economic opportunities became scarcer, and political patronage more important. When the poorly paid army went on a rampage in Kinshasa in 1991 and 1993, pillaging thousands of stores and houses, the Bembas lost millions of dollars. Increasingly, Jean-Pierre used his ties to Mobutu to defend his businesses. He obtained procurement deals from the army for the supply of fuel, uniforms, and boots and even carried out confidential diplomatic missions for Mobutu in the region. He made friends with top generals, who controlled much of the government’s spending, and when Mobutu fell sick with prostate cancer, Jean-Pierre visited him on his sick bed in France.

  By the time the AFDL arrived in Kinshasa, Jean-Pierre had fled to Europe; by that time he owned several sumptuous villas in Portugal and Belgium. His father, however, stayed, in order to look after the family business and properties. Not surprisingly, when Laurent Kabila arrived in Kinshasa, Saolona Bemba became one of the first people he locked up. “When you talked about Mobutu’s business elite, Saolona was foremost,” Henri Mova, Kabila’s transport minister at the time, recalled. “We had to arrest him.”

  When Jean-Pierre heard about his father’s arrest, he was terrified what might happen to him. He contacted several Mobutu officers who had fled across the Congo River to Brazzaville and tried to organize a prison break for his father. At the last minute, when preparations were already at an advanced stage, Saolona himself told his son to stand down. It was too risky, he said. This is just about money. He was right: After paying half a million dollars, he was released.

  Jean-Pierre’s investments—a dozen planes, warehouses full of goods, coffee plantations, a mobile phone network—were all sunk costs, based in the Congo. While many other entrepreneurs had been able to make the transition between Mobutu and Kabila, Bemba’s intimacy with Mobutu was too well-known. He was also too proud to come begging Kabila to forgive him for past alliances.

  Bemba was an avid pilot and liked talking in aviation jargon. When asked why he had doggedly pursued his dream of rebellion, he once responded: “ In an aircraft at take-off, you reach decision speed, after which, no matter what happens, you have to continue accelerating and take-off or else you risk crashing the plane. I had reached decision speed.”3

  Some sociologists have put down insurgencies to “blocked political aspirations.”4 If this is true, many others from Mobutu’s entourage would have had better reason to start an insurgency than Jean-Pierre Bemba. Following Mobutu’s demise, the complacency of his lieutenants and strongmen was astounding: All of his ministers, the heads of his powerful security services, and his personal advisors contented themselves with comfortable exiles in Europe and South Africa. Instead, it was a political neophyte who took up the struggle against Kabila.

  Once Jean-Pierre Bemba had decided on starting a rebellion, he had various choices. He had naturally been in touch with Mobutu’s former generals in exile but was skeptical about their abilities given their recent ineptitude. They were also divided into different, competing networks, the result of decades of divide-and-conquer manipulations by Mobutu. Bemba also wanted to avoid direct association with Mobutu’s regime.

  Then there was the new Rwandan-backed rebellion that had begun gestating in the early months of 1998. Bemba had met Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni during one of his business trips before the war and had kept in touch since.5 Museveni was worried about the way Laurent Kabila’s regime was shaping up, and he was eager to identify new, more reliable figures in the Congolese diaspora. He recommended Bemba to General Paul Kagame, who was busy cobbling together the RCD rebellion. In Kigali, however, Bemba didn’t like the look of what he saw. “Militarily, the choice of this movement to lean exclusively on its Rwandan ally to the detriment of developing a Congolese capacity, makes me think that this method cannot lead to the creation of a credible popular movement,” he wrote after a two-hour meeting with Kagame.6 He was also worried by the phalanx of Congolese political and economic heavyweights already assembled in Kigali. It was clear that if he joined, he would not be the leader of the new movement, but milling around in mid-level bureaucracy. Back in Kampala, he explained his reservations to Museveni and pushed for a second option, “a real alternative force to Kinshasa’s dictatorial regime.”

  Museveni himself was beginning to have his doubts about Rwanda’s approach, which seemed too top-down and controlling. “We had a different strategy,” Colonel Shaban Bantariza, the army spokesman, told me. “For us, the Congolese were supposed to learn how to manage and rule themselves.” The Ugandan army was inspired by its own experience as rebels, fighting for six years in the bush with little external support, relying on the local population. Bemba fit the Ugandan model. “He was convincing,” Bantariza said. “You could spend two hours with him, and he would give you a clear, structured vision of what he wanted to do with his country.”7 The Ugandans agreed to back Bemba and enrolled him in accelerated military training.

  Shortly after the beginning of the second war in August 1998, they agreed with the Rwandans to split operational sectors, with the Ugandans taking the area north of Kisangani and the Rwandans staying to the south. Kisangani itself would remain under joint command.

  To start their own rebellion, the Ugandans recruited 154 Congolese in Kisangani in September 1998 and began training them along with Bemba. That number would later take on mythical proportions for Bemba, who claimed that he conquered the area north of Kisangani with a mere 154 soldiers. That was, at least initially, not true. As Bemba sweated away in the training camp with his soldiers—he was made to goose-step, snake around on his considerable belly, and take apart an AK-47 in thirty seconds—RCD troops with Ugandan support were advancing to the north, fighting pitched battles with Kabila’s troops.

  The key moment for Bemba came when Uganda seized the strategic town of Lisala, the birthplace of Mobutu, in Equateur Province, and the Ugandan commander, General James Kazini, assembled the RCD troops and told them to turn in their walkie-talkies “for reprogramming.” General Kazini sat down with the Congolese officers and gave them a choice—you can return to Kisangani and work with the Rwandans, or stay here with us and help us build a new rebellion. Most chose the latter.

  It was in the midst of this Kigali-Kampala catfight that the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) was born. Bemba, who had been working for several months with friends from the Congolese diaspora on drafting statutes and a political program, quickly called the BBC radio service to announce his new rebellion.

  The MLC’s beginnings were shaky. Applying himself to the rebellion with the same tenacity as he did to his business empire, Bemba managed to recruit a hodge-podge of young men and women from the business and political class of Kisangani. Of the founding members of the MLC, there was a journalist for the state radio station, the local manager of Bemba’s phone company, a territorial administrator, two former Mobutu officers, and several businessmen. None of them was over forty years old. For the most part, they were political unknowns.

  Slowly, Bemba began to take over control of the military wing of the MLC from the Ugandans. He leveraged his contacts among Mobutu’s former officers to rally some of the most capable around him, making sure to stay away from the most infamous a
nd corrupt. It had not been for lack of experience and knowledge that Mobutu’s army had lost the war, and hundreds of officers, marginalized or in exile, were eager to get back into the fray. Bemba handed the military command over to Colonel Dieudonné Amuli, the former commander of Mobutu’s personal guard and a graduate of several international military academies. Other officers’ résumés included stints at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning (United States), Sandhurst (United Kingdom), Nanjing (China), Kenitra (Morocco), and academies in Egypt and Belgium. Although the Ugandans continued to provide military support, in particular through artillery, training, and logistics, by early 1999 the Congolese were largely the masters of their own rebellion, expanding their rebel force from 150 to around 10,000 troops within two years.

  Slowly, on the back of the MLC ’s growing reputation, a second wave of political figures began to board flights from Europe to join up. Their pedigree was as impressive as those of the military officers. This time it was the well-heeled diaspora, the members of the Kinshasa elite, educated in Europe and the United States. There were the young and westernized, like Olivier Kamitatu, the son of a founding father of the Congo who had been Bemba’s inseparable friend in business school in Brussels. Then there were the Mobutists-turned-oppositionactivists, including former prime minister Lunda Bululu and two other former ministers, and the businessmen, such as the erstwhile heads of the Congolese business federation and the Congo-Belgian chamber of commerce. In groups of two or three, they arrived on Ugandan military planes in Gbadolite, which by mid-1999 had become command central of the rebellion. They walked around the pillaged town dumbstruck.

  Then came the luck, and with it the birth of the Bemba myth. From the early days of rebellion onwards, the portly MLC leader, who had had less than a month of formal military training in his life, was present along the front lines and insisted on participating in military operations. When the Chadians and Kabila’s troops tried to attack the MLC base in Lisala, Bemba flew into town under gunfire and drove around in a pickup truck, rounding up and regrouping his scattered soldiers. “If you have to believe in miracles, that wasn’t the only one,” he later wrote.8 A day later, a rocket-propelled grenade whistled by him, missing him only by several feet. The day after that, amid a shower of gunfire, a Ugandan transport plane landed, unloaded, and took off again without major damage. “It was incredible,” a friend, who had been in touch with Bemba on a monthly basis by satellite phone, recalled. “ It was as if he was blessed with special powers.”9

  The MLC leaders began constructing a myth around Bemba’s exploits, a panegyric that fit well into the Congolese tradition of praise singing. The youths called him “Baimoto,” a dazzling diamond that blinds the enemy. Radio Liberté, the MLC radio station, began transmitting programs infused with Bemba’s legend. It was supposed to provide the glue to keep the disparate elements of the MLC together: Bemba the soldier, Bemba the liberator, always on the front line, always with the troops. “It did the trick,” a former MLC commander told me and then laughed:“The problem was he began to believe it himself.”10

  Bemba adopted the title of Chairman of the MLC, in part reference to his business upbringing, in part a wink to Chairman Mao’s cult of personality. Progressively, his ego became more and more bloated, even as he himself put on more weight. “Bemba was the MLC,” said José Endundo, the MLC’s former secretary for the economy. “He was an incredible egomaniac.”11 His commissioners and counselors couldn’t just go and visit him in his house in Gbadolite; they would have to wait to be called. At the entrance to his house, soldiers would frisk the MLC leaders, even the frail professor Lunda Bululu, Zaire’s former prime minister, who was in his sixties. Inside, officials sprawled on Bemba’s leather couches, but even there, they were obliged to call him Mr. President or Chairman. For some of the leaders, who had boozed and danced with Bemba in high school or had known him when he was still in diapers, this treatment grated.

  Bemba’s massive ego initially had a positive impact on the organization. According to many of his former colleagues who later left the rebellion, he ruled strictly but fairly. “He respected us,” Endundo remembered. “And he was a good manager.” But for most of Bemba’s lieutenants, the goal was clear: to sit tight and wait for negotiations with Kabila’s government. If they had to endure Bemba’s narcissism until then, they would.

  As opposed to most other rebel movements in the Congo, which spent much of their life spans embroiled in internecine squabbles, Bemba was the unquestioned leader of the MLC, politically as well as militarily. From command central on his couch, he micromanaged the organization, one hand on the remote control of his television, another on his satellite phone or ham radio.

  While he promoted debate about internal policy and strategy, he was the only one to maintain contacts with foreign leaders. He almost never invited other MLC leaders along when he visited President Museveni, his biggest ally. The same went for other contacts. “He had a fabulous address book,” Endundo recalled. “ He would speak to [Gabonese] President Omar Bongo, [Libyan leader] Muammar Ghadaffi, [Republic of Congo] President Sassou Nguesso.” Likewise, none of the other political leaders in the MLC had much to say about military operations. Bemba sat together with the commander of the Ugandan troops and Colonel Amuli and discussed military strategy. In several cases, he went so far as to overrule his Ugandan counterparts.12

  Bemba did not have a hard time being popular in Equateur Province. The MLC arrived on the heels of two years of occupation, pillage, and abuse by Rwandan, Congolese, and Chadian troops. Each group had accused the local population of supporting Mobutu and blamed them for hosting such luxurious, wasteful projects as the Chinese pagodas and the hydroelectric dams. When Bemba arrived, he was treated as a mwana mboka, a son of the soil, a hometown hero. People lined the streets when Bemba arrived in a town, waving flags of Zaire and chanting Bemba’s name.

  More than one former MLC official I interviewed compared Bemba’s management style to that of a private entrepreneur: “He ran his army like a company,” or “the MLC for him was an IPO, an initial public offering.” Nonetheless, even those who fell out with him concede that it was better organized and more successful than other rebellions. Its leaders were members of the Kinshasa elite, and tribalism, which was a problem for other rebel movements, was not an issue here. There was no interference from Kampala in political matters, and the group of decision makers was small and relatively united. Most MLC leaders were not motivated by immediate financial gain—many of them were independently wealthy—but rather by a return to power in Kinshasa.

  In any case, there was little profit to be gleaned from Equateur. It was a relatively poor province, especially since its coffee, rice, and palm oil plantations had fallen into disrepair. After taking all the money they had found in the coffers of the banks—UN investigators tallied around $1.5 million “liberated” from three banks at the beginning of the rebellion—there was little money to be made. According to François Mwamba, the head of their finances, they rarely got more than $50,000 a month. “Once, I had to spend ten hours on the back of a motorcycle, hanging on to a kid with an AK-47 strapped on his back, just to collect $2,000 from a bank in the jungle town of Banalia,” Mwamba told me. “Do you think I would be doing that if we were flush with cash?”13

  Given their financial limitations, the MLC had little to offer the local population in terms of services. They organized communal labor to rebuild some roads and bridges, but even they admitted it was rudimentary.14 Most of their money went to buying food and medicine for the army and paying for air transport. What the rebels could provide, however, was the most sought-after commodity in the region: security. A poll carried out in 2002 in the province concluded that 70 percent of locals felt protected against crime. The same number indicated that they would vote for Bemba and the MLC if elections were held then.15 Indeed, when elections were eventually held in 2006, Equateur was the only province where the population voted massively in favor of the armed group that had rule
d them during the war, casting 64 percent of their ballots for Bemba in the first round and 98 percent in the second. Almost everywhere else in the country, the population clearly rejected its rulers.16

  The problems arose when the MLC began expanding its military operations outside of Equateur in 2001. The northeastern region of Ituri, which borders Uganda to the east and Sudan to the north, was quickly turning into a quagmire for the Ugandan army. There, as opposed to Equateur, there was an abundance of natural resources, ranging from gold to timber, on top of the lucrative customs offices at the Congo-Uganda border, which collected millions of dollars of revenues a month. The district shared no front line with Kabila’s forces; nonetheless, Uganda had deployed a large military contingent there, ostensibly to protect their border. In addition, Ituri had a history of ethnic rivalries, especially between the pastoralist Hema people and the Lendu farmers. Ugandan army commanders quickly became involved in semiprivate business ventures, with different commanders backing various local ethnic militias in order to corner lucrative parts of the market. In January 2001, President Yoweri Museveni, who approved of Bemba’s management of Equateur Province, asked Bemba to move eastward to take the leadership of a new coalition of rebel movements, including several Ituribased factions and the MLC. Bemba accepted, attracted by the greater status it would provide him, as well as by the substantial revenues to be garnered.