Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  Masasu was arrested along with over fifty other soldiers. Several weeks later, on November 27, 2000, he was executed on the front line at Pweto.

  Young recruits from the Kivus constituted up to a third of Kabila’s army of 50,000. Since the early days of his rebellion, Kabila had surrounded himself with child soldiers, much to the chagrin of visiting diplomats and dignitaries, who were often accosted by the youths asking for a couple of dollars or some cigarettes. When one visiting foreign businessman, a friend of the president, warned him against using these kadogo, Kabila replied, “Oh no, they could never hurt me. They’ve been with me since the beginning. They are my children.”23 In another frequently described incident, the kadogo prevented Kabila’s wife from leaving the residence, protesting that they hadn’t been paid and were hungry. In order to shut them up, she opened up the chicken coop behind the residence and allowed them to help themselves to the hens and eggs.24

  Masasu’s execution prompted riots in military camps in Kinshasa, and hundreds of kadogo were arrested or fled across the river to Brazzaville. Although details are murky, at least several dozen were executed by firing squad in the capital.25 It was then, according to interviews of kadogo carried out by a French journalist, that a fateful meeting was held among the young Kivutians who had remained in the president’s bodyguard.26 “I will kill him,” Rashidi Kasereka is reported to have said, furious over the killing of his friends, to a group of twenty other presidential guards, who cheered their approval.

  After the assassination, a group of kadogo fled across the river to neighboring Brazzaville. According to the Congolese authorities, they had been part of the plot to assassinate Kabila. The president of the neighboring Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou Nguesso, who didn’t want to appear to be sheltering coup plotters, promptly arrested them and had them brought back to Kinshasa. Several of them had been close to Masasu—they included his former chief of staff and military advisor. According to Kabila’s security services, when they interrogated these prisoners, they admitted to being part of a plan to kill Kabila. The kadogo said they had received money to organize the coup from Lebanese businessmen; the security services had already suspected their involvement and had executed eleven Lebanese. The businessmen had allegedly been incensed by Kabila’s grant of the quasi-monopoly of diamond sales to the Israeli trader. “It was strange, though,” remarked Kabila’s national security advisor, who had followed the interrogations. “They were very calm during our questioning. They said that they knew they would soon escape.”27 Sure enough, shortly afterwards, the leaders of the Masasu group engineered a break from the Makala prison through an inside job.

  The Le Monde journalists, who spoke with several of the fugitives, concluded that the assassination had been the work of a bunch of bitter former child soldiers who were seeking revenge. This is possible. However, the whole affair—the lax security at the presidency, the escape from prison, the murder of the Lebanese—seems to be too well choreographed, too slickly greased to have been the doing of a few renegade bodyguards. There are several indications that Rwanda was directly involved. First, according to the Congolese security services, before fleeing, the Masasu crew admitted to being in cahoots with Kigali. Second, when they did flee, along with several affluent Lebanese businessmen, they made their way directly to Rwanda, where some were eventually given influential political and business positions by the government. Last, a former Rwandan security official told me that he had seen Colonel James Kabarebe on the day of the assassination. Kabarebe, who was still running Congo operations for the Rwandan army and would soon be promoted to become head of the army, reportedly slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Good news from Kinshasa. Our boys did it.”28

  Others, however, dismiss the Rwandan conspiracy theory. If the Rwandans had wanted to get rid of Kabila, the argument goes, they would have launched an offensive, either in Kinshasa or along the front line, to accompany their coup. Instead nothing happened. In fact, the assassination ended up working against Rwandan interests, as the dead president’s successor was able to reestablish support for his country among diplomats, reinvigorate the peace process, and emasculate Rwanda’s Congolese ally, the RCD.

  Skeptics of the Rwandan conspiracy theory, including the French political scientist Gérard Prunier, usually point their finger at Angola, President Kabila’s erstwhile ally. In 2000, the Angolan army had come close to crushing UNITA, its rebel adversary of twenty-five years. Nonetheless, according to UN investigators, UNITA continued to rake in revenues of $200 million a year through diamond deals, and it appeared that Kabila, in a desperate bid for cash, had begun to allow UNITA to deal through Lebanese gem traders in Kinshasa. The Angolan rebels would mask the true origin of the diamonds, and Kabila would get hefty kickbacks in return. According to French and British insider periodicals, by the end of 2000 UNITA operatives were once again active in Kinshasa. President Dos Santos, who had supported the initial rebellion against Mobutu precisely to root out UNITA bases in Zaire, was livid.29

  This hypothesis is supported by the curious behavior of General Yav Nawej, the commander of Kinshasa who had close ties to Angola, along with Edy Kapend, the president’s military advisor. The day before the assassination, General Yav, as he was known, ordered the disarmament of select northern Katangan units in Kinshasa’s garrison, who were the most loyal to Kabila. Then, within hours of the assassination, General Yav ordered the execution of eleven Lebanese, including six minors, belonging to a diamond trading family. In the meantime, Kapend had gone on the radio and ordered the commanders of the army, navy, and air force to maintain discipline and calm, rankling these officers, who thought such commands to be far above his pay grade.

  According to this scenario, the Angolans did not instigate the assassination but found out about it ahead of time and then told their men in Kinshasa—Yav and Kapend—not to intervene. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the kadogo acting on behest of Angola, as they had few links to Luanda and were much closer to Rwanda. It is, however, equally difficult to believe that only the pro-Angolan officers within the presidency would have discovered the coup plot, given the porous information networks in Kinshasa. This theory is also challenged by the subsequent arrest of both Kapend and Yav, the former for having allegedly orchestrated the assassination, the latter for his extrajudicial execution of the Lebanese citizens. One would imagine that if Angola had wanted to get rid of any leaks of information, they would have eliminated both altogether—prisons in the Congo are notoriously porous themselves. It also isn’t clear why Joseph Kabila, who is known for his deep attachment to his father and may have had a good idea of who killed him, would have so easily assumed the presidency surrounded by people who had been involved in the plot.

  Any number of narrative strands could have ended in Laurent Kabila’s death. Other theories include one that he died of a natural death: He had apparently fallen sick with malaria the day of his death, and according to a human rights organization, the doctor at the clinic where he was treated did not notice any bullet wounds on his body. Another conjecture is that he had been shot by a group of his own generals whom he had sacked for their shoddy performance in Pweto. A year later, Kabila’s deputy director of protocol appeared in exile in Brussels, suggesting that the Zimbabwean army was behind the murder but providing little evidence or rationale for his claim.30

  As so often in the Congo, the truth may never be known. Observers of Congolese politics should steel themselves with a deep skepticism of simple truths in general. Information, in particular regarding matters of state, is often rooted in hearsay and rumor. Indeed, politicians have become adept at using rumors as a tactical weapon, spreading them on purpose to distract from the truth or to smear their opponents.

  Sometimes it seems that by crossing the border into the Congo one abandons any sort of Archimedean perspective on truth and becomes caught up in a web of rumors and allegations, as if the country itself were the stuff of some postmodern fiction. This is, in part, due to a st
ructural deficit; institutions that could dig deep and scrutinize information—such as a free press, an independent judiciary, and an inquisitive parliament—do not exist. But it has also become a matter of cultural pride. People weave rumors and myths together over drinks or while waiting for taxis to help give meaning to their lives. It may, for example, be easier to believe that Joseph Kabila’s real name is Hippolyte Kanambé and that he is a Rwandan, acting in the interests of Paul Kagame, or to believe that the conflict in the Congo was all an American corporate conspiracy to extract minerals from the country. Either might be easier to swallow than the complex, tangled reality. Doesn’t it give more meaning to the Congolese’s grim everyday existence?

  A military tribunal in Kinshasa held a nine-month-long trial at the central prison of 135 people arrested in conjunction with Kabila’s assassination. Day after day, prisoners, soldiers, family members, and people in search of entertainment filed into the court, ushered to their seats by prisoners in blue-and-yellow uniforms. The judges sat in front of a mural that had been painted by a prisoner with an artistic bent: a rustic picnic next to a pond, garnished with wine, grapes, a violin, and a bouquet of roses. As the defendants stood and gave their testimony, the audience jeered or clapped. They were particularly noisy during the speeches of Colonel Charles Alamba, the chief prosecutor, who distinguished himself by long, irrelevant digressions. At one point, he castigated Edy Kapend for having had children with more than one woman. “We practice monogamy here—we don’t recognize polygamy!”31 The audience groaned in dismay.

  The court did not provide the accused with decent defense lawyers and barred independent observers from the courtroom for much of the trial. The prosecutors were military officers and as such answered to their superiors, a fact that undermined their independence. Many had little or no legal training. They arrested and put on trial wives of some of the soldiers, including Rashidi’s, without any evidence to indicate they were involved. Emile Mota, the economic affairs advisor who had been present during the assassination, was arrested while he was on the witness stand because he allegedly had contradicted himself. At no point did anybody provide convincing evidence that any of the accused was guilty, nor did the reasons behind Kabila’s death become any clearer.

  The judge eventually sentenced thirty people to death, ten of whom had been tried in absentia.

  By the time of his death, Kabila had become the central figure in the country. Everything about him was big, from his figure to his bombastic language to his acts. In many ways, he was heir to the man he had spent most of his life trying to overthrow: Mobutu Sese Seko. Laurent Kabila, too, was a strong, often autocratic ruler who governed by decree and repressed all opposition. “Kabila, c’était un vrai chef,” Congolese often remember fondly. He was in charge, a fact he reminded most of his associates of by arresting them for short periods and then releasing them again; almost no one escaped this treatment. But there were no monumental relics of his rule: Kabila was not given to the same kind of Louis XIV extravagances as his predecessor. He lived a relatively modest life and had little tolerance for most kinds of corruption. If there is one thing the Congolese will remember Mzee for, it is the war. It consumed both Kabila and his government and pushed them into a frenzy of patriotism and, at times, xenophobia. He became obsessed with winning. After all, he had grown up a rebel and felt much more at ease in trying to win a war than to rule a country. But when he became a martyr to his most dear cause, the country heaved a sigh of relief.

  19

  PAYING FOR THE WAR

  GOMA, ZAIRE, NOVEMBER 1996

  “Illegal, illegal! What the hell does ‘illegal’ mean?” Mwenze Kongolo responded when I asked what he thought about the “illegal exploitation” of Congolese resources by foreign companies and states. Mwenze had been the powerful interior minister under Laurent Kabila, and he was himself a shareholder in several mining deals. “We needed money to finance the war. We used our mines and resources to stave off foreign aggression. Is that illegal?”1

  Many have come to criticize the deals struck between Kabila’s government and states in the region to finance the war. Others have condemned Rwandan and Ugandan profiteering during their occupation of the eastern Congo between 1998 and 2002. As usual, a coarse brush was used to paint these different forms of involvement with the same broad strokes, sacrificing nuance for caricature. For all the states involved, economic interests played a role but were woven into a complex web of domestic and regional, political and corporate considerations. In some cases, politicians did exploit natural resources for personal profit; in others, they did so to finance the war and government operations, although often by very dubious means. Foreign governments and companies were involved, but again, in a wide variety of forms, ranging from direct complicity to more tangential responsibility.

  The first invasion of the Congo in September 1996 had everything to do with security and geopolitical concerns and only little to do with business. It was Mobutu’s support of Angolan, Ugandan, and Rwandan rebels that provoked the incursion, not his neighbors’ greed for the Congo’s minerals. As the rebellion advanced, however, money soon became a decisive factor.

  As parts of the country became independent of control from Kinshasa, they slashed import and export taxes by 70 percent. Goma became a hotbed of entrepreneurship, as investors from all over the world were attracted to the region. Doing business with the rebels at that time was a risky proposition. No large corporations threw their weight behind Laurent Kabila, afraid that Mobutu could make a comeback and they would be perceived as turncoats. This opened the door for risk-seeking entrepreneurs not confined by the strictures of large, publicly owned corporations.

  Jean-Raymond Boulle fit this profile. He was one of the first prominent entrepreneurs to get in touch with the AFDL rebellion in the early months of 1997, when the rebellion controlled no more than a thin sliver of the eastern border region. Boulle had a typical profile for investors in the Congo: erudite, adventurous, and risk-seeking. A soft-spoken forty-seven-year-old from Mauritius, Boulle had been educated in South Africa and the United Kingdom. He drove a Bentley and had settled in a mansion in Monaco, but he was no stranger to the rough-and-tumble of African mining. He had become involved in the business at an early age, following his mother, who had been an experienced diamond dealer; he had gone to work for the South African diamond giant De Beers in Zaire and Sierra Leone in the 1970s. Frustrated by the company’s bureaucracy, he left to start his own company in 1981. In 1994, he had his big break, when one of his geologists stumbled by accident on the world’s largest nickel deposit in Voisey Bay, Canada, while he was prospecting for diamonds. After stiff bargaining, Boulle sold the concession, walking away with $400 million, which he promptly invested in a new company, American Mineral Fields, a joint venture with a land surveyor from Hope, Arkansas, the hometown of President Clinton. Boulle was never too shy to remind potential partners where his company was based and to mention that he had met Clinton on several occasions, including at his inauguration celebration at the White House.2

  When the war broke out, no major investor had been actively mining in the Congo in years. At the same time, however, the Belgian and Congolese state had already invested billions over the years in prospecting and conducting feasibility studies. This considerably reduced the risk for private capital. Companies could buy known quantities of copper and cobalt, anticipating roughly how much surface rock needed to be removed, water needed to be dredged, and infrastructure needed to be renovated or installed. In some cases, foreign businessmen colluded with officials from Gécamines, the state-owned mining corporation, to obtain their technical evaluations and feasibility studies. “They rewrote them, put their letterhead on top, and then simply said that they had done a technical study,” a former Gécamines official, who—like most mining officials—refused to be named for this book, told me.3

  Boulle had already attempted to get involved in mining under Mobutu, obtaining two mining concessions that conta
ined an estimated $20 billion in copper and cobalt.4 But Mobutu had canceled the contracts, handing one of them to Anglo American, the continent’s largest mining conglomerate. Rankled by the dictator, Boulle, who worked in tandem with several brothers, reached out to Mobutu’s opponents. When Kisangani, the country’s third biggest city, fell in March 1997, Boulle made his move, shutting down his office in Kinshasa and opening a diamond trading house in an area controlled by the AFDL. “Do you wait until everybody gets here and be last or do you get in early?” his brother Max Boulle told the press at the time. “We’ve made a conscious decision to get in early.”5

  Since the AFDL had shut down all other diamond dealers in town, Boulle was able to turn a handsome profit. In return, he reportedly paid the rebels $1 million in “advance taxes” on the diamonds.6 Diamond traders were so desperate to sell their diamonds that they literally broke down the door of Boulle’s office. The Mauritian also allowed the rebellion to continue using his corporate Lear jet, although he later claimed that it had been commandeered. In April 1997, after the AFDL had seized control of Lubumbashi, the country’s mining capital, they awarded Boulle with the mining deals that Mobutu had recently called into question. In return, the Mauritian mining magnate was supposed to dole out an $80 million down payment, a quarter of which he reportedly advanced to the AFDL.7