In other words, consumers are not held responsible for the conditions under which minerals are produced. In the Congo, despite the occasional hue and cry raised by the media, corporate responsibility has been largely ignored—the supply chain is more convoluted, passing through traders, brokers, smelters, and processing companies. The tin and coltan that come from the Congo are mixed with those from Brazil, Russia, and China before they make it into our cell phones and laptops. There is a burgeoning consensus in international law that we should care about the conditions under which the products we consume—sweatpants, sneakers, and even timber—are produced. If we can hold companies accountable for their business practices, we will give an incentive to the Congolese government to clean up the mining sector. The “conflict minerals” legislation signed into law by President Obama in July 2010 is a step, albeit a small one, in the right direction.
PART IV
NEITHER WAR NOR PEACE
20
THE BEARER OF EGGS
KINSHASA, CONGO, JANUARY 2001
There are several versions of the story of how Joseph Kabila was chosen to succeed his father. A popular one goes as follows: The day after Laurent Kabila’s assassination, the inner cabal of the presidency meets to decide who would become president. Around a table are the Who’s Who of Congolese power politics: Katangan strongmen, the high brass of the army, and the regime’s economic kingpins.
A cacophony ensues as the group argues over who is best suited for the job. Gaetan was Kabila’s favorite, one claims; Victor has the best ties to Angola and Zimbabwe, another suggests.1 Finally, as the tensions reach a climax and the country teeters on the brink of civil war, General Sylvestre Lwetcha, the old, frail commander of the armed forces and a renowned witch doctor, bangs his fist on the table.
“Silence!” The general, who had fought side-by-side with Laurent Kabila during the bush rebellion, pulls out his side arm, a Magnum nine-millimeter pistol, cocks it to his temple, and shoots himself six times. Smoke billows up around his head, filling the room, as his colleagues cough and wave their hands in disbelief.
When the smoke clears, the bulletproof general slams his pistol down on the table, slowly clears his throat, and says, “I have decided that General Joseph Kabila will become president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo!” He looks around the table slowly and asks calmly, “Are there any questions?”
Of course, this is not what really happened. The truth is buried under hundreds of competing rumors and may never be entirely uncovered. But according to various people who took part in the meetings, the following is as accurate as we might get.
On the morning following Mzee’s death, his closest associates met at the City of the African Union, a sprawling complex of government buildings overlooking the Congo river. Edy Kapend, Laurent Kabila’s powerful military advisor, presided over the meeting.2 The president’s taciturn son Joseph had flown in the previous night from Lubumbashi, still in shock.
Kapend began by reminding everybody of an oral will that the deceased president had given his close associates several years earlier, when he was suffering from a severe illness. “He told us that in case he died, his son Joseph was supposed to take power,” Kapend reminded the small group. Several people nodded. Others contested the will, claiming that Joseph was only supposed to take command of the military, while the political leadership should be handed to someone else. Let’s set up a special committee to study the matter, someone else suggested.
A debate ensued in the air-conditioned rooms, which Kapend cut short by pulling down a military map of the eastern Congo. Bold, red arrows marked where the Rwandan offensive was threatening Lubumbashi and Mbuji-Mayi. “We can debate this all night if you like, but if we are weak and divided, our enemies will take advantage. We need to decide now.”
After some squabbling, everyone in the room realized there was little choice. They needed someone who could command the respect of the army and their allies alike. If they chose anyone else besides Joseph, the government was at risk of collapsing into internecine fighting. Joseph was young, shy, and practically unknown on the political scene, but this could be a good thing. “The logic was: The weaker the person we chose, the less he was likely to be contested, as they thought they could influence him,” one of the people who attended the meeting told me.3
The ayatollahs of the Congolese government were in for a surprise. The weak, introverted successor turned out to be much smarter and more independent than anybody had suspected. Within a year of his nomination, Joseph would rid himself of almost everybody who had put him in power. He also launched a peace process, setting the gears in motion to bring an end to the war and paving the way for elections.
It would have been difficult to find someone more different from his father than Joseph Kabila. Where his father was authoritarian and confrontational, Joseph was shy and reclusive. In his first speech to the nation on January 26, 2001, he stumbled through his prewritten text in halting, uninspired French. He was not very fluent, as he had grown up mostly in Tanzania and was more comfortable in Swahili and English. Several days later, he asked an advisor to help him through his first meeting with the diplomatic corps. “You do the talking,” he said uneasily.4
For the Congolese public, the contrast was jolting. “He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t like going out to dinner, doesn’t have a large wardrobe, doesn’t have a lot of good friends, and doesn’t speak the languages of the people he’s going to govern,” an American reporter observed.5 In an early television interview in the United States—he avoided the press in his home country until he had a better command of French—his expression was wooden, his hands folded in front of him, barely moving when he answered questions.
So who was Joseph Kabila? From the first day of his presidency, the Congolese rumor mill began churning. As usual, most of the talk was not about government affairs, but about his ethnicity and origins. He wasn’t the real son of his father, some said. He is really Tanzanian, others tattled—he can’t speak French. Or even: He killed his own father to take power!
Joseph Kabila and his twin sister, Janet, were born in Mpiki, South Kivu, on June 4, 1971, in the grass-thatched rebel headquarters of his father. Overlooking the camp was the so-called Mlima ya damu, the Mountain of Blood, named for the battles that had taken place there against Mobutu’s army.
Most agree that Joseph is the son of Laurent Kabila. The deep attachment between the two attests to this: Mzee doted on Joseph while in office and elevated him from a simple soldier to the commander of his army. However, short of DNA testing, the mystery of Joseph and Janet’s biological mother will be more difficult to solve.
The official mother, Sifa Mahanya, married the rebel leader in 1970 and would remain his wife until he died, albeit alongside a gaggle of mistresses. She was responsible for the women’s wing of the rebellion and a member of the revolutionary courts. It was Mama Sifa, as she is known today, whom most of Mzee’s former comrades recognize as the mother of the current president.6
A second, plausible version is provided by members of Joseph Kabila’s entourage. They say that Joseph’s mother was a Rwandan Tutsi called Marcelline Mukambuguje, who was one of the many Rwandans who joined Kabila in his maquis in the hope of using Zaire as a rear base to overthrow the Hutu-dominated dictatorship in Rwanda. Mukambuguje was allegedly kept from public sight when Laurent Kabila was president in order to prevent the public from discovering Joseph’s real mother. A Tutsi mother would obviously not do in a country at war with Rwanda.
As soon as he became president, his alleged mother was bundled away to the United States to live. This is not just Internet apocrypha—although the blogosphere does abound with these rumors—but allegations relayed by people close to the president, including a close former advisor, a bodyguard, and members of his family.7 Every once in a while, rumors make the rounds among diplomats and the elite in Kinshasa that a mysterious elderly woman was seen in the presidential chambers or gardens. Of cours
e, this version of his parentage is lapped up by the opposition and many Kinois, who think Kabila never stopped working for the Rwandan government, a sort of Tutsi Manchurian candidate.
Shortly after Joseph’s birth, Kabila’s troops kidnapped a group of American students from a Tanzanian chimpanzee research project, earning them international infamy. While the rebels did manage to obtain a hefty ransom, Mobutu’s army launched a new offensive against Kabila, pushing his soldiers out of their highland redoubt into inhospitable jungles to the west. Given the danger and poor living conditions, Laurent Kabila decided it was best for his family to move to Tanzania, where he had good connections inside the security services.
In Dar es Salaam, Joseph and Janet enrolled in the French school under fake names, pretending to be from a western Tanzanian tribe in order to escape the attention of Zairian intelligence agents active there—Laurent Kabila’s deputy was scooped up by such spies and taken to Kinshasa, after which he wasn’t heard from again.
According to one of Joseph’s classmates, he was intelligent, proficient in English, and an admirer of martial arts and sports cars. Nonetheless, even then he was a silent loner. When he did speak about politics, he liked to discuss the exploits of the heroes of his father’s generation—Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, and Yoweri Museveni.8
“The small boy already had the personality of a leader, he dreamed of being a soldier, of leading an army,” recalled his mother, Sifa Mahanya, who, according to Tanzanian security sources, was with Joseph during his whole childhood. He used to play with small model cars and trucks in their house, lining them up into military convoys.9
Joseph underwent a brief military training in southern Tanzania but spent most of his youth helping his father with his businesses, which for a while included transporting large shipments of fish along Lake Tanganyika. The young man drove trucks for thousands of miles, from Zambia through Tanzania to Uganda.10
When Laurent Kabila got in touch with the Rwandan army in 1995 to prepare for the invasion of Zaire, Joseph accompanied him to the meetings. Once the war started, the twenty-five-year-old was entrusted to Colonel James Kabarebe, the Rwandan field commander of operations. The two lived under the same roof and traveled together to the front lines to inspect the troops. Officers remember seeing Joseph Kabila, known as Afande Kabange11 by his soldiers, everywhere along the front lines, but he rarely spoke. The image that remains for most from that time is of a young man, his military cap pulled low over his sunken eyes, a silent fixture in the room. The war had a serious impact on his psyche. “The worst thing that I have ever seen is the sight of a village after a massacre; you can never erase that from your memory.”12
After the AFDL’s victory, Joseph kept a low profile in Kinshasa. He lived in the same house as several Rwandan commanders and began to explore the capital. He visited the famous bars and nightclubs of Bandal and Matonge, where ambianceurs (lovers of the nightlife) and sapeurs (dandies) strutted the latest fashion and ate grilled goat washed down with bottles of Primus or Skol beer. Until today, scurrilous Kinois still claim to have drunk beer with Joseph or have seen him trying out a dance move. (“He used to love the women!” some claim. “No! He was too timid, he couldn’t even dance.” “Alligator skin shoes, that’s what he liked. My little brother sold him his first pair!”)
In early 1998, his father sent him on a military training course to China; his father had himself once visited the Nanjing military academy decades earlier. This training, however, was short-lived, as he was called back home when the second war began. Despite his brief military career—at that point, he had served a grand total of three years in military uniform, including a year of basic training in Tanzania—he was promoted to the rank of general and named acting chief of staff of the army.
It was an abrupt change for him; he had had little experience in military operations. 13 Now he commanded tens of thousands of Congolese troops against the very Rwandans who had trained him. As soon as he got off the plane from China, he rushed to defend the capital from his former mentor and friend, James Kabarebe.
Few remember much of Joseph Kabila during the next few years. He rarely met with foreign military advisors, and even in meetings with his own staff he spent most of the time listening. In any case, it is not clear how much power the young general had; his father made many important military decisions, like, for example, the battle for Pweto in 2000, and Zimbabwean and Angolan generals also had strong influence.
The Congolese officer corps was an amalgam of former Mobutu officers, Katangan Tigers trained in Angola, Mai-Mai from the Kivus, and newly recruited child soldiers. Without much experience, the president’s son showed he was adept at navigating the tensions between these different groups, making friends and listening to their advice. He established a small coterie of young army officers, some of whom had also gone for training in China—not the most experienced officers, but fiercely loyal to him.
As much as Joseph admired his father, he also realized that his views were outdated. In his first address to the nation, just days after he had laid his father to rest, Joseph announced a sea change in foreign policy. George W. Bush had just been elected in the United States, and Kabila’s message was directed at him: “Without beating around the bush, I recognize there has been mutual misunderstanding with the former administration. The DRC intends to normalize bilateral relations with the new administration.”14 At the same time, he promised to liberalize the diamond trade and float the currency, promote a new mining code, and—most importantly—immediately try to resuscitate the peace process. Several months later, he allowed political parties to operate again. Where his father had governed by ideology, Joseph was a pragmatist.
To underscore his point and to bolster his position, Joseph immediately embarked on a diplomatic offensive. As one political analyst of the region remarked, “Devoid of any national constituency, he had decided to treat the international community as his powerbase.”15 The American ambassador in Kinshasa, William Swing, invited him to take up an invitation to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington that had been extended to his father. He traveled first to Paris, where he met with President Jacques Chirac, and then on to Washington, where he met with Secretary of State Colin Powell and later, privately, with President Kagame, with whom he discussed the possibility of a peace deal. He finished off his tour with an address to the UN Security Council in New York, all within a few months of becoming president.
His presidency marked an abrupt U-turn in government policy. His father had insisted that the war would be “longue et populaire.” It had been the former, but certainly not the latter. His son immediately abandoned this purely military approach.
After his speech at the UN, diplomats lined up to shake Joseph Kabila’s hand and applauded his desire to restart the peace process. His eagerness to comply with the demands of the United Nations put Rwanda on the defensive for the first time since the beginning of the war. Other factors also played in his favor. The American representative to the UN remarked, “We do not believe that Rwanda can secure its long-term security interests via a policy of military opposition to the government of Congo.” The British UN ambassador asked President Kagame to bring an end to the plunder of the eastern Congo.16 Several months later, a UN report concluded that Rwanda and Uganda were plundering the eastern Congo for personal enrichment and in order to finance the war.
The new Kabila was no pacifist. He did not stop fighting with his enemies; he just changed tactics. He largely respected the front line cease-fire but provided weapons and supplies to fuel the Mai-Mai insurgency on his enemies’ turf. It was as brilliant in its logic as it was brutal. The ramshackle Mai-Mai were little military threat to the RCD and their Rwandan allies, who had much greater firepower, but they provoked ruthless counterinsurgency operations by Rwanda and its allies, making them even more unpopular. It was typical guerrilla warfare, as practiced by Mao Tsetung and Che Guevara: Keep the enemy swinging with nine-pound sledgehammers at flies.
&
nbsp; Suddenly, it was Rwanda and Uganda who were seen as the obstacles to peace. The RCD rebels refused to allow UN peacekeepers to deploy into their territory, seeing it as a “declaration of war,” prompting demonstrations against them in Kisangani and Goma.17 Kabila, on the other hand, urged the Security Council to increase its deployments and to relaunch the investigation into the massacres in the refugee camps that his father had so adamantly blocked.
Within his own government in Kinshasa, the new president took equally drastic steps. Three months after he came to power, he sacked almost his entire cabinet, including most of the people who had chosen him as his father’s successor. The aging generals who had fought side by side with his father since the 1960s received handsome pensions and were retired. In their place, he appointed a new group of technocrats, young Congolese who had not been as tainted by corruption and warmongering. The new finance minister came from the International Monetary Fund, the new information minister was a U.S.-educated journalist. The average age of the new ministers was thirty-eight.18
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 37
