In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

by Michela Wrong

  Long-nursed plans for the massacre of the Tutsi community that had once constituted Rwanda’s aristocracy were put into effect by local officials who counted on the instincts of unquestioning obedience nurtured in one of Africa’s most rigidly bureaucratic states. Sure enough, Hutu villagers did precisely as they were told. With the militias known as interahamwe—‘those who stand together’—leading the way, they turned on their Tutsi neighbours. Within three months Rwanda was littered with piles of stinking bodies. Between 500,000 and one million Tutsis and Hutu moderates died in the world’s quickest genocide, much of it carried out with that most basic of killing instruments: the machete.

  The massacres had the opposite effect of what was intended. The Hutu extremists were aiming for eventual control of a mono-ethnic state. Instead the RPF, whose fighters the Hutus dubbed ‘the cockroaches’, stepped up their military campaign. By July it had won control of Kigali and the Hutu extremists had fled into neighbouring countries. Warning of certain Tutsi revenge for a slaughter condoned by an entire community, they took with them over two million peasants. Laden with straw sleeping mats and cooking pots—the bare essentials of existence—more than a quarter of the Rwandan population abandoned their villages. It was the largest, most sudden human exodus in modern history.

  Stripping the landscape as they passed, a human swarm that gobbled up woods, livestock and crops, the Hutus headed for the borders with Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda and Zaire. Hour after hour, hundreds of thousands of bare feet scuffled and scurried through overwhelmed crossings, sending up a whispering chorus of guilt and fear. Then, the frontier safely passed, the refugees stopped. More than half ended up in Zaire’s Kivu region, settling on the unforgiving black rock of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira.

  At first, when a cholera epidemic felled tens of thousands of the refugees, they were viewed by the West as helpless victims of an ethnic conflict. One of the most complex humanitarian operations the world had ever seen got underway in Africa’s Great Lakes region, with 200 aid organisations bringing in medicine and shelter, doctors and nurses, food and water. As the immediate crisis passed, a rather more sinister status quo began to emerge from the soft grey blanket of mist that formed over each settlement, product of innumerable charcoal fires.

  Encouraged by the relief organisations, who found it easier to distribute aid through recognised chains of command, the mayors and prefects who had masterminded Rwanda’s genocide neatly reestablished control over their communities, with the interahamwe and army soldiers providing the muscle to police a government-in-waiting. The men who featured on the lists of human rights organisations investigating Rwanda’s genocide had not been sidelined by the community they had so sorely misled. Instead, they decided who got fed, how much, and even levied a form of tax. Determined to prevent a mass return which would deprive them of their constituency, they told the gullible they would have their eyes plucked out if they returned to Rwanda. The bodies of those who dared to defy them would be found by aid workers in the morning, a blunt lesson to the rest.

  Like a monstrous cancer, the camps coalesced, solidified and implanted themselves in the flesh of east Zaire. An exile initially expected to last a few weeks turned into months, then years. Time and time again, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) would announce that conditions were ripe for a mass return. Transport was laid on, way stations prepared, the supposed support of community leaders secured. The buses would leave virtually empty, their handful of passengers drawing silent stares from the crowd. Any return, the exiled Hutu extremists had decided, would be led by a conquering army. To that end, the Rwandan former generals and militiamen were rearming and recruiting, making a mockery of the camp dwellers’ supposed refugee status. So confident were the extremists, they even trained young fighters within sight of passing aid workers. Preoccupied with their humanitarian targets, aware the international community was not ready to tackle the huge problem posed by the hardliners, the relief officials looked the other way.

  Increasingly, there seemed little reason to move. Seen from the air, from where the alleys, distribution points, clinics and individual prefectures dividing up these mosaics of blue, red and green tarpaulins made sense, it was clear these were towns rather than camps, blessed with all the to-and-fro, the ceaseless commercial activity, of any sophisticated urban conglomeration. When it came to adapting to adversity, the Rwandan refugees could teach even their inventive Zairean neighbours a thing or two about Article 15. The cattle herds that were the source of Goma’s famous cheeses slowly disappeared from surrounding hills, rustled by Rwandans, who operated their own camp abattoir. Meat in the camps was so plentiful, it was actually cheaper than in central Goma. Local wildlife—from flayed monkey to chunks of hippo—provided an exotic alternative. Penetrating the nearby Virunga National Park, a former tourist attraction, refugees took whatever came in handy. The denuded areas left as they felled woodland for charcoal were so large, they were visible on satellite photos.

  In 1995, a UNHCR survey listed nearly 82,000 thriving enterprises in the camps, including 2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 589 general shops, 62 hairdressers, 51 pharmacies and 25 butchers. Cinemas rubbed shoulders with photographic studios. It was possible to down a Primus in one of the many cafés, while waiting for a local tailor to run up a suit. Markets in the camps were so well-stocked with vegetables, grown on tiny refugee plots, Zaireans sometimes headed out to the settlements to do their shopping. The refugees even ran their own transport service between the camps and Goma, using buses Japan had once donated to the Rwandan government. While hardly luxurious, life was certainly tolerable. With their vaccinations, regular diet and medical check-ups, the Rwandans enjoyed a higher standard of living than local Zairean peasants.

  UNHCR and the myriad aid organisations who set up base in Goma ensured this was so. In the first days of the crisis, they had deluged the camps with food, plastic sheeting and utensils, not realising they were duplicating each other’s work. The initial oversupply allowed community leaders to stockpile, providing them with the raw materials with which to jump-start the camp economy and trade with the locals. The sudden rush of funds did not stop with the stabilisation of the crisis. The aid agencies hired trucks and aircraft, rented local offices, warehouses and hotel rooms, took on translators, administrators and drivers. In the last nine months of 1994 alone, UNHCR and the aid organisations dedicated at least $336 million to the Zairean part of a vast refugee operation spanning the Great Lakes region, a sum that exceeded the Kinshasa government’s total annual operating budget. Even if a share of that was spent outside the area on flights and logistics, what remained still constituted a heady injection of funds for a hitherto neglected provincial backwater.

  For a president who had always used money to maintain his hold on the country, the financial influx into this 100-mile strip of land running along Lake Kivu marked a turning point. At a time when Gécamines and MIBA, Mobutu’s traditional sources of ready cash, were barely operational, funds he could neither control nor appropriate came pouring into Zaire. For the army generals and Big Vegetables who had once looked to Mobutu as sole provider, there were arms deals and security arrangements to be negotiated with the Hutu extremists, food and transport contracts to be struck with the aid organisations. Every transaction offered opportunities for bribes and commissions, sweeteners and the usual ‘leakage’, none of it granted at Mobutu’s bequest. For a leader who depended on financial patronage for his survival, it was the final stage in a drawn-out process of economic marginalisation.

  If Kivu’s refugee camps taught Zaire’s elite they no longer needed Mobutu to prosper, they also brought home to neighbouring states that he was no longer a leader they could do business with. Throughout his career Mobutu had played the game of befriending, sheltering or simply tolerating on his territory guerrilla groups dedicated to the overthrow of fellow central African leaders. The Hutu extremists determined to topple the Tutsi leadership in Kigali were to prove no exception. They had
struck up solid friendships with Zairean army commanders who allowed them a free hand when it came to sabotaging the RPF’s attempts to build a post-genocide society with a series of raids across the border. Bringing with them Rwanda’s infectious ethnic hatred, they had also won Zairean backing for an operation to ethnically cleanse the Masisi region in north Kivu of local Tutsis, never popular with other Zairean tribes. The camps were feeling cramped, and the Hutus wanted a temporary homeland from which to prepare their planned invasion.

  By late 1996, it was south Kivu’s turn to be cleansed. The local deputy governor told the Tutsis from the Banyamulenge hills they were persona non grata in Zaire. For the Banyamulenge, who had seen their Tutsi brothers in Rwanda and Masisi slaughtered and driven out, it was tantamount to announcing a new genocide was about to be launched. It was not a development that took the new authorities in Kigali by surprise. They had watched the extremists establishing their fiefdoms in Kivu, had tried in vain to pre-empt the guerrilla raids from Zaire that left buses smouldering, schools machine-gunned, ethnic reconciliation a sour joke. Together with ally Uganda, they had complained repeatedly to Zaire, called on the UN to either move the camps away from the border or bring the hardliners to heel, hinted that they were considering unilateral action. But nothing had been done.

  So, the Rwandans began infiltrating Tutsi fighters and weapons into east Zaire. In October 1996, at their instigation, four guerrilla movements announced the formation of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) in Lemera, south Kivu. In the fighting that followed, it took the rebel coalition and its neighbouring allies less than a month to achieve what the UN and Zaire had failed to do for two and a half years. As the interahamwe fled west, taking what followers they could, the extremists’ hold on the camps was finally broken. UN plans for an international force to ‘save’ the Rwandan refugees trapped in the camps were quietly shelved. At every border crossing a multicoloured ribbon made up of refugees—bowed under their sleeping mats and cooking implements—stretched to the horizon. As the air once again filled with the sound of hundreds of thousands of feet brushing the earth, Rwanda’s Hutus doggedly walked home.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Inseparable Four

  ‘Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.’

  —Winston Churchill

  When the AFDL’s representatives started calling the BBC offices in Nairobi in late 1996, claiming they would march all the way to Kinshasa, journalists dismissed them with a weary shrug as yet another unknown guerrilla movement, the length of its constituent acronyms only rivalled by its obscurity, making wild plans and farcical claims. Africa is full of them: they surface, splinter into factions—yet more acronyms—only to disappear with equal suddenness.

  Anywhere else in the world, the AFDL story would have probably been one of raids on helpless villages, a few clashes with the army, limited annexations of land. A hotch-potch of credos, experiences and motivations, its membership ranged from communists to US-educated academics and village thugs. They had barely had time to work out either a clear structure or an ideological line when south Kivu’s deputy governor pushed them into the limelight. Laurent Kabila, the spokesman-turned-leader, was a Maoist with keen commercial instincts, who had funded a fiefdom in eastern Zaire by smuggling out gold and ivory, a trade enlivened by an occasional spot of kidnapping of Westerners. Some of his colleagues thought they were fighting for the overthrow of capitalism, some for the survival of Zaire’s Tutsi community, some for the end of Mobutu.

  Sure enough, stories from Kivu soon began filtering through: of rape and looting, car-jackings and murder, hysterical fighters on the run. But on examination these turned out not to be atrocities committed by defeated rebels. At the first hint of an encounter with the AFDL and their Rwandan and Ugandan allies, Zaire’s hated army was grabbing what it could find, stealing the four-wheel drive vehicles owned by the aid agencies and heading for the interior.

  As Kinshasa promised a ‘devastating counterattack’ that never materialised, town after town ‘fell’ to the AFDL, whose fighters, in their trademark black wellington boots, could barely keep up with the army’s accelerating rout. Despite ineffectual UN appeals for a ceasefire, it became clear this was a war in which very little actual fighting was going on. Conquests began to follow a predictable routine. The incoming rebels would make it clear they intended to take a certain town. Alerted by the arrival of the first drunk army deserters that they were about to face a security crisis, local dignitaries would pool funds and lay on trucks or planes to evacuate the retreating FAZ. If the community could not afford the transport, it hit the road, more afraid of its own army’s brutality than anything the rebels could do.

  If Mobutu’s regime could not quite believe what was happening, neither could the West. With the vantage point of historical hindsight, the telegrams sent by Daniel Simpson, US ambassador in Kinshasa at the time, show an extraordinary knack for getting it completely wrong. They are a measure of how thoroughly Zaire’s diplomatic corps—like the country’s population—had fallen under the Mobutu spell. ‘The dramatic parts are almost over. The Rwandans have completed what they came to do,’ Simpson told Washington in early November. Mid-month, with the AFDL still extending its campaign, he slapped down notions that the rebels enjoyed support outside the Kivu region. Any idea that the movement had supporters throughout the country was ‘just silly’.

  In early December, Simpson ruled out any risk of the rebels turning west and heading for the capital. ‘A south Lebanon-type buffer state is all that Rwanda and Uganda have signed on for,’ he said. In January 1997, during a lull that preceded Angola’s army joining the anti-Mobutu onslaught, Simpson concluded: ‘The Rwandan-Uganda backed rebellion in the east of Zaire is falling apart.’

  Whatever Big Vegetables in Kinshasa came to believe, the AFDL’s lightning advance was not the result of massive logistical support from Anglophone Western nations determined to destroy their former ally. Zaire’s security system was collapsing like a maggot-eaten fruit. As village after village greeted the AFDL ‘liberators’, the campaign Rwanda and Uganda had launched to eliminate a border problem transformed itself into something else entirely: the takeover of a vast country. To misquote Churchill, never in the field of military history had so much territory been captured by so few with such little effort.

  Zaire’s national embarrassment of an army traced its roots back to the Force Publique of the colonial era, which, while hated, had been ruthlessly effective. Its officers had been taught in the best military academies of the US, France, Belgium and Israel, trained by experts from Germany, Egypt, China and South Korea, and supplied with some of the most sophisticated equipment ever seen in Africa. France had provided a batch of Mirage jets; the CIA technicians to maintain its aircraft. In the 1970s it had been regarded as credible enough to contribute to international peace-keeping operations. Other African nations had even sent their officers to Zaire’s centres of military excellence for training.

  During the first decade of his rule the army had been Mobutu’s pride and joy—modernised, expanded and restructured. The former sergeant’s original ascension was premised on his success in curbing an army mutiny, his understanding of what made the ordinary subaltern tick. His ability to stay in power long after support had waned had depended in part on public dread of the men who were now quietly stripping off their uniforms and melting into the crowd. No one, surely, could be more aware of the importance of army morale than Mobutu. So what had gone wrong?

  I met the man who thought he knew the answer in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris. Outside, the sun was blazing down on tourists scrunching the gravel of the Tuileries Gardens, but here it was dark. As a result, his photosensitive lenses had turned clear and I could see his eyes, usually hidden behind dark glasses. He was slightly smaller than I remembered and for a moment I wondered how this quiet, soberly dressed man—his only vi
sible extravagance a diamond-studded gold watch—could ever have become a figure of such controversy.

  But it was when he started talking that I was reminded of his nickname. It is not something one likes to mention in his company, but Honoré Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Atumba is commonly known amongst Zaireans as the ‘Terminator’, a reference to the horrors carried out by the ‘owls’, the sinister force responsible for night-time interrogations and disappearances which cracked down on opposition activists and troublesome students during the five years he spent as head of the intelligence service. And there is something about the Terminator’s voice that strikes a chill to the heart. It is clipped, slightly nasal and instantly recognisable. His French is impeccable, his phrases wind their way through subsections, qualifications and subtleties, pointing to a coldly precise brain behind. It is a sophistication which has determined the course of his life.

  He was a brilliant, seminary-educated young man when he was talent-spotted by Mobutu. Presenting the student body’s complaints to the president, he made such a good case Mobutu told the head of his intelligence services to follow his academic career and recruit him on graduation. At his mother’s suggestion, he let drop ambitions of becoming a priest, while holding on to the Christian faith with peculiar fervour. The secular world called. It was to bring him decidedly unmonastic levels of wealth while sharing some of the characteristics of the priesthood: a familiarity with occult forces and intimate secrets, an awareness of the machinations unseen by the common man, and, finally, privileged access to a supreme being held in awe by mere mortals. As the Jesuits proved during the Inquisition, spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just.

  Several foreign assignments were followed by a posting as ambassador, the directorship of the SNIP intelligence service, three stints as Defence Minister and nomination as Mobutu’s special security adviser. The Terminator succeeded where Janssen, the white playboy venturing out of his depth, had failed. He was privy to the president’s most secret thoughts, entrusted with the most delicate of diplomatic missions. His role, which won him the sobriquet of ‘Special’ from Mobutu, made him a natural target of Kinshasa’s scurrilous rag-sheets. Journalists speculated about his business interests, cartoonists depicted him—with sideburns and signature sunglasses—as a kind of thuggish spiv hatching dark plots with fellow aide Vundwawe Te Pemako, the two real powers behind the throne left vacant while Mobutu disported himself in Gbadolite.