Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Such was the melee, the guard of honour nearly knocked over Kengo and a troop of flower girls. I was driving back through the bustling back-streets, debating furiously with a colleague whether Mobutu could be on his deathbed, when by chance we drew level with the Mobutu motorcade, which had come a different way. The weight of people in the road had forced it to a crawl. No one seemed to know whether to cheer or boo. Then the smoked-glass side window slid down and a hand emerged waving Mobutu's distinctive wooden cane. It was a masterstroke. A cheer went up followed by loud applause. Within moments the city was buzzing with rumours that he was back and in charge.

  Mobutu had come a long way from his impoverished childhood as the son of a maid and a cook. He is believed to have arrived in Leopoldville from his native Equateur province with only five pounds to his name.4 Even then he was displaying the traits which would serve him so well. According to a Zairean historian who lived in exile during the dictatorship, Mobutu was expelled aged nineteen from mission school for 'his adventurous character, his proclivity for delinquency and his burglary of the mission library'. (5)

  The CIA knew a shrewd operator when they saw one. Lawrence Devlin, a young operative who met Mobutu in the pre-independence years when he was a journalist, is widely credited with masterminding his rise through the turbulence of the early Sixties. In the late Sixties, Devlin took breakfast with Mobutu on most mornings to plot the next move. More than three decades later as the rebels closed on Kinshasa, diplomats charged with negotiating a peaceful settlement frantically tried to contact Devlin as one of the few voices Mobutu might heed. But it was far too late.

  When the foreign aid dried up after the end of the Cold War, the soldiers stopped being paid, let alone trained. Mobutu had always believed that by running down his army he had insulated himself from the threat of a coup, but instead he had hastened his end. As the rebels advanced, so his soldiers melted away, and the 'war' became little more than a route march. Mobutu's Chinese-trained tank division, which could have changed the course of the last battle for Kinshasa, languished a hundred miles away lacking crucial spare parts.

  In the final irony, in the ultimate burglar's nightmare and in a sober lesson for his thieving imitators, Mobutu ran out of things to steal - not that he recognized this until far too late. He put some of his foreign properties on the market and his aides had one last pillage of state resources. 'They are all busily back-dating letters of credit,' the British ambassador explained wearily, clearly expecting nothing less after several years' experience in the posting. Many of Mobutu's properties in Europe had already been mortgaged to raise instant cash for relatives, many of whom had learned all too well from the 'chief' and defrauded him as readily as he did the state. Diplomats said at the end he barely had enough money to fuel the personal jet he leased to fly him to Europe for his cancer treatment, let alone to fight a war.

  Mobutu had long vowed that he would die in office. After years of watching him weave his magic, some Zaireans were convinced his prostate cancer would claim him as the rebels arrived. But he could not hold the rebels off long enough to achieve his goal. He fled, like the Belgians, with what he could carry. A friend of the family told me later that he suddenly panicked. 'It was terrible. No one had seen the old man lose his nerve before. He just did not know what to do. So his wife took charge and told everyone to pack their bags.' Such was Mobutu's haste that he left half his luggage on the runway.

  The morning after his flight, I shared the Intercontinental Hotel lift down to the ground floor with a young woman in hip hugging suede trousers and with waist-length plaited hair that was struggling with two huge suitcases. She was also clutching a plastic bag brimming with cardboard folders and a shoulder bag with a teddy bear sticking out. I offered to carry her largest case to the foyer. 'Books?' I hazarded. 'No. My clothes and my studies,' she said. She was, I learned later, a niece of Mobutu.

  For three hours she sat amid a pile of Gucci suitcases before she was evacuated across the river to Brazzaville, the capital of the neighbouring Republic of Congo, escorted by Mobutu's most hated son, Kongolo, whose nickname was Saddam Hussein. His final act before fleeing was to fire two rocket grenades at the façade of the Bank of Zaire, the institution he and his kind had debased for so long. It was a fittingly petty way for the last of the Mobutus to leave Zaire.

  Barely twenty-four hours later, the Intercontinental lobby was again humming with activity. But this time there were no designer labels. The rebels' suitcases were shabby and battered, as befitted a movement that had moved headquarters dozens of times and travelled more than a thousand miles in the previous six months. The low-key luggage was a hopeful sign that a new guard was in charge that would lead Zaire into an honest future - but no one was holding their breath.

  The fall of Mobutu was tentatively hailed as a turning point for Africa. For years Zaire had been a 'black hole' the size of Western Europe. Everyone and everything that came into con tact with it suffered- with the exception of government officials and foreign companies extracting its mineral riches. Its vast interior provided hideaways for half a dozen guerrilla movements to destabilize its neighbours. When in 1995 there was news of a rare outbreak of the deadly flesh-eating Ebola virus it seemed grimly apt that it should have emerged in Zaire.

  With Mobutu ousted, there were grounds for hope that the regional monolith might at last play a more positive role in the continent. Optimists compared his downfall with the end of apartheid as a signpost for a brighter future. There was talk of the Congo cementing a central African trade bloc, opening up the continent and ensuring security from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. In the second city, Lubumbashi, Congolese businessmen and administrators were overheard in bars discussing the changing world order and hailing Tony Blair, who had just been elected in Britain, Thabo Mbeki, then Mandela's heir apparent, and Laurent Kabila in the same breath as leaders of a brave new world.

  For his regional supporters the victory of Kabila's alliance was a triumph. The initial impetus for his rebellion came from the Banyamulenge, Zairean Tutsis whose rights had for years been abused by Mobutu. They were backed by the Tutsi-led army of neighbouring Rwanda, Uganda, the wily regional supremo, and also Angola. Kabila initially seemed little more than their front man. He was a Luba with a long record of opposing Mobutu and so was a convenient riposte to the dictator's claims that Tutsis had attacked him. Kabila's political career had last flourished more than three decades earlier in the early chaotic months of independence as an ally of the independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. When Lumumba was murdered in 1961, Kabila fled into the bush and began a thirty-year odyssey in the political wilderness. As leader of a Maoist guerrilla band he waged a desultory jungle war. He was best known for dabbling in gold smuggling and hit the headlines only briefly when in 1975 his men kidnapped three American students and a Dutch researcher. But as the rebels advanced so he became a manifestation of Zaireans' despair. Drawing on financial and logistical backing from Angola and slipping through Zambia to accelerate their advance, the rebels easily outmanoeuvred Mobutu's forces. Within six months the war was over after one of Africa's most whirlwind military campaigns. On some fronts they were even able to advance by train.

  Overnight the political map of central, southern and eastern Africa was transformed. Angola's UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) rebels, who had for years used Zaire as a conduit for arms and a market for diamonds (their principal source of revenue), had lost their most import ant backer. Mobutu's overthrow also dealt a wounding blow to Rwanda's former Hutu extremist government, many of whose supporters had fled to Zaire in 1994 after organizing the genocide of up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Since then their forces had regrouped and launched raids against the new Tutsi-led Rwandan government. But Kabila's alliance drove many of their units more than a thousand miles from their homeland. Uganda's President Museveni, too, was delighted, as the way was clear for him to attack the bases of two rebel groups.

 
Even more strikingly, the downfall of Mobutu threatened to redraw the century-old division between francophone and Anglophone Africa. With 40 million people, Mobutu's Zaire had been a jewel in la Francophonie, the network of French-speaking former colonies. For several years the first stages of a linguistic revolution had been filtering through Kinshasa as Zaireans realized they were as likely to do business with South Africa, the continent's powerhouse, as Belgium or France. Its currents even washed against the thick stone walls of the Lycee Moliere, one of Kinshasa's top schools. The lycee was the lodestar of French culture, where Zaireans were raised to become little Frenchmen or Belgians. But since the mid-Nineties, the headmaster explained with an air of resignation, English was becoming increasingly popular.

  With a frenzy bordering on paranoia, French officials saw Kabila's rebellion as a direct assault on the French-speaking world by the English-speaking governments of Uganda and Rwanda. In an entertaining throwback to the Anglo-French rivalry of the colonial era, the French and American embassies were barely on speaking terms. A French diplomat who had close links to the Elysee Palace spelled out to me in hushed tones how President Clinton and John Major were charting the rebels' every move. He was a colourful character who drove around Kinshasa in a sports car. You had to treat Mobutu 'like a woman', he insisted, and of course 'only the French' knew how.

  While far from planning Kabila's uprising, as Mobutuists claimed, America was delighted to see Mobutu fall. First, he was an embarrassing reminder of America's old African policies. Second, Washington made no secret in the Nineties of its disdain for France's neo-colonial African policies. French troops had intervened in francophone Africa more than twenty times since the Sixties, most controversially in 1994 when they set up a buffer zone in south-west Rwanda, enabling many of the Hutu extremists to escape. Third, America welcomed the commercial and political advantages which they looked set to enjoy following the departure of Mobutu. Even before Mobutu was ousted, the rebels awarded a Texas-based mining firm a multi-million dollar mining contract in recognition of the directors' buccaneering foresight in lending Kabila a private jet to ferry him around his newly won territories. Infuriated in part by the very French diplomat who briefed me in Kinshasa, Kabila promised to withdraw from the association of francophone countries.

  Coming barely two months after the death of Jacques Foe cart, the enigmatic architect of France's Africa policy from the early Sixties, the downfall of Mobutu signalled a crossroads for France. Foccart had acted as an intermediary between African heads of state and French presidents - he once boasted that he had had 3,000 one-on-one meetings with de Gaulle- and was particularly close to Mobutu. The departure of two giants from the old francophone stage enabled liberals in Paris to push for a less paternalist approach to Africa; in 1999 British and French ministers toured the continent together and even talked of sharing embassies.

  However, it soon became clear that France's loss was not to be America's, still less the Congo's, gain. By the end of Mobutu's rule his self-justification that he alone had kept together 200 tribes in one of the clumsiest creations of the colonial carve-up had long since lost its validity. Such was his corrosive influence that it was open to question whether the integrity of Zaire was worth keeping, and anyway Zaire was effectively functioning as several separate countries. But it did not take long for his catchphrase 'après moi le deluge' to return to haunt his people. Kabila had hardly arrived in Kinshasa before he was behaving like his predecessor. In a sequence sadly familiar from elsewhere in the continent Congo found it was easier to get rid of a Big Man than it was to end Big Man rule.

  Che Guevara, the Third World's revolutionary icon, briefly supported Kabila in the Sixties during a tour of Africa to foment the anti-colonial fight. Struck by his charisma Che backed him with a hundred soldiers. But he was soon disillusioned by Kabila's record of wining and whoring in Dar es Salaam.

  'Nothing leads me to believe he is the man of the hour,' he wrote in a memoir. 'He is too addicted to drink and women.(6)

  Sadly for the Congolese, old bush-fighters, it seemed, could not learn new tricks. When Kabila flew to Angola's capital, Luanda, before the last abortive round of negotiations with Mobutu, he went on a drinking binge and, according to one diplomat, had to be plucked from a bar by his Angolan backers to attend the talks.

  'Zaire is like a hooker,' Guillaume Ngefa, the head of a human rights organization, told me. 'If you don't have any money, you go with the first man who comes along.'

  *

  They had been waiting since dawn, huddled in cliques outside their headquarters seeking instructions from the new guard in town. In their shabby suits they looked like the tens of thousands of civil servants thronging ministries all over Kinshasa as they awaited their new masters. Their white-washed villa set back from the street had a pleasingly shambolic air. It could have been the arts ministry or a cultural centre. But under Mobutu no taxi would take you there, for it was there that SNIP enforced the dictator's will, sending out agents across his vast nation to intimidate his subjects.

  Now, however, it was their turn to tremble. Paul Kabongo, the security chief of the new order, was inside issuing instructions. Some of the agents were clearly embarrassed by my presence. One of their main responsibilities had been harassing the press, and they hid behind their wraparound sunglasses. But as the morning wore on, so they relaxed. Any unease at my presence vanished when Mr King, my old friend and adversary from the airport days, bounded up to me with a warm smile.

  'We are free. We were afraid our jobs were not secure. But they are okay. What we want more than anything now is to look after the security of our new country. Security should be strong. There should be all available means for that.'

  Albert Kimongo, a counter-espionage agent, butted in enthusiastically to outline his hopes for a new streamlined service. 'We deserve cars and a higher salary because they need us to make this place work. In the past most of SNIP's money went to people in Mobutu's tribe. It killed the service. We had no motivation. But now we will give it a go.'

  Intrigued, I followed them into their headquarters. M.

  Kabongo was announcing that SNIP was to be renamed the National Agency of Information, a suitably bland yet sinister name for a secret police, when I caught his eye. 'Some things remain a secret,' he yelled. 'Get out of here.' It was the third day of Kabila's government and the old secret policemen were back on the streets with redoubled energies.

  A few of Kabila's ministers took office genuinely believing the talk of a new era and determined to cleanse the taint of the past. They set up an 'anti-corruption centre' to eliminate graft. They even spruced up the airport - painting the walls, banning the protocols, and sweeping the floors.

  Within a week of Mobutu's flight, passengers were queuing at the airport check-in desk, unheard of in the anarchic old days. A stem official examined my papers. There was no sign of the protocols nor the chef. Nor was there a question of my proffering a 'cadeau'. The official handed me a receipt for my exit stamp - and wished me a bon voyage. But the fervour soon faded, as Kabila's talk of democracy and freedom proved as illusory as so many previous Congolese dreams, and his alliance fell apart. When he took over, there was speculation he would form a coalition with Etienne Tshisekedi, Mobutu's long-standing political rival. But within days 'Tshi Tshi' was enduring the same harassment he had faced in the old days. After a night in prison he was forced into internal exile. The 'Sphinx', as Tshisekedi was known, was a pompous and uninspiring figure, but he had a genuine following and could have assisted Kabila to fuse the old with the new. His treatment reinforced the impression that all that had changed was the presidential headgear - Kabila favoured a floppy cowboy hat.

  So jittery was Kabila's high command that when one of his generals moved into the villa where Thambwe had entertained me with Vivaldi and champagne, he dug up the flower beds in case of an ambush. He also excavated the swimming pool to look for buried gold - there was none. In such an atmosphere of paranoia and conspi
racy there was no chance of justice. Hundreds of suspected Mobutuists were shot dead or lynched in the first fortnight of Kabila's government.

  Even his sternest critics, however, were startled at the speed with which he managed to squander the international goodwill the Congo so desperately needed. As Kabila consolidated his position, he proved more interested in revisiting the old ideological battles of the Sixties than in forging new friendships. He seemed obsessed by the turn of events the last time he had been in Kinshasa in 1961, when America was on Mobutu's side and the CIA is thought to have approved the murder of his mentor, Lumumba, whose overtures to the Soviet Union had been rather too fulsome for the men from Langley. Within a year of taking power he was back in the bosom of la Francophonie, proving that French and Congolese diplomacy was as calculating as ever.

  Any remaining hopes that Kabila might be a positive influence on the region vanished when he refused to co-operate with the United Nations over their attempts to investigate the massacres of thousands of Rwandan Hutus who had been killed by his army on their march through the interior. The refugees included some of the organizers and perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, but many of the victims were innocent women and children. The UN was eventually allowed to send a commission of enquiry to Kinshasa, but its members were never given permission to move into the interior, and were left whiling away their days in frustration at the Intercontinental, in the footsteps of so many thwarted delegations in Mobutu's era. The more the West criticized Kabila, the more he dug in his heels and insisted the commission was a vestige of neo-colonialism.

  Unsurprisingly, African countries rallied to Kabila's defence, arguing it was hypocritical of the West to be hostile to Kabila after its long years of support for Mobutu. President Mandela himself spoke out for Kabila, partly for African solidarity and partly for reasons of trade. There was a wearying sense of déjà vu about his remarks. Africa has a long and ignoble tradition of turning a blind eye to the abuses of its fellow leaders - or at least its fellow black leaders. When a rebellion broke out against Kabila in 1998 - led by, among others, none other than Alexis Thambwe, the tennis-playing minister, who was once again proving his versatility- Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola sent soldiers, tanks and planes to protect him. Their forces drove back the rebels from the gates of Kinshasa, entrenching a partition between the east and the west and south which may in time become a fixture, further undermining the Organization of African Unity's insistence on the inviolability of frontiers. But there was no principle in the so-called southern African solidarity, only politics and money. Kabila had mortgaged his country (or at least its minerals) to the hilt before taking power. Angola had invested millions in Kabila's takeover and feared the Congolese rebels might succour UNITA. Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe saw the foreign adventure as a convenient distraction from his parlous domestic record. He also had a pressing financial interest in Kabila's survival as his nephew, Leo Mugabe, and several top Zimbabwean businessmen were engaged in lucrative contracts with Kabila's regime.