Congo (69 page)

But on April 24, 1990, his mind was made up. Generals, magistrates, cabinet ministers, provincial governors, members of parliament, and foreign journalists were summoned to the whited conference grounds at Nsele, to what had been the Vatican of the MPR for the last quarter of a century. Standing behind an array of microphones, dressed in the black marshal’s uniform that Alfons Mertens had sewed for him, Mobutu spoke to the auditorium. He had heard the voice of the people; Zaïre was to be democratized. To everyone’s amazement, he announced the end of the single-party state. From now on, three parties would be allowed; room would be made for freedom of the press, free trade unions, and, within a year, free elections. “And what will happen with the chief in all of this?” Mobutu wondered aloud at the end of his speech. “The head of state stands above the political parties. He will be the umpire, even more, the highest court of appeal. I hereby announce that, as from today, I am withdrawing from the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, to allow a new chief to be chosen . . . .” Mobutu hesitated for a moment, stumbled over his words and looked helplessly into the hushed auditorium. Like a man grown old in the space of a single second, he lifted his thick-rimmed spectacles, dabbed at eyelids hazy with tears and spoke the words that have since become legendary: “
Comprenez mon émotion
, forgive me for being emotional.”

The footage was seen all over the country. Had they understood correctly? Was this how the Second Republic came to a definitive end? By means of a simple speech, diluted with a few crocodile tears? A speech as prosaic as the radio broadcast with which Mobutu had seized power in 1965? With no revolution or fighting in the streets? Young people raided their fathers’ closets, rummaged through the old clothes, looking for neckties. No one remembered how you tied one, but who cared? This was the emblem of freedom! Girls put on their brothers’ oversized dungarees and went out on the street, giggling. This was one revolution that required no throwing of stones or chanting of slogans. “I remember it clearly.” Zizi said, thinking back on the most hopeful day of his life. “That night the streets of Kinshasa were filled with badly tied neckties.”

CHAPTER 11

THE DEATH THROES

Democratic Opposition and Military Confrontation

1990–1997

R
ÉGINE AND
R
UFFIN BOTH LIVED IN
B
UKAVU, THAT LOVELY
town on Lake Kivu along the Rwandan border—but that was all they had in common. When Mobutu announced the end of the single-party state, Régine was thirty-five and Ruffin was seven. Régine was headmistress at a Catholic girls’ school, Ruffin was just learning to read at a Catholic boys’ school across town. Régine had organized the teachers’ sit-in a few years before. When she heard that the MPR had lost its primacy, all she could do was dance. Ruffin was too young to understand the historical portent of the turnaround. He played soccer with his friends and began to dream of life as a priest. Yet both of them would become involved in the dictator’s fall, in totally different ways and at totally different moments, Régine in 1992, Ruffin in 1997. When it came to falling, Mobutu took his own sweet time.

Régine Mutijima thought it might all go very quickly. “We really wanted Mobutu to step down after the elections and go on living honorably inside the country.”
¹
But in the period 1990–97, Mobutu kept hold of power with a stubbornness and cunning no one had thought possible. These were the death throes of a dictator taking his country along with him in his fall.

In 1905, when Leopold II could no longer deny the atrocities taking place in the Free State, he tarried for three years before turning over his conquered land to the Belgian state. Mobutu’s attitude after 1990 was no different. The results of the public sittings caused him at first to slacken the reins, only to tighten them again afterward. There was, as far as he was concerned, no big hurry with those elections. He had applied his creativity in 1970, 1977, and 1984 to get himself elected, but knew that that trick would no longer work in 1991. The democratic genie was out of the bottle. Still, he succeeded in remaining in power for another seven years, this time without any elections.

Mutijima knew all too well that Mobutu owed his power to two things: money and violence. Money from abroad, violence at home. But how long could he keep that up, now that the Cold War was over? On May 12 and 13, 1990, a few weeks after his emotional speech, Mobutu ordered the student protests in Lubumbashi crushed by military force, for the students were once again the first to take to the streets. For the West, that was the last straw. Reports spoke of hundreds of casualties, but the exact number has never been stated (there were perhaps only three, Mutijima heard later). Belgium suspended all development aid, France froze all relations, America no longer had any need of Mobutu. In the early 1990s, his former foreign allies were glad to see the back of him. Even the IMF expelled Zaïre as a voting member.

What remained was: violence. But the army was unreliable and, now that more and more bans were being lifted, the intelligence services had lost their grip on the people. The official media, too, had stopped monitoring the flow of information. Government newspapers with “authentic” titles like
Elima
and
Salongo
were overtaken by new periodicals with French names like
L’Opinion
,
Le Phare
, and above all
Le Potentiel
. Those periodicals did not make it all the way to Mutijima in Bukavu, but they were very important in the capital. At the newsstands along Boulevard Lumumba there arose the phenomenon of the
parliamentaires debout
(the standing members of parliament), groups of the unemployed who read the front pages of the newspapers that were hung up on display and discussed them all day long. A public space, peopled with critical citizens. The founder of
Le Potentiel
was Modeste Mutinga: “We were completely independent. We didn’t even maintain ties with other opposition movements, like the UDPS or the Church. I bought a second-hand printing press in Strasbourg. It wasn’t until later, after that period of détente in the early nineties, that things got worse again. The DSP burned our presses and the presses at other papers too. Everything was demolished.”
²

Besides the newspapers, democratization expressed itself in other ways. In between the powers-that-be and the masses, there arose a full-blown
société civile
(civil society). Hundreds of new associations were set up: for rural women, for taxi drivers, for altar boys . . . associations for agrarian development, for solidarity between laypeople, for health care . . . even associations for the chairmen of associations.
³
Trade union organizations shot up like mushrooms: in 1991 there was only one state-aligned union; by 1991 there were 112.
⁴
And, just like in the late 1950s, there was an explosion of political parties. Mobutu had advocated a three-party system at first, but soon had to allow a full multiparty system. In no time, the all-powerful MPR had to countenance some three hundred rivals large and small. Some of them had no more than one member. News of the upcoming abdication caused some people to dream of a bid for power. Mobutu watched ruefully: the proliferation of parties confirmed his fears of disintegration and sectarianism. “But if you can’t beat them, join them” he must have thought; in an attempt to weaken the power of the opposition, he paid some loyal followers to set up parties that advanced his own views. “Alimony parties” those were referred to mockingly, or “taxi parties,” because their members could all fit in one taxi cab. Was this the
mulitpartisme
Mobutu had promised? It looked more like
multimobutisme
!
⁵

In the end, the restless political field crystallized around two poles, with Étienne Tshisekedi’s UDPS—the so-called
Union Sacrée de l’Opposition
(Holy Alliance of the Opposition)—on one side, and the MPR and Mobutu loyalists—the
mouvance présidentielle
—on the other. Between them one had the mugwumps. The church sympathized with the opposition, but was often prepared to compromise. Mutijima did not feel called to serve. “I had been a member of the UDPS for a while, when it was still clandestine, but I didn’t feel at home in politics. For me, the most important thing in 1990 was the birth of the
société civile
.”

The opposition gained a major victory when Mobutu agreed to the organization of a national conference. With that, he hoped to cut a good figure abroad and regain Western support. The plan was to bring together representatives to discuss the past and set out tentative lines for the future, analogous to a similar conference in Benin that had recently reformed that country in ten days’ time. The Kinshasa conference was intended to give form to the shift from the Second to the Third Republic; today it is best known by the name given it later, the Sovereign National Conference. The participants were to include not only politicians and dignitaries, but also the rank and file, representatives of the associations and the churches. The meeting would be held in the capital, but with delegations from all the provinces. Everything was to be broadcast live on radio and TV, a high mass of town-hall democracy.

In distant Bukavu, Mutijima donned her battle dress: “The other women teachers in Bukavu said: ‘You have to go to Kin!’ So I ended up in the South Kivu delegation. All the tribes were represented, we didn’t want to think along ethnic lines. At the Sovereign National Conference we were going to denounce everything. We were going to depose Mobutu and demand his head on a platter.”

Mutijima went to the capital as one of the twenty-eight hundred delegates, no more than two hundred of whom were women. “There were too few women, not even 10 percent. A lot of women were afraid to express themselves. They were badly informed about how such a meeting worked and about the importance of lobbying.” But she herself would prove her mettle. The Sovereign National Conference started on August 7, 1991, and was intended to last three months. The opening session was held in the Palais du Peuple, the national house of parliament. That colossal structure, thrown up by the Chinese, was only a few hundred yards from the new soccer stadium. In the parking lot, Citoyen Jacques Tshimbombo Mukuna, one of the big cheeses in the regime, stood passing out banknotes from a cardboard box to anyone interested in starting a little, off-the-cuff political party. The money was free, all you had to do was stick up for Mobutu . . . .
⁶
Tshimbombo was the man who once, on the president’s behalf, had presented the members of the national women’s basketball team with twenty-two Mercedes sedans for winning the Africa Cup, and kept eleven of them for himself . . . .
⁷
Now that the people saw him standing there with his box of money, they jokingly began referring to him as the “guardian of the national treasury.” Mobutu was clearly out to thwart the purposes of the conference, by hook or by crook.

“He kept trying to compromise us by offering us hotel rooms, giving us presents or offering to let us stay at the Nsele conference grounds,” Mutijima said, “but we refused. The South Kivu delegation was very militant. We even spent two nights sleeping on the ground in front of the doors of the house of parliament! People brought us food. It was the first time in my life that I tasted manioc bread. And in Kinshasa you had these big, fat mosquitoes. We didn’t have any of that in the mountains of South Kivu.”

Mobutu was prepared, if need be, to agree to an extensive transitional government with a certain amount of room for dissenting votes. A government of national unity with great power for the opposition, however, was too much for his taste. He had stipulated that he would appoint the conference’s chairman himself and entrusted the task to an old supporter, a man whose
nom kilométrique
(mile-long name) alone showed how fanatically “authentic” he was: Kalonji Mutambai wa Pasteur Kabongo. The old man’s name still makes Mutijima sigh in despair: “He was a complete marionette. He was hard of hearing and didn’t even understand what we said! “Pasteur wa Farceur” was what we called him, the Honorable Joker. I remember thinking: did we come two thousand kilometers to let ourselves be jerked around? We told each other: We need to silence this man! But how? Every morning we had to walk past the police guards and be frisked. We started smuggling in whistles, those little plastic ones. I had five of them tucked away in my shoes and in my braids. Every time the chairman took the floor, we started whistling until he stopped.”

The first weeks of the conference went agonizingly slowly, with endless quibbling over procedural questions and interminable haggling over who was to take part in the committees. Mobutu, who followed it all from a distance, must have relished the bickering. A failed conference, after all, would serve him well. But there was growing unrest outside the walls of the Palais du Peuple. On September 23 the soldiers at the paratroopers’ center at Ndjili staged a mutiny. They went to the nearby airport and shut down the control tower. From there they cut a swath to the center of town, plundering department stores, shops, gas stations, and even private homes along the way. Everything worth anything was up for grabs: the mutineers dragged away television sets, refrigerators, and photocopy machines; entire warehouses were pillaged, trading companies sacked. With the desperation of the hungry and the poor, the people joined in. It was a great rush, a party, the moment for the Big Snatch. At last the people could do what their leaders had been doing for a quarter of a century! A delirium, the reversal of all values. Forbidden and fantastic! The upheaval spread to other cities, and the plundering went on for days. The Belgian and French armies intervened to free their own nationals. Some 30 to 40 percent of all the urban businesses were destroyed, 70 percent of the small retailers were ruined. Some 117 people were killed and some 1,500 injured.
⁸