Congo (70 page)

And Mobutu? He didn’t react. He simply let his troops go about their business. Many suspected that he had provoked the mutiny himself in an attempt to scuttle the Sovereign National Conference. Even his loyal press officer Kibambi Shintwa, when we spoke later on the balcony of his little apartment, said he suspected the president of opportunism. “Mobutu wanted to break the country. Maliciously. His pride was deeply wounded by Tshisekedi’s popularity, and he wanted revenge. It’s like someone with a nice cell phone.” He held up his own phone by way of illustration. “The kind of cell phone that other people would like to have, but can no longer afford. So what do you do then?” He lowered the hand holding the phone until it was beside his chair. “You drop it, so it breaks and no one else can have it either. That’s what Mobutu did. When the Sovereign National Conference started, he moved out to Gbadolite, permanently. He knew that his people despised him. At three in the morning the soldiers sacked the airport and he didn’t do a thing to stop them. It was really a case of:
après moi le déluge
. He saw the pillaging as the people’s just deserts. I was very disappointed when he ruined the country like that. For the first time, I was more afraid of being killed by the people than by Mobutu.”
⁹

Once the ransacking stopped, the conference got a new chairman: this time by popular vote. Laurent Monsengwo, the popular archbishop of Kinshasa and chairman of the national synod, was chosen without delay to replace Pasteur wa Farceur. Monseigneur Monsengwo: the very name prompted great expectations. With his purple vestment and moral authority, he seemed poised to become the Desmond Tutu of Zaïre. The opposition liked him: the Zaïrian synod of bishops had often expressed sharp criticism of the Mobutu regime. Under Cardinal Joseph-Albert Malula the church had evolved into the major counterforce in the Second Republic. When the new civil society awakened, many organizations, even the more secular among them, drew inspiration from the grassroots groups and liberation theology of Latin America.
¹⁰
Monsengwo was perhaps not the most radically progressive of Catholic clerics, but the church itself enjoyed credibility among the opposition (which referred to itself—not at all coincidentally—as
sacrée
). There was no doubt about it in Mutijima’s mind: “Monsengwo was our candidate, but he even received votes from a few Mobutu supporters!”

Mobutu was not pleased. His relationship with the church had always been ambivalent: he had fought and feared it for almost twenty years. On the eve of the pope’s visit in 1980, he had quickly arranged a marriage in the church with his mistress, Bobi Ladawa. He built a cathedral at Gbadolite—he, the man who had once tried to outlaw the liturgy and liked to surround himself with West African miracle workers and soothsayers. With Monsengwo at the head of the conference, the time had come to watch his step. Having surrendered the power to choose the chairman of the national conference, he would now make sure he decided about that other central position in the transitional government: the prime minister. Zaïre had eight different prime ministers between 1990 and 1997, seven of whom were given a leg up by Mobutu himself. The longest term of office had been three years, the shortest three weeks. The latter had been his archenemy, Tshisekedi. In October 1991, after the pillaging was over, Mobutu appointed him to chair the cabinet. Had the uprisings forced the Steersman to acknowledge that he could no longer get around Tshisekedi? Or was it a cunning move to discredit him with his own following? The standing members of parliament along Boulevard Lumumba chattered about it for days, but three weeks later the prime ministership was over. Mobutu immediately replaced Tshisekedi with Bernardin Mungul-Diaka, another of his old enemies. He remained in the saddle for one month. Then it was Nguza Karl I Bond’s turn; yet another dissident from the distant past.
Le vagabondage politique
(political merry-go-round) was once again running at full speed, and meanwhile nothing was happening. In January 1992 Mobutu declared that the Sovereign National Conference had come to an end. The game had lasted long enough in his eyes, and to his relief nothing had been achieved. This reef too had been skirted and he had kept his firm grip on the wheel of state.

“The delegates had their trips home paid for them,” Mutijima said, “but we couldn’t go home empty-handed. The people of my province demanded results. Those elections had to be held. The government finally withdrew our travel allowance, but we stayed in Kinshasa, thanks to the people’s support.” The Congolese were not about to relinquish the hope for a change.

A
ND THEN IT WAS
F
EBRUARY
16, 1992, a day as important in Congolese history as January 4, 1959, when the riots broke out in Léopoldville. Here too, the immediate cause was a banned demonstration and here too that led to large-scale protests in Kinshasa and a bloodbath. The churches wanted to protest against the closing down of the conference, but the government refused permission. The charismatic priest José Mpundu, a cleric who stood closer to the masses than to the hierarchy of the church, was directly involved in the organization of the protests. I spoke to him in his plainly furnished house just outside the old soccer stadium. He was wearing short pants—a rarity among Congolese men—and—even rarer—he addressed me right away with the familiar
tu
.

The bishops had already called for the conference to be reopened. The priests had mentioned that during mass on Sunday. A number of laypeople said: well then, let’s do something about it. I went along with their initiative and attended their preparatory meetings, where I talked about nonviolence. Within the bishops’ conference, you see, I was secretary of the commission for justice and peace. But Cardinal [Frédéric] Etsou, the new archbishop, wouldn’t give permission for the march and Monseigneur Monsengwo felt that bishops should talk, not act . . . . Anyway, we mapped out the routes and decided that the banners would say: “Unconditional reopening of the Sovereign National Conference.” Later I was kicked out of the bishops’ conference for that.

The march began on Sunday, February 16, after the nine o’clock mass. Starting in Kinshasa’s more than one hundred parishes, people left their churches and converged along the broken boulevards and avenues of the capital. They were simple believers, not diehard dissidents or dyed-in-the-wool politicians, merely schoolchildren, students, young parents, poor people, people who felt supported by the common clergy, like the nonconformist Father José. They waved fronds and sang songs. The Protestants, the Kimbanguists, and Muslims took part too. Similar marches were held in Matadi, Kikwit, Idiofa, Kananga, Mbuji-Mayi, Kisangani, Goma, and Bukavu. More than a million people took to the streets, it was the biggest mass meeting in the country’s history. People referred to it as the March of Hope.

“I was on my way from Limete to Pont Kasavubu,” Mpundu told me, “but when we got to Saint-Raphaël we encountered a battalion of heavily armed soldiers. I was up in front. We had agreed beforehand: if anything happens, we all sit on the ground. Sitting beside me was an old woman, looking in disbelief at those soldiers who were maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. One of them looked her right in the eye, and she said: ‘
Mwana na nga, est-ce que omelaki mabele ya mama te?’
[My son, didn’t you ever drink at your mother’s breast?] The boy didn’t know which way to look. That’s the power of nonviolence, of the truth.” For a moment Congo resembled the India of Mahatma Gandhi. “Then they dispersed us with tear gas. We ran away, but regrouped again a little farther along. We marched on, and we kept singing. At Kingabwa we ran into bodyguards, I think they belonged to Prime Minister Nguza. They threatened to kill us. ‘Don’t sing, just march,’ they shouted. But I said: ‘If we keep marching, they’ll shoot at us.’ A burly fellow with a revolver tried to grab me, but the people held on. The buttons on my cassock popped off. My chain broke. One of the parishioners picked it up. White priests were beaten up too.”
¹¹

The March of Hope ended in a bloodbath. At least thirty-five civilians lost their lives that day.
¹²
The guardsmen shot at anyone they saw, even from very close range, even at children. They not only used tear gas to disperse the crowds, but also a highly inflammable product rarely used outside military operations: napalm. During one of my many conversations with Zizi Kabongo, at a picnic table outside the canteen at the public broadcasting company, he said: “After that march, Mobutu was afraid he would be excommunicated. The Sovereign National Conference was allowed to reopen, and he withdrew even more to Gbadolite. The conference became much more assertive. The fear was gone. ‘Did you really think you could kill us all?’ people said out loud. During the march, my wife saw bodies lying around. I was burned too.” He shifted his legs from under the table and rolled up his pants legs. I had known him for a few years already, but he had never talked about this or shown it to me. On his shins I saw big, pink spots, as though he were a white man wearing camouflage. A long silence descended. “Napalm,” he said at last.
¹³

T
HE CONFERENCE RESUMED IN
A
PRIL
1992 and this time it made a great deal of progress. It became truly sovereign: its decisions were no longer lukewarm recommendations, but expressions of popular will with the force of law. With the conference as the supreme state body, the process of democratization accelerated decisively. After the plenary sessions the delegates split up into twenty-three committees and a hundred subcommittees, spread around the city. Amazing work was done in many of those groups. Inventory was taken of existing problems and realistic alternatives were offered. Régine Mutijima ended up in the “Woman, child, and family” committee. “I was the acting secretary. We worked around the clock. Afterward, all the reports were read aloud during the plenary session, so they could be amended and ratified. The negotiations that finally led to consensus were a formidable lesson in democracy. The Mobutu supporters discussed openly with the opposition. We wanted to bring the country’s true history to the surface and give a voice to the powerless.”

The Sovereign National Conference voted on a provisional constitution; its most notable clause read that it was not the president who appointed the prime minister, but the conference itself. That constituted such a radical break with the past that the symbols of state had to change as well: Zaïre was to once again be called Congo and the country’s motto and national anthem would revert to those used before 1965.

And then something peculiar happened: Monsengwo left the conference and went to negotiate with Mobutu on his own. That step ran completely counter to all agreements concerning the conference’s sovereignty.
¹⁴
Mobutu told the prelate in no uncertain terms that the country would continue to be called Zaïre; a name change was completely unacceptable to him. But he also intimated that he might settle for a more ceremonial presidency. Mutijima still has mixed feelings about that move: “I thought it was outrageous of Monsengwo to go off to Gbadolite, but I think he did it to keep more people from being killed.” The men of the DSP, Mobutu’s private army, were still well-armed; a civil war could have broken out. “Monsengwo was for gradual change. He didn’t want there to be winners or losers, because he feared that the latter would ultimately take revenge. Tshisekedi, on the other hand, wanted a fast victory, even at the risk of a serious conflict. Monsengwo chose for the gentle landing. He did his best to operate tactically in a complex situation.”

Zaïre remained Zaïre, but a new prime minister was elected directly for the first time in thirty years. On August 15, 1992, the Sovereign National Conference appointed Tshisekedi prime minister of the transitional government with 71 percent of the votes; his opponent, Thomas Kanza, received only 27 percent. Change did not come without a struggle, the offices of the UDPS had been destroyed only a few days earlier, but Étienne Tshisekedi, the man who had written that daring open letter to Mobutu a decade earlier, now became the first democratically elected prime minister since Moïse Tshombe in 1965.

Things went quickly after that. A transitional government was formed, and a transitional parliament: of the 2,800 delegates, 453 were to take part afterward in the Supreme Council of the Republic. A new constitution was drafted, based largely on the 1964 Luluabourg federal constitution, the only one Congo had ever known that was passed by referendum. An agenda was also established for the coming elections.

The democratic momentum seemed unstoppable. But Tshisekedi’s fresh new government excelled in neither vision nor strategy.
¹⁵
The prime minister made no attempt to gain control over the government apparatus’s most essential instruments, the intelligence services and the army. The cabinet ministers wasted their time with visitors and public ceremony. Governing a nation took more than just sitting around in leather armchairs and talking for hours, but that was something these people, who had even less experience with democratic practice than the politicians of the First Republic, did not know. Tshisekedi himself seemed to have come down with Patrice Lumumba’s old ailment: charismatic as long as he remained in the opposition, capricious and unpredictable as soon as he came to power. Becoming prime minister seemed more important to him than providing leadership for Congo.
¹⁶

The Sovereign National Conference was drawing to an end, but the reports from the two committees dealing with the most delicate issues still had to be read aloud: the committee on “unlawfully procured goods” (read: theft) and the committee dealing with the political killings. “Monsengwo wanted to hold those sessions behind closed doors,” Mutijima told me. “Mobutu sent tanks to the houses of parliament and had the broadcasts of the conference proceedings stopped.” The damning report on government corruption was read only in part; the worse of the two reports, about human rights violations, was not read at all. A few hundred printed copies of the report made the rounds, but missed any effect. “There were two other women with me in the South Kivu delegation. Neither of them could read or write,” Mutijima said. In a country where more than two generations had done without proper education and where the spoken word had more authority than the printed one, the lack of those moments of public disclosure were more than symbolic.