Congo (72 page)

“Je suis zaïrois!” a Mai-mai veteran told me proudly in December 2008, eleven years after his country had changed its name back to Congo. “At first we got along well with the Banyarwanda, but then they tried to eliminate the Hunde, the Tembo, and the Nyanga. I’m a Hunde. The Banyarwanda locked the Hunde up in their houses and burned them down.” The conflict, in essence, was about land. Rwanda and Kivu are Africa’s most densely inhabited agricultural regions. “It started in 1993. We became Mai-mai. To do that you had to belong to the Bantu race, you had to be highly patriotic and baptized with our special water. You received a ritual scar, traditional potions, and medicinal plants. Stealing and raping was forbidden. There was no raping back then. We adapted the rifles we usually used for bird hunting. We had no alternative. The Banyarwanda were foreigners who wanted to annex North Kivu as part of Rwanda.” Overcrowding, poverty, and an absentee state made for a deadly cocktail. In 1993 the tensions in North Kivu led to campaigns of ethnic cleansing that killed at least four thousand, by some accounts as many as twenty thousand, people.
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“Oh, I took part in at least forty battles myself.”
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In Goma I talked about this with Pierrot Bushala, a man who still looked back in amazement at the events of that day: “In the 1980s no one knew what ethnic group his classmates came from; that only started in the 1990s. My class at secondary school was
un mélange total
[a complete mix]. I had a Tutsi girlfriend at the time, and I didn’t even know that. But in the 1990s, when we wanted to get married, her parents wouldn’t allow it. I’m sure that ten years earlier they would have accepted me.” He was able to place his heartbreak within a historical context. “Look, when Belgium took over the mandate territories in 1918, the border with Rwanda became porous. The Belgians had exported thousands of Rwandan Hutus to the mines and the Tutsis moved spontaneously across the border. Under Mobutu those Tutsis had Zaïrian passports, but in the 1990s, tribalism grew. Suddenly people starting saying that the Tutsis were no longer loyal countrymen, because they supported their brothers’ struggle in Rwanda. ‘If you’re a Tutsi, then you’re a Rwandan,’ the Zaïrians said. That’s where things went wrong. I ended up marrying a Lega woman; her tribe originally comes from South Kivu.”
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In South Kivu, these Zaïrian Tutsis were increasingly referred to as Banyamulenge, the people of Mulenge, an ethnic moniker invented and applied to them by others. Ever since the nineteenth century, they had lived with their herds in the cold, misty highlands west of Lake Tanganyika, close to the town of Mulenge. With their height, their fine features, and their felt hats they confirmed the clichés of the Tutsi herder sauntering along behind his cows with his stick over his shoulder. And increasingly, they became the objects of abuse and hatred. They were like bats, a Congolese woman told me once, neither bird nor mouse, neither Rwandan nor Zaïrian, scary and slippery. And a bit dirty as well! Yes, another person chimed in, they earned lots of money with their cattle but the Banyamulenge had no culture. They bought the most expensive clothes, but all in bad taste. Their men wore women’s clothes. And their women used toilet pots to pound manioc. Ha ha! And the way they grimaced all the time! Was that because of their buck teeth? Or were they just cold?

Mobutu had tried to awaken national sentiment as an antidote to the tribal reflex; in times of scarcity, however, enmity was just around the corner. The Tutsis in Kivu (both the Banyarwanda in North Kivu and the Banyamulenge in South Kivu) in particular footed the bill for that. The racial hatred, in turn, caused them to behave increasingly as a group. Those reviled as Banyamulenge truly began feeling like Banyamulenge. They looked back on their history, recalled that they were indeed different from all the rest, that their roots lay in Rwanda, and that in fact, yes, now that you mention it, they had never been truly welcome in Zaïre. Groups form as soon as they are threatened. Ethnic identification became more important than national identification.
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Even the father of the nation had withdrawn to his native region and entrusted his safety to men of his own tribe. Mobutu, the advocate of unity, himself became a tribalist. Zaïre was once again transformed into a crazy quilt of tribes. Poverty led to aggression, hunger to atrocities.

No money, no foreign aid, and no functional army: Zaïre was crumbling and little would have been needed in 1994 to bring the dictatorship to its knees. But then, in Zaïre’s smallest neighbor, a humanitarian catastrophe took place that destabilized the entire region so badly that the international community once again came to see Mobutu as a beacon of stability, a wise elder, a bulwark amid the storm racing across Central Africa. That catastrophe was the Rwandan genocide, a foreign event that would impact the history of Zaïre like no other.

Like neighboring Burundi, Rwanda had become independent of Belgium in 1962. During the first democratic elections, the centuries-old ruling class, the Tutsis, a cattle-breeding minority, lost power. Ascendancy went to the far more numerous Hutus, a traditional farming people. The social and economic differences between the two groups were real enough, but the Belgian colonial regime had accentuated them and rendered them categorical. You were either a Hutu or a Tutsi. After independence, the new Hutu regime displayed great intolerance for its former masters. Many Tutsis fled with their herds to Burundi, Congo, and Uganda. From there, at the borders of their fatherland, they stared at the distant hills and vowed to return some day and seize power anew. In southern Uganda they banded together militarily in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and fought beside rebel leader Yoweri Museveni in his campaign to oust Milton Obote. Museveni became president of Uganda and the RPF learned for the first time how one went about conquering a country. That military experience would serve them well. Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda, became their military leader. Starting in 1990, the RPF began crossing the Rwandan border and initiated a civil war with the Hutu regime. An estimated twenty thousand people were killed in that war between 1990 and 1994, and 1.5 million civilians became displaced. The attacks created so much bad blood among the Hutu population that the hatred toward anything Tutsi grew even further, even toward those Tutsis who had remained in Rwanda and behaved as good citizens. “Cockroaches” is what people called them.

On April 6, 1994, when Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, all hell broke loose. Kagame’s RPF had to be behind the attack, the Hutus reasoned, and they began murdering Tutsi citizens on a massive scale. This was no battle fought by soldiers with firearms, but by civilians with machetes. Civilian militias had been trained beforehand by the Hutu regime and equipped with machetes. These militias often consisted of teenage boys weaned on racial hatred, the infamous Interahamwe. They set about the business of genocide, egged on by the broadcasts of hate-radio Mille Collines, which kept repeating that the graves were not yet full and that there were still cockroaches scuttling around. Within three months, eight hundred thousand to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. Meanwhile, from the north, Kagame’s RPF continued to press on toward Kigali, the capital.

The international community was not on the ground. At the start of the genocide, the Rwandan government army had murdered ten Belgian blue helmets in order to chase the United Nations out of the country and clear the way for ethnic cleansing. Reporters and foreign journalists fled the country’s violence. The eyes of the world in those weeks were turned much more on South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was elected president. Few people knew exactly what was going on and France’s President François Mitterand was no exception. He saw the Hutus as victims of the Tutsi invasion and sent French troops to Rwanda to help them. The French support was unconsciously prompted in part by the fact that the Hutus were Francophone while the Tutsis in Uganda spoke English. What Mitterand did not know was that he was in fact protecting the perpetrators of the genocide. Under the name Opération Turqoise, the French troops established a safe haven to which Hutus could flee in the southwest of the country, away from Kagame’s advancing RPF, away from the reprisals that were sure to follow.

The genocide was intended to make Rwanda Tutsi-free, but those same Tutsis were now coming in to conquer it from the neighboring countries. The RPF’s military might had been sorely underestimated. The French soldiers took in hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees and helped them across the border. Here it was not only a people fleeing, but also a regime: the government army, the country’s ordnance, the administrative apparatus, and even the state treasury left the country. Some 270,000 people fled to Burundi and 570,000 to Tanzania, but the lion’s share of the refugees—approximately 1.5 million—ended up in eastern Zaïre.
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Mobutu had put his airports at the disposal of the French offensive and granted permission to lodge the refugees in his country. Most of them arrived in North Kivu, in and around the city of Goma (850,000 refugees), and to a lesser extent at Bukavu in South Kivu (650,000).

Along with Pierrot Bushala, the man who had lost his Tutsi girlfriend, I drove in December 2008 to Mugunga, west of Goma, the biggest of the former Hutu camps. It was still being used as a refugee center; since 1994, calm has never returned to Kivu. In the 1990s, under the auspices of the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee organization, Bushala had been involved in trying to maintain hygiene in the camps. “Can you picture it? This whole area was full of refugees, and there was nothing at all,” he said as his jeep bounced through a sinister lunar landscape overrun with garish green vegetation. The earth’s surface in this place consisted of black lava from the imposing Nyiragongo volcano a little farther along, and suddenly 850,000 people had been dropped here. Bushala was responsible for the sanitary conditions in one of the camps. “At first the people relieved themselves wherever they could. But then the UNHCR and the Red Cross brought in tents, and quicklime to sprinkle around. It was only later that toilets were built, over a hole in the ground.” As we walked around Mugunga itself, I realized how grim a task it must have been to dig toilet holes in that volcanic rock. Pierrot looked out over the desolate landscape of clotted lava covered with little huts and tents. “We combated flies, mosquitoes, we walked around with spray guns, we had teams to empty the toilets, we collected garbage.” But it was to no avail. Cholera and dysentery broke out in the camps. At least forty thousand people died. Their bodies were piled along the road. The stench was unbearable. The clouds of flies were so thick that drivers could barely see through their windshields.

The misery that came after the genocide restored Mobutu’s international respectability. The French were grateful to him for his assistance and soon invited him to an international summit at Biarritz. The United Nations recognized his role in taking care of the refugees. When the camps were struck by epidemics, dozens of NGOs and international aid organizations were allowed to descend on the country. The outbreak of the highly contagious Ebola virus in Kikwit one year later lent Mobutu the aura of victim, rather than villain. Now that the world was taking a milder view, Prime Minister Kengo wa Dondo could easily go about delaying and sabotaging the election process. There was no rush.

But providing shelter for a million and a half refugees within one’s own territory was of course a high price to pay for rehabilitation, particularly in a region that was already overpopulated and where hatred toward Rwanda had been growing for years. Just as the people tried their luck with risky games of chance, Mobutu too was playing for high stakes with those camps. At first his gamble yielded some returns, but in the end it was to be his downfall.

O
N THAT SAME
S
ATURDAY IN
1996, Ruffin Luliba was playing soccer with the locals. A sunny day. The sound of children’s voices calling for a pass, the dull thud of soccer slippers against the ball, a few screaming spectators, the arbiter’s whistle. Ruffin was thirteen by then. After elementary school in Bukavu he had gone to the Marist Brother’s boarding school in Mugeri and begun studying at the minor seminary there. On that particular Saturday his team was playing in the semifinals, and one of the spectators was Déogratias Bugera, a man who worked as an architect in Goma but liked to spend his weekends in his native region. “When the match was over, Bugera said he would like to sponsor our team. He gave us sugarcane, bonbons, and cookies. If we won the finals that next week, he said, he would pay for everything: all the equipment, the jerseys, even new soccer shoes.” Ruffin could hardly believe his ears: new soccer shoes! “That next week, there he was. We really wanted to win, and we beat the opponents by 2–0. We were all allowed to go along in his Daihatsu to pick up the new uniforms. It was one of those pickups with nets over it. There were thirteen of us. The oldest was sixteen, the others were fourteen or fifteen. My roommate Roderick went too.” But the boys’ exultation quickly changed to confusion.

We drove off in the direction of Bukavu, but we didn’t stop there. We went on, all the way to the Rwandan border. We crossed at the bridge over the Ruzizi. There weren’t even any customs formalities, no guards, no immigration service, nothing. We drove on until we got to an airfield. Wait here, Déogratias said, and he left. We didn’t know exactly where we were, we were just schoolboys. It was already five thirty in the evening and it was getting dark. We were afraid the headmaster at the boarding school would punish us, and we started crying. At seven o’clock a big truck came by and we had [to] climb in. The drive took five hours. “What’s the headmaster going to say?” we asked each other. That was our biggest worry. Finally, we arrived at the military training camp at Gabiro. We didn’t get soccer shoes, but they gave us rubber boots, not leather boots like the ones at home. There were a lot of children at that camp, all of them kidnapped from Goma and Uvira. There were also a few Bunyamulenge, but they were there as volunteers. They cut off our hair right away. It was one o’clock in the morning, and as a sort of hazing we had to crawl through the mud. You have to rid yourselves of Mobutu, they screamed, you are the new liberators of your country.
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