Congo (73 page)

Young Ruffin’s testimony is very important, not only because it describes the fate of what was then a relatively new phenomenon, the child soldier under duress, but also because it shows how Rwanda was preparing to invade Zaïre. The Tutsi regime that came to power in Kigali after the genocide was extremely wary of those 1.5 million Hutu refugees in Zaïre. Contrary to international directives, they were not a few dozen kilometers from the border, but bunched up almost right against it. In those camps, the recently routed Hutu regime was busy regrouping. They had money and weapons and were determined to retake Rwanda. Just as the Tutsis in exile had awaited their chance in Uganda from 1962 to 1994, the Hutus in eastern Zaïre were now waiting their turn. Most of the refugees, some 85 to 90 percent, however, did not belong to the national army in exile, had not taken part in the genocide, and had never belonged to Interahamwe.
⁴⁰
They were innocent civilians who simply wanted to go home again, but who feared for a genocidal countercampaign.

An invasion was being planned in the refugee camps. The international community was aware of the problem, but did not seem inclined to do much. After the debacle in Somalia, America had no desire to once again see the corpses of GIs dragged through the dust. Belgium did not feel like losing another ten paratroopers. And UN Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali could not round up enough support to deploy an international force. Any international action in Zaïre, in any case, would be seen as support for Mobutu and no one wanted to go that far. And so Kagame decided to take things into his own hands: his Rwandan Patriotic Front, by then redubbed the Rwandan Patriotic Army, the new government forces, would just have to neutralize those camps itself. His old friend Museveni, president of Uganda, promised his support.

Raiding the camps, however, meant raiding a sovereign country, an act of aggression against a foreign power. Kagame therefore went looking for a stalking horse for his initiative, and found one among the frustrated Tutsis in Zaïre. Humiliated for years by the “real” Zaïrians, they were now being bowled over as well by 1.5 million Rwandan Hutus. Déogratias Bugera, the soccer fan who had kidnapped Ruffin and his teammates, was a Tutsi from North Kivu and the leader of the Alliance Démocratique des Peuples (ADP). Along the same lines, there was also Anselme Masasu Nindaga, a Tutsi from South Kivu who was politically active in Bukavu and led the Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour la Libération du Zaïre (MRLZ). But there were also older nationalists, like André Kisase Ngandu, a Tetela who harked back to the Lumumbist tradition. And then there was Laurent-Desiré Kabila, no Tutsi either but a Luba from Katanga, the man who had kept the area between Fizi and Baraka out of Mobutu’s hands ever since 1964 and made such a lamentable impression on Che Guevara. And if Kabila’s “rebellion” had been an utter mess in 1964, by 1996 it was showing little improvement. Kabila lived semipermanently in Tanzania and earned a living by smuggling a little gold, doing a little gunrunning, and organizing the occasional kidnapping: the mixed farming of African crime, in other words.

In October 1996, at Kagame’s instigation, these four men would set up the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération (AFDL). Kabila was their spokesman and, as the eldest of the four, received the honorable term of address
Mzee
, Swahili for
elder
. Bugera was the alliance’s deputy, Kisase its military commander.

Ruffin Luliba saw it all “live”:

During our training, we were introduced to the men who later set up the AFDL. We already knew Bugera. But Kisase Ngandu, Masasu, and Mzee came to visit too. Mzee even gave us two cows, which meant we had our first good meal in a long time! Normally we ate beans and corn from our mess tin. There were two battalions in the camp, and our training lasted six months. Three months of physical training for the battlefield and espionage, two months of ideological training to impress upon us the war’s objective. And one month of concrete preparations. The first part was especially hard. Some of us died. Roderick, my roommate at the minor seminary, succumbed to dysentery. We buried him in a blanket, there weren’t any coffins. At the end of our training we were given our real uniforms, and they told us again that we were “the new liberators” of our country.

It was clear from the start that Rwanda hoped not only to neutralize the camps, but to actually push on all the way to the capital, two thousand kilometers (about 1,250 miles) to the west. Kagame demanded that Mobutu step down, because he had given the
génocidaires
shelter and protection. Minuscule Rwanda would force Zaïre, the giant of Central Africa, to its knees, and the AFDL had to make it look like a domestic uprising. This was to be Kagame’s third regime change in a Central African country: after Uganda and Rwanda, it was now Zaïre’s turn.

At the head of the invasionary force was the fresh-faced but dauntless Rwandan officer James Kabarebe, one of Kagame’s most trusted men. He was only twenty-seven: a boy with a baby face, but also with great charisma and a flexible conscience. The invading army was already known for youthfulness, because it made use for the first time of
kadogos
(child soldiers) from Zaïre. They were recognizable by their baggy uniforms and particularly by their black rubber boots, the true earmark of Rwandan involvement. Kalashnikovs seemed too big to fit in their hands, but the way they clutched the characteristic curved clip showed more venom than reluctance.

Ruffin remembered the first phase:

James Kabarebe said: I need ten
kadogos
from Bukavu, ten from Uvira and ten from Goma. I reported to him and we had disguise ourselves as street children and go in and spy. James told me: “I’m entrusting this mission to you. Go and watch the FAZ [Forces Armées Zaïroises, Mobutu’s government forces]. See what kind of guns they have. See whether they have reinforcements.” He gave me a Motorola to keep in touch with him. I crossed the border wearing rags and went to look at their camp in Bukavu. When I got there, the soldiers were busy plundering. One of them shouted to me to come and help him carry the booty! I hid the Motorola. It was complete chaos. Shots were being fired. Then I went back to Rwanda to tell James what I had seen. I didn’t look up my family while I was in Bukavu. When you’re in the army, you forget your family. The army was my family.

The FAZ, plundering? Kabarebe was delighted to hear that. Zaïre, he decided, was now a complete shambles. And indeed: in early October, when the deputy governor of South Kivu announced that he would start the next day with the ethnic cleansing of the Banyamulenge, the threatened group went on a rampage. That was the starting shot for the hostilities. Rwanda commenced the invasion. A few days later, the AFDL came to the fore as rebel movement. Uvira was taken on October 28, 1996, Bukavu two days later. One of the first casualties was Christophe Munzihirwa, the archbishop who had sharply criticized the Rwandan machinations. Ruffin and his buddies fought in the front lines. “There were Rwandans, Ugandans, and even Eritreans with us. We smoked big six-inch joints, that gave us the courage to be patriots.” Mobutu’s soldiers turned and ran right away, but the heaviest resistance came from the Mai-mai, the popular militias that hated all things Rwandan.

My first fight was with the Mai-mai who were guarding the offices of the RTNC, the public broadcaster. I had a short Kalashnikov. That took some getting used to. I’m left-handed, so I kept burning myself; the cartridges ejected on the right side of the gun, right against my stomach. A Mai-mai came running up to me with his red kerchief and his fetishes. He didn’t have any ammunition. I put a bullet through his head. I was terribly upset. I had never killed anyone before and I felt terrible. Let me go back to the third section, I begged the officers. I didn’t want to fight up in the first section anymore. You have no choice, they told me, and they gave me a hundred lashes.

After the fall of Uvira and Bukavu, Goma followed on October 31, 1996. Within only a few days the AFDL had taken the three most important cities in eastern Zaïre, and by no accident the three cities with the biggest refugee camps. The AFDL wanted to press on to Kinshasa as quickly as possible, but neutralizing the camps was crucial for the Rwandans. Ruffin clearly felt the tensions within the mixed invasionary forces: “Whenever we got to a refugee camp, the Rwandan Tutsis would do all the work. Hundreds, thousands of dead people . . . Fathers, mothers, women . . . The Hutus are serpents, they said. At the Kashusha camp, close to Bukavu, I went into a tent where they had just killed a grandmother and a pregnant woman. The only one alive was a child. A toddler. I was supposed to kill him, but I couldn’t. He petted my gun. I let him go, sent him along with a few Hutus who were running away.”

Around Goma, where the five largest refugee camps were located, the killing was particularly remorseless. Rwanda riddled the hovels with mortar and machine-gun fire, causing many of the Hutus there to flee in a panic back to their homeland. Within a few days, almost four hundred thousand refugees, a huge sea of humanity, fled east across the border.
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In Rwanda a new traffic sign was posted: “
Ralentir: refugiés
” (Slow: refugees crossing).
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But a great many Hutus, especially the more militarized among them, moved farther west into the jungles. By the time the United Nations had put together an intervention team to protect the refugees, the camps were empty. The ensuing struggle between the Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis, the sequel to the genocide, was to take place on Zaïrian soil.

At the age of fourteen, Ruffin learned about the horrors of war from close by. His battalion moved south, by way of Uvira, along Lake Tanganyika to Katanga. At Bendera, a town in north Katanga, he experienced the grimmest fighting. He and his comrades were pinned down by heavy shelling. “A firefight is like a drum set. Bombs and bazookas sound like the tom-toms and the floor tom. The bursts from our Kalashnikovs are like ruffles on a snare drum. The bass drum is represented by an 80-mm mortar. And the cymbals, those are our shrieks, because we were always screaming. We made ghostly sounds to drive the enemy mad, some in a low voice, others shrilling. We shouted their names and said that we would find them.” War, madness, hysteria. Soccer, but then without the ball. Only the screaming. And with guns.

The screaming didn’t help. Ruffin and three other soldiers were taken prisoner by Rwandan Hutus. He was terrified. “The Hutus were notorious for killing people with the machete, the way they had during the genocide. They cut off your arms or pounded in your skull, so they could see your brains. That was typical of them.” He was the youngest of the four prisoners, and that proved to be his salvation. One by one, the others had to lay their arms on the chopping block.

The Hutus had new machetes, they glistened: they were like mirrors. My friend looked the other way when they raised the machete. He screamed. I saw his hand, his hand that was still moving, even though it was already lying on the ground. Then they made him suffer terribly. They kept on chopping, they ran their blades through his body, until he was dead. And then they did the same to the second one, and the third. My friends were slaughtered one by one and I watched. When it was my turn, the commander told me that his name was Mungara and that he had been President Habyarimana’s bodyguard before the president was murdered. He was going to spare me and started writing a letter in Kinyarwanda. “Here, take this to Kabarebe.” They tore off my clothes and sent me away in my underwear. I came down out of the hills and returned to our position. That was the hardest moment of my life, I’ll never forget it. When I finally got there, I handed the letter to James Kabarebe. He read it and said: “
Dieu le veut
. It is God’s will. Mungara has murdered the whole family, but I’m going to keep you as my bodyguard.”

Ruffin, a Zaïrian boy who until recently had known nothing about politics and found the offside rule already difficult enough to comprehend, had almost been killed in a conflict between Rwanda Hutus and Tutsis. “I didn’t have to go into battle anymore. James loved me, he let me carry his duffle bag. ‘Ruffin, bring me my bag!’ he would shout to me. In the days that followed, I saw him studying the map of Congo. He had never been here before either. Kabarebe had no real education, but he was very logical and calm, he could analyze and listen well. He had lost his family and he said to me: ‘You have to love your country,
kadogo
.’” And that was how Ruffin, the boy who liked soccer and wanted to become a priest, became bodyguard to the de facto commander of the invading force that would dethrone Mobutu.

T
HE
AFDL
USED A PINCER MOVEMENT
to conquer Zaïre. Ruffin was with the southerly arm that moved toward Lubumbashi; the northern pincer headed for Kinshasa, the city on the river. After three decades of dictatorship, many tens of thousands of civilians were now overrun by war as well. A virtual exodus began. Many of the inhabitants of Kivu tried to get out, but the last planes were chock full and anyone with a jeep had to hand it over to the plundering soldiers of the FAZ. Thousands of them then decided to travel to Kisangani on foot. It was a seven-hundred-kilometer (435-mile) journey through the jungle, the first part of which went by way of Kahuzi-Biega, a mountainous natural park where in better times tourists had come to see the gorillas. Dr. Soki, a Bukavu physician, walked away after his house was destroyed by a mortar shell.
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Sekombi Katondolo, an artist from Goma, left town with a few friends in search of safety.
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Émilie Efinda, a relatively prosperous female pharmacist from Bukavu, started the journey in high heels.
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It was an arduous trip through the jungle, at the height of the rainy season. People took shelter beneath the leaves, slept on the ground, fought off the ants, and ate rotten fruit. Hygiene was at a minimum. Stockings, handkerchiefs, and rags were used as sanitary napkins.
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The paths through the interior were muddy; at many places there was no road left. Where the bridges had been washed away, people waded through rivers. Trucks could pass only here and there, but the drivers demanded exorbitant sums to carry the sick, exhausted, and starving a little farther. The column of refugees was huge and heterogeneous: plundering FAZ soldiers, panicky civilians, terrified Rwandan Hutus running for their lives, drugged child soldiers, hardened military men from Rwanda and Uganda. The only ones moving in the opposite direction were the Mai-mai, off to combat the foreign elements. In ragtag groups they moved eastward, with no central chain of command.