Congo (79 page)

Dr. Soki spoke calmly about that week-long inferno. There were no heroics; his tone was more that of resignation and sorrow. “We treated soldiers too. Four Ugandan soldiers came in, their abdomens torn apart, their intestines hanging out. We were able to save them. We treated everyone, we didn’t discriminate. When Rwandan soldiers came in, we put them in another room. I just kept on, because of the suffering I’d known myself. I had traveled seven hundred kilometers [about 430 miles] on foot, I had seen children and grown-ups die along the way. Apparently I had the courage needed to give myself to others.” These days he eats his omelet alone. He doesn’t like to talk much. “We had a birth that week too. A lot of women went into labor too soon, because of the shock. We performed a Caesarian. I held the child in my arms. May God grant him life, I thought.”
³⁴

A
FTER TAKING PART IN THE
T
INGI
-T
INGI MASSACRE
outside the city in 1997, Lieutenant Papy Bulaya finished his career with the AFDL in Kinsangani itself. He married there, put away his guns, and went to live with his wife’s family in the
brousse
, where he farmed a plot of land. At last he was living the life of the average Congolese in peacetime: the farming life. But then Wamba dia Wamba came to Kisangani in 1999 because of the schism in the RCD. “He said: ‘You people want to fight for your country, but the Rwandans are trying to occupy us. Look at what’s happened in Goma!’” Farmer Papy figured he had turned enough soil already, and once again became Lieutenant Papy. He received three months of training, this time from a Ugandan colonel. Wamba had most definitely switched camps.

In August 1999 he was there when Rwanda shelled Kisangani and took it for the first time. When Wamba moved his headquarters to Bunia, he went east too. Now he wanted to sign up with Roger Lumbala, who had started his own rebel army, the RCD-N (for National, although the
L
for
local
would have been more fitting) in Bafwasende, the heart of the diamond region. Lumbala originally came from the RCD-G, had flirted with the RCD–K/ML, set up the RCD-N, and, finally, was in league with Bemba’s MLC.
³⁵
The rebel movement was falling apart, especially on the Ugandan side, and Papy was tossed to and fro. At first he wanted to go to Lumbala, then changed his mind; then he wanted to go back to Wamba, but Wamba had been replaced by Mbusa; what he really wanted was to go back to his family, which was in Beni, but that was too far away, so he stayed with Mbusa anyway. Loyalty was, above all, a matter of opportunism. In the end he wandered about for years with a handful of troops through the jungle of what was known in better days as the Parc National de l’Okapi, with its eighteen-thousand square kilometers (seven thousand square miles) one of Congo’s biggest nature reserves, a world heritage site since 1996, and inhabited as a rule only by Mbuti Pygmies.

There were seven men in their group; Papy was the squadron leader. Deep in the jungle they arrived at the little town of Bomili, where they had a glorious view of the confluence of the Ituri and one of its tributaries. The place was ruled by a man named Mamadou, a Malinese poacher who had adopted the airs of a village chieftain. It was reminiscent of the way Msiri, the Afro-Arab slave trader from the east coast, had had himself crowned king of the Lunda in 1856. As official political authority faded, there was room for new structures from the inside out: foreign traders could pursue their affairs with impunity and, with a bit of force, achieve real political power. In the year 2000, the Congolese interior was as wild and woolly as it had been in the mid-nineteenth century. Even the merchandise was the same. “Mamadou had a house full of ivory. I saw fifteen tusks there, all of them almost two meters (6.5 feet) long. He had four hunters: a man named Pascal and three Pygmies. There were also okapi hides and a rhinoceros horn. Mamadou took everything we had, even the little chains around our necks. He beat us for three hours. Then he said: ‘Carry that ivory for me, otherwise I’ll kill you.’” A command that could have come straight from the nineteenth century. Papy and his men walked seven kilometers (about 4.3 miles) with the tusks on their shoulders, in precisely the same region where the
Arabisés
had once done their raiding. When it grew dark, they built three little lean-tos for the night. They had no intention of continuing to play porter. “One hour later, Mamadou arrived. He had been following us and he opened fire. One of us was killed, so we killed three of his hunters, including Pascal. We ran away and buried the ivory. I still have to go back and get it someday.”

Listening to Papy was like rereading Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, an immersion in a gloomy, dark-green world full of lethargic violence. A world of shady characters as cruel as they were bleak and drunken. “Mamadou was in cahoots with the king of imbeciles, Ramses. That was the number-two man in Bemba’s MLC. There was a lot of rivalry with Mbusa’s RCD-ML.” A sultry world full of misty thinking. The pro-Ugandan rebels were no longer fighting against Kinshasa, not even against Rwanda, but simply against each other. “The MLC wanted to expand to the east. They attacked Isiro, and later Beni and Butembo too. Ramses was their commander. At Mambasa his men captured Pygmies and ate them.” A feverish world with bizarre rituals and gruesome incidents. The Pygmies’ family members were even forced to consume parts of their murdered relatives’ bodies. The hearts of newborn babies were cut out and eaten . . . .
³⁶
A clammy world with water dripping from the leaves, and the distant cries of animals. Papy sneered, snorted. His somber words dripped with contempt. “One day I lost track of my friend, my comrade. At first we couldn’t find him. Then we saw him at a bend in the road. Ramses had got hold of him. His head was impaled on a stick. His penis was tied to the stick a little farther down.”

A world of fearful sweat and the smell of bodies. Two million civilians took off running to nowhere. Deep in the jungle, villagers were so absolutely cut off from the outside world that they could no longer find clothes to replace their rags.
Les nudistes
, they were called. Naked, they walked through the forest in search of food, as though it were 1870 all over again—but this time they were ashamed.
³⁷

In colonial times, the area around Bomili was known for its wealth of smaller gold mines. The lodes were not as rich as those in the more easterly Kilo-Moto, but still worth exploiting. Papy became involved in gold mining and proved a good deal more successful at that than in the ivory trade. Soldiers became entrepreneurs, killers became traders. “I ran thirty-five gold mines around Nia-Nia. That was my sector. No one paid me and my men, but each mine had its own CEO.” Although those were mostly teenagers in torn T-shirts, the term CEO (PDG in Papy’s French,
president-directeur-général)
still showed that the economy of plunder had attained a certain degree of formalization. “I called all the CEOs together and held a speech: ‘You people have to start making contributions, otherwise the soldiers will start helping themselves and then you’ll have people leaning on you. Everyone has to contribute:
l’effort de guerre
[the war effort]. Every month I want to have five grams of gold from each of you.’ There was some discussion, and finally we agreed to three grams. There were five thousand
creuseurs
working at some of the mines, but the CEOs only got a little bit of what came out of them.”

Industrial mining was a thing of the long distant past. The machines used during the colonial period had been idle and rusting for decades. The work was done now by
creuseurs
, young men and children who scraped away the sediment with a hoe or pick. It resembled the earliest days of Katangan mining, a century earlier, except this time no one was on a payroll; they were all independent businessmen who paid taxes to a superior in the form of a portion of the proceeds. “I went around to all the mines to collect the tax. I had to use that to feed my men, but also to satisfy my superiors. I sold the gold to brigade or battalion commanders. I also demanded a few square meters of the mine for my own use. I had digs everywhere, and about a dozen
creuseurs
who panned sand for me in the river. That brought in about five hundred grams a month,
bon
, if I was lucky.”

As medium-sized fish, Papy occupied a place somewhere halfway up the pyramid of the wartime economy. The artisanal mining activities formed a long chain: from
creuseur
to mine manager (CEO) to the ranking officers, and then on the
comptoirs
in the urban centers or even directly to Uganda, where it was sold in turn to international gold buyers. Salim Saleh, President Museveni’s brother, was a key figure in such bulk transactions. At the big gold mines of Kilo-Moto, however, all these middlemen were skipped over. There the Ugandan army had direct control over the pits. Mine workers had to do their digging with no safety equipment and without pay, without shoes, and often without tools, at gunpoint. Accidents were common. When a tunnel collapsed in 1999, at least one hundred miners were killed.
³⁸
In 1999 and 2000 Ugandan gold exports rose to between $90 and $95 million annually. Rwanda at the time was exporting $29 million worth of gold each year. This is a great deal, especially when one realizes that neither country has any significant domestic gold deposits.
³⁹

The same thing went for other mineral raw materials. Before the war started, Uganda exported less than two hundred thousand dollars worth of diamonds; by 1999 that had multiplied fourteen times over, for a total of $1.8 million.
⁴⁰
Rwanda, a country without diamonds, exported perhaps as much as $40 million in such stones each year.
⁴¹
That immediately explains why control over Kisangani was so important. But there was more involved than just precious metals and gems. From Congo, Rwanda also raked in tin, a much more workaday ore used around the world to manufacture food packaging. Between 1998 and 2004 that country produced some 2,200 metric tons (2,420 U.S. tons) of cassiterite (tin ore) itself, but exported 6,800 metric tons (nearly 7,480 U.S. tons), more than three times that amount. The difference came from the mines in Kivu.
⁴²
The area around the Great Lakes resembled a sort of African Schengen Area, a unified market where goods could cross borders freely. Tropical hardwood, coffee, and tea disappeared eastward as well. Congo became a “self-service country.”
⁴³
The scramble for Africa was now being organized by the Africans themselves.

And then there was coltan. An unseemly substance that resembles black gravel and is heavy as lead, the ore was mined from muddy deposits. But suddenly the whole world was clamoring for it. It was to become Rwanda’s major economic asset in Congo. What rubber had been in 1900, coltan was in 2000: a raw material, available locally in huge quantities (Congo contained an estimated 80-some percent of the world supply), that was suddenly in acute demand around the world. Cell phones were the pneumatic tires of the new century. Coltan comprises columbium (niobium) and tantalum, two elements that are adjacent in the periodic table. While niobium is used in the production of stainless steel for, among other things, body piercings, tantalum is a metal with an extremely high melting point (almost 3,000
^o
C), which renders it extremely well-suited for superconductors in the aerospace industry and capacitators in electronic equipment. Tear open any cell phone, MP3 player, DVD player, laptop, or gaming console and inside you will find a little green labyrinth with all manner of obscure little elements. The drop-shaped, brightly colored beads are capacitators. Break them open and you will be holding a bit of Congo in your hand.

The year 2000 witnessed a veritable coltan rush. Nokia and Ericsson were hoping to bring to market a new generation of cell phones, while Sony was poised to launch its PlayStation 2 (the company actually had to postpone the introduction due to a dip in the supply of coltan).
⁴⁴
Within less than a year the price rose by 1,000 percent, from thirty to three hundred dollars a metric pound (1.1 U.S. pound). With the exception of one Australian quarry, eastern Congo was the only place on earth where it was mined. Down Under it served as a welcome source of state revenue, but in Congo it was more a curse than a blessing. A feeble state with great wealth beneath its soil, that is asking for trouble. All the coltan mines were controlled by Rwanda; in 1999 and 2000 Kigali exported a mind-boggling $240 million worth of coltan annually. Most of that was sheer profit. Rwanda had to pay the traders and rebels in Congo, of course, but that was peanuts compared to what coltan brought in. The profits made from the war were three times higher than the losses.
⁴⁵
The occasional crate of Kalashnikovs, therefore, was a minor write-off.

But Rwanda and Uganda were not the ones who profited most from the pillage of eastern Congo’s raw materials. In an increasingly globalized economy, governments were only intermediaries in a mass of complex, international, and rapidly mutating trading networks. Kagame and Museveni were not at the end of any supply line; it was the multinational mining companies, shady fly-by-nights, notorious but highly evasive arms dealers, and crooked businessmen in Switzerland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany who made a killing by selling Congo’s stolen raw materials. They all operated in an extremely free marketplace. In political terms Congo was a disaster area, but in economic terms it was a paradise—at least for some. Failed nation-states are the success stories of runaway, global neoliberalism.