Congo (91 page)

Wait a minute, it occurs to me, he’s still hated there, even today! Under his reign of terror in 2002, dozens of young people from the poor neighborhoods were murdered. At the bridge over the Tshopo, two hundred policemen and soldiers were slaughtered and thrown into the river. They were tied up and had a gag stuffed in their mouths. Some of them were shot and killed or decapitated, others had their neck broken or were bayoneted. Their stomachs were cut open so that they wouldn’t float to the surface after a couple of days. Nkunda was there. He supervised the operation, with Rwandan support.
³⁸
And now he’s trying to claim that foreign interference is a bad thing?

“When Germany threatened England, didn’t Churchill call on his people to resist? They applauded him for that. So why should we have to accept that the FDLR occupies this place, like the Germans did back then?” Churchill was chosen by the people, general, you were not. “In times of war, that doesn’t matter. Hitler was an elected official, and look what happened. De Gaulle wasn’t chosen by the people, but he freed France, didn’t he?” For a moment, I’m dumbstruck. Is he trying to claim a comparison with the most important French statesman of the twentieth century? “Yes, I am the General De Gaulle of Congo!”
³⁹

D
AZED BY THIS ADVANCED COURSE IN RHETORIC
, I squeeze into a jeep with René and seven others. Crammed into the baggage compartment is a child soldier with a Kalashnikov. It is almost midnight. We drive east through the wet, dripping hills and hope that we don’t run into a Mai-mai patrol. I’m scared and confused. What I don’t know is that, at that moment in New York, the finishing touches are being put to a UN report demonstrating Rwandan participation in the CNDP. What I don’t know is that Human Rights Watch is preparing a report on Nkunda’s atrocities.
⁴⁰
I have arrived at the point where history is still warm, fresh, and elusive. I can’t see the big picture. No one can see the big picture.

All I know is that I would rather talk to normal people than with politicians, that I learn more from anecdotes than from rhetoric. All I know is that I once sat in Grâce Nirahabimana’s plastic hut at the Mugunga refugee camp, block 48, number 34; it was too small for me to stand up. Grâce was a beautiful twenty-three-year-old woman with two children, Fabrice and David. Her two brothers, twelve and sixteen, had been taken by Nkunda, her two sisters died of dysentery, she was raped by three soldiers. She left everything behind. Her sisters died in the camp—too little to eat, no toilets—and were buried among the banana plants. It was cold, sitting on her bed. A harsh wind was blowing across the lunar landscape of lava and rattling the plastic walls of her little hut. “I don’t feel safe at all,” she sobbed. “I’m afraid, very afraid. Afraid of Laurent Nkunda.”
⁴¹

After what seems like an endless drive, the jeep stops at an old colonial-style house. “This is the Ugandan border,” René tells me, “this house once belonged to the chief customs official. There, where those trees are, that’s where Uganda starts.” The place is called Bunagana, it is a safe place to spend the night. But to René’s surprise, the house turns out to be full of child soldiers, at least twenty of them. They are sleeping in the armchairs, on the floor, in the kitchen. There is neither water nor electricity, but a bed is arranged quickly enough.

I get up early the next morning. Shirtless, I go out onto the patio to read through my notes. A thirteen-year-old boy tells me that his rifle is called a Chechen. Around eight I walk into the village with René to get some breakfast. He did not sleep well. “Gastritis,” he sighs, “I worry too much, it’s just the way I am. Nkunda suffers from it too, alongside his asthma. The war is not good. It’s the worst thing there is, but it’s all we can do.”

We arrive at very normal-looking house. It turns out to be the civil headquarters of the CNDP. There I meet all the dignitaries I saw yesterday as well. Nkunda’s sister is there too: two peas in a pod. The courtyard is an open-air garage. There, a half-dozen Humvees captured from the FARDC are being fixed up for the rebels’ war effort. For the first time in weeks I eat cheese, Kivu cheese, a Tutsi specialty. The rebel leaders discuss the news of the day. Desmond Tutu and Romeo Dallaire, former UN commander in Rwanda, have just called for a large-scale intervention force to be sent to North Kivu. “What a bunch of hooey,” René snorts. “Now that they don’t have any more political arguments, they bring in the moral heavyweights. Humanitarianism is being misused to cover up military domination.” The others chime in in agreement. “We’ll all be going to the International Court anyway,” he jokes, “so we might as well rape and murder, otherwise we’ll be there for no good reason.”

That intervention force never arrived. The European Union had no desire to act on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s appeal, and the African Union, the South African Development Community, and Angola didn’t feel much like coming to Kabila’s aid. That morning in Bunagana I concluded that Nkunda might very well go on ruling his territory for a long time to come. The Uganda border was officially sealed, but I saw a truck full of flour come into Congo. Who’s going to stop him anyway? I thought. Congo has no army, the MONUC won’t intervene, a more extensive intervention force is not going to arrive, and besides, he has food and he collects taxes. Maybe he’ll keep up this bush war for as long as Laurent-Désiré Kabila did.

But I was wrong. One month later, in January 2009, what no one dreamed would happen actually did: the Congolese and Rwandan armies, those sworn enemies, joined forces and arrested Nkunda. A totally unexpected move, but they had little choice: Kagame had lost a great deal of international credit after the appearance of that UN report detailing his support for the CNDP, and Joseph Kabila was cutting a bad figure with his worthless army that no one wanted to help. Strange bedfellows in pursuit of a common cause, they even tried to put the FDLR out of commission. They only succeeded in part, but Nkunda ended up in custody in Rwanda and has been awaiting trial in Congo ever since. The CNDP was handed over to war criminal Bosco Ntaganda and simply “fused” once again with the government army.

The joint Congolese-Rwandan operation became known under the name Umoja wetu (in the first half of 2009) and was followed by the operations Kimia II (2009) and Amani Leo (2010), proactive campaigns against the FDLR by the national army (in fact by former CNDP forces, led by the scoundrel Ntaganda) in cooperation with the MONUC, which resulted in more civilian suffering than glory.
⁴²
By 2010 the FDLR numbered six thousand men, no more than a homeopathic residue of 1994’s 1.5 million refugees. Less than three hundred of them were suspected of crimes of genocide.

If Rwanda is overmilitarized, then Congo remains undermilitarized. The country’s armed forces are still more an apparition than any real force to be reckoned with. And that is clear to see. The FARDC is unable to stop Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army from sowing unrest in the northeast, let alone effectively defend more than seven thousand kilometers (over 4,300 miles) of national borders. And that at a moment when geopolitical tensions are rising: with Uganda concerning oil in Lake Albert, with Rwanda concerning methane gas in Lake Kivu, and above all with Angola concerning oil concessions in the Atlantic—sometimes resulting in skirmishes. The army cannot even keep order within Congo itself. In the course of a quarrel over fishing rights in a few ponds in Dongo (Équateur) in November 2009, at least a hundred people were killed and ninety thousand fled. The will to change seems minimal.
⁴³
With an army, Kabila could assert himself more; without an army, however, he need fear no putsch.
⁴⁴

A
ND LIFE FLOWS ON LIKE THE RIVER
. On the other side of the country, in Nsioni, people are walking up and down the red, dusty main street of the village. I watch them from the terrace where the music has been turned up deafeningly loud for me and two other customers. Think away the cell phones and there is little difference between today and the 1980s. The same soft drink bottles, the same cars driving around, the same rickety market stalls selling slices of dried fish. The only thing that has changed is the size of the slices; today they are little more than cubes. But across the street it looks as though a UFO has landed. Towering above the dull barracks and the faded housefronts is a pristine white building that gleams on all sides. Neatly parked before the door are four brand-new motorcycles with sparkling chrome. Their seats are still covered with protective plastic. Beside them are ten men’s bikes, bound together, their handlebars turned parallel to the frames and still packed in cardboard. The glistening rod brakes are a glory to behold. From inside the building comes the flickering blue glow of a plasma screen. Hanging above the door is a sign that explains a lot:
CHINA AMITIÉ COMPANY
. In Nsioni, the first Chinese traders have touched down.

I go in and say hello to a wary-looking Asian couple who speak not a word of French or English, but whose merchandise speaks for itself: a
horror vacui
of flashy sports shoes piled up to the ceiling next to TVs and clocks and racks full of perfume. The China Amitié Company creates the same impression of luxury and comfort for the people of Nsioni as the supermarkets did in the farming villages of Europe in the 1950s. What a contrast to those sorry market stalls where you went to buy razor blades or candles one at a time! What luxury when you compare those perfumes to the homemade bars of soap you’ve been scrubbing yourself with all your life! What easy comfort when you realize that you no longer need to go to Boma or Kinshasa to buy such products! And affordable as well!

The shopkeepers even sell paintings in gaudy frames, showing mountain landscapes and alpine pastures. Asiatic merchants coming to the African interior to sell European landscapes: this, I believe, is what they call globalization. The world as marketplace. It reminds one of the ingenious graffiti sprayed on the old railroad trestle at Matadi, less than a hundred kilometers (sixty-two miles) from here. That bridge from the 1890s, when Nkasi’s father and Chinese workers built the rail connection to Kinshasa, today serves as canvas for an act of vandalism that brilliantly summarizes this third millennium: www.com.
⁴⁵

From the late 1990s, more and more Chinese began coming to Africa. They arrived not only to sell their wares, but much more frequently to buy raw materials. The formidable explosion of the Chinese economy, as a result of Deng Xiaoping’s controlled experiment with capitalism along the country’s coastlines, enormously boosted the demand for mineral riches. In 1993, for the first time, China imported more oil than it exported.
⁴⁶
The first African countries with which it established intensive ties, therefore, were the oil states of Nigeria, Angola, and Sudan. Zambia and Gabon entered the picture later as well, because of their copper and iron ore. As “geological scandal,” and despite the war and the grim business climate, Congo also caught China’s eye. In Katanga Chinese adventurers soon caught scent of a golden opportunity and swooped down on the wreckage of the once-prosperous mines. In 2003 Gécamines, at the insistence of the IMF and the World Bank, had fired eleven thousand superfluous miners.
⁴⁷
They received severance pay, but most had spent it all on cars and TVs. Many of them then were
creuseurs
, artisanal miners. Like in Kivu, they were prepared to use limited means to scratch away at the old mines and fill sacks of ore that they then sold to Monsieur Chang or Monsieur Wei.

In February 2006 I had the chance to visit the mine at Ruashi. There, hundreds of
creuseurs
were digging for heterogenite, an ore that contains both copper and cobalt. I saw children clamber down into poorly shored-up wells of up to twelve meters (thirty-nine feet) deep. I saw a five-year-old boy covered in dust, wearing a “Plop the Gnome” T-shirt. If they were lucky, they received five dollars a sack. Sometimes a group of friends would bring up as many as ten sacks in the course of a day. It was strenuous, dangerous work, they said, but they could live from it. What a contrast with my visit later that day to the enormous spic-and-span Luiswishi cobalt mine owned by Belgian businessman Georges Forrest, where I saw no more than a few dozen Congolese at work. They all wore safety helmets and operated excavators with hubcaps bigger than a human.

The Chinese buyers were private entrepreneurs and received no support from the Chinese government. Some of them began their own makeshift foundries, in order to export ore in more concentrated form. Their Congolese day laborers worked under ghastly conditions. They were badly paid, they breathed in noxious fumes, and they had no work clothes, let alone any collective labor agreement. Take Jean, for example. He went to work for Jia Xing, one of the larger copper-processing companies with a depot at Kolwezi and a foundry in Lubumbashi. The concern employed two hundred people and Jean received a permanent contract: he was an experienced smelter. A day worker, therefore, could sometimes work his way onto the payroll—although the contracts were often written only in Chinese. Jean’s shifts lasted twelve to thirteen hours a day with an ultrabrief lunch break, seven days a week. The company worked with a day shift and a night shift. There was no protective clothing, Jean’s tools were worn-out, the heat from the blast furnace was unbearable. Jean earned $120 a month, plus a $100 bonus if he ran the blast furnace: with that, Jia Xing was the best-paying Chinese employer in Katanga.

One morning he and twelve colleagues arrived a few minutes too late for work: they had been held up by a traffic accident. For punishment they were locked in a container, where they sat from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. At the end of the day they were all fired. There were, after all, plenty of others waiting to take their places. And so Jean went to work as a
creuseur
. He sold his sacks of ore to his former boss, but the spots where artisanal mining was allowed were limited. Perhaps he should hook up with the teams that trespassed in the middle of the night on the big mining companies’ concessions? It was dangerous, working in the dark. Some workers drowned or suffocated on the job, others were shot by the security guards. He could always go to work at the Emmanuel Depot in Kolwezi, but the workers there always got drunk during their lunch break because they had to process radioactive ore without gloves or a mask.
⁴⁸