Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (3 page)

For centuries the Congo has held a fascination for outsiders. Lying at the heart of the African continent, and encompassing some of the continent’s most impenetrable jungles, it has long been associated with violence and injustice
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In 1885, during the scramble to divide Africa among colonial powers, King Leopold II of Belgium claimed the country as his personal fiefdom. He set up the Congo Free State, a private enterprise, and during the rubber boom of the 1890s the country became a key source of latex for car and bicycle tires. Colonial officers created a draconian system of forced labor during which they killed or mutilated hundreds of thousands and pushed millions of others to starvation or death from disease.

This brutality prompted the first international human rights campaign, led by missionaries and activists, including Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle. Under pressure, King Leopold capitulated and handed the country over to the Belgian government in 1908. Although they established a much more elaborate administration with extensive primary education, the Belgians still focused on extracting resources and did little to encourage Congolese development. The upper echelons of the military and civil service were entirely white, pass laws kept Congolese from living in upper-class neighborhoods, and education was limited to the bare minimum.

By the time they were forced to hand over power, the Belgians had set the new nation up to fail. As the novelist Achille Ngoye vents through one of his characters: “I don’t like these uncles mayonnaise-fries
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for their responsibility in the debacle of our country: seventy-five years of colonization, one [Congolese] priest by 1917, five [Congolese] warrant officers in an army of sergeants and corporals in 1960, plus five pseudo-university graduates at independence; a privileged few chosen based on questionable criteria to receive a hasty training to become managers of the country. And who made a mess of it.”
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One of those sergeants, Joseph Mobutu, a typist and army journalist by training, went on to rule the country for thirty-two years, fostering national unity and culture and renaming the nation Zaire
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in 1971, but also running state institutions into the ground. Mobutu’s rule, although initially popular, paved the ground for Zaire’s collapse. By the 1980s, Mobutu (by then he had changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko) was increasingly paranoid and distrustful of his government and army; fearing dissent from within the ranks of his single-party state, he cannibalized his own institutions and infrastructures. Political interference and corruption eroded the justice system, administration, and security services; Mobutu was only able to ward off military challenges by resorting to dependence on his cold war allies and mercenaries. With the end of the cold war, even those resources had become more difficult to muster.

Then, in 1994, came the trigger: The civil war in neighboring Rwanda escalated, resulting in the genocide of 800,000 Hutu and Tutsi at the hands of Hutu militia and the army. When the incumbent Hutu regime crumbled, the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels, led by Paul Kagame, took power, and over a million Hutu fled across the border into Zaire, along with the soldiers and militiamen who had carried out the massacres. The defeated Rwandan army was not the only displaced group seeking refuge. In his Machiavellian bid to become a regional power broker, Mobutu had come to host over ten different foreign armed groups on his territory, which angered his neighbors to no end. By 1996, a regional coalition led by Angola, Uganda, and Rwanda had formed to overthrow Mobutu.

Finally, in addition to national and regional causes, there were local dimensions to the conflict, which resulted perhaps in the greatest bloodshed. The weakness of the state had allowed ethnic rivalries and conflicts over access to land to fester, especially in the densely populated eastern regions on the border with Rwanda and Uganda. During Mobutu’s final years, he and other leaders cynically stoked these ethnic tensions in order to distract from challenges to their power and to rally support.

This book tells the story of the conflict that resulted from these regional, national, and local dimensions and that has lasted from 1996 until today. The war can be divided into three parts. The first Congo war ended with the toppling of Mobutu Sese Seko in May 1997. After a brief lull in the fighting, the new president, Laurent Kabila, fell out with his Rwandan and Ugandan allies, sparking the second Congo war in August 1998, which lasted until a peace deal reunified the country in June 2003. Fighting, however, has continued in the eastern Kivu region until today and can be considered as the third episode of the war.

The book focuses on the perpetrators more than the victims, the politicians and army commanders more than the refugees and rape survivors, although many of the protagonists oscillate between these categories. Rather than dwelling on the horror of the conflict, which is undeniable, I have chosen to grapple with the nature of the system that brought the principal actors to power, limited the choices they could make, and produced such chaos and suffering.

What is this system? As a Congolese friend and parliamentarian told me as I was finishing this book: “In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless. That’s the system here. That’s just the reality of things. If you don’t bribe a bit and play to people’s prejudices, someone else who does will replace you.” He winked and added, “Even you, if you were thrown into this system, you would do the same. Or sink.”

There are many examples that bear out his sentiment. Etienne Tshisekedi, the country’s former prime minister, insisted so doggedly that the government had to respect the constitutional order before he stepped back into politics and stood for election that he briefly moralized himself out of politics. Wamba dia Wamba, a former rebel leader who features in this book, was so idealistic about what a rebellion should be that he marginalized himself to irrelevance. It would have been an interesting experiment to drop a young, relatively unknown Mahatma Gandhi into the Congo and observe whether he, insisting on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, would have been able to change anything, either. The Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara spent almost a year in the Congo in 1965 fighting with rebels in the east before he abandoned the struggle. Malnourished and depressed, he concluded they “weren’t ready for the revolution.” The Congo has always defied the idealists.

Even Laurent Kabila, who as president would be stereotyped by many as the quintessential Congolese big-man politician, was acutely aware of how deeply entrenched in society the Congolese crisis had become. An inveterate lecturer, he often turned his speeches into morality lessons. “
Vous, Zairois
... ,” he would begin, a finger thrusting upward, berating the crowd for having put up with the country’s moral decline for so long. “Who has not been Mobutist in this country?” he asked during one press conference. “Three-quarters of this country became part of it! We saw you all dancing in the glory of the monster.”
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Papy Kamanzi
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is an example of how easy it is to be drawn into the deepest moral corruption. A thirty-year-old, mid-level army commander from the minority Tutsi community, he had fought for four different armed groups. I interviewed him almost a dozen times over two years to try to understand his experience. We became friends, and he took me home to meet his young wife and two children. Finally, in one of our last interviews, he broke down and started telling me about how he had worked for a Rwandan death squad in the eastern border town of Goma in 1997. Together with sixty other soldiers, they had been tasked with rounding up dissidents; often the definition of “dissident” was stretched to include any Hutu refugee. Papy could kill up to a hundred of these dissidents—sometimes old women and young children—a day, usually using a rope to crush their windpipes and strangle them.

“Why did you do it?”

“I had to. If I hadn’t, it would have been suspicious,” he replied, but then looked at me. “You know, you can’t really explain these things. For us soldiers, killing comes easy. It has become part of our lives. I have lost five members of my family during the war. You have to understand that. You have to understand the history of my family—how we were persecuted, then favored by Mobutu, how we were denied citizenship and laughed at at school. How they spat in my face. Then you can judge me.” But it was clear that he didn’t think I could ever understand.

Nevertheless, this book is an attempt to do just that: to explain the social, political, and institutional forces that made it possible for a family man to become a mass murderer. Kamanzi, and all those like him, were not inherently predisposed to evil. Some other explanation is called for.

PART I

PREWAR

1

THE LEGACY OF GENOCIDE

Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Most of the dead were Tutsis—and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.

—“RWANDA: HOW THE GENOCIDE HAPPENED,” BBC

GISENYI, RWANDA, JULY 17, 1994

To the east of the Congo, in the heart of the African continent, lie the highlands of Rwanda. The country is tiny, the size of Massachusetts, and has one of the highest population densities in the world. This is not the Africa of jungles, corruption, and failed states portrayed in movies. Temperatures fall to freezing on some hilltops, cattle graze on velvety pastures, and the government maintains a tight grip on all aspects of society. On the thousands of hills—in between tea plantations and eucalyptus groves—millions of peasants eke out a living by farming beans, bananas, and sorghum.