Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (21 page)

“No words, no verbal expression would be capable of expressing the depth of my gratitude and the contentment I felt when my feet touched the soil of Zaire,” Mobutu said in a grave baritone that had suddenly gone tremolo with emotion. “Your warm welcome comforts me more than ever in my belief in our solidarity, which is the foundation upon which our Zairian fatherland was built.

“Recently, we have watched as the enemies of our people have chosen the moment when I was floored with disease to stab me in the back. They did this because they know that I represent the territorial integrity of our great Zaire, for which I have consecrated my entire life to the defense of its sacred values.”

At that moment, Mobutu burst into tears, but after collecting himself and asking people to pray for his health, he delivered what amounted to a call to arms. “I have never retreated, and once again, this time there can be no question of retreat,” Mobutu said dramatically. “Zaire has become a victim of its African hospitality, and has been wronged. . . . But together we will restore the tarnished image of our beloved country.”

Alas, the depths of this country’s social fracture were too deep to be papered over, even amid a remarkable surge of patriotism. Zaire had the misfortune of having been ruled by the Belgians, a small, tribally divided European people who gave full vent to their pettiness as they set about colonizing one of Africa’s largest territories. The Belgians imagined and enforced tribal distinctions everywhere they went. On the rear terrace of his colonial-era mansion in the old European quarter of Gombé, Cléophas Kamitatu, a onetime advisor to Mobutu, put it this way: “In every region of the country they favored one group over another. Here it was the Bakongo over the Bakaya. In Kasai it was the Baluba against the Lulua, the Basonge and the Bakete. In Shaba it was the Lunda against all the ethnic groups of the south. The Mongo enjoyed the ear of the Belgians in the north. But just as a precaution, they recruited their neighbors, the Bangala, to serve in the army.

“Our greatest misfortune was to be colonized by a country with such a small spirit. You will say that’s all old history now, but the effects are with us still today. When I asked an official Belgian delegation that was here the other day if they were seeking investments in the country, they replied that Belgium would only invest once there had been elections. In the meantime, they said we are here to prevent anyone else from taking our place.”

Kamitatu’s quick history lesson was fine as far as it went. What he left out, though, was no prettier. Like almost everyone else in the political elite, in his own small way the weary old former diplomat, who somehow still managed to live quite well amid the country’s ruin, had had his hand in Zaire’s mess, too. It was said that he had sold the country’s embassy in Tokyo while in residence there, and had simply pocketed the money.

Mobutu’s generals were even worse than the civilian elite. During the first Shaba war, in 1977, when rebels from Angola occupied the country’s southern copper belt, the chief of staff, General Eluki Monga Aundu, pulled off a train heist worthy of Butch Cassidy, robbing the entire payroll for the troops he was about to lead into battle. That he was quickly defeated was hardly a surprise. More surprising is that he was never punished, whether because of his kinship with Mobutu or because the Guide may have admired his audacity.

In the streets, everyone knew the code by which the country was ruled. But if Article 15 governed daily life, by no means did everyone subscribe to the degradation it wrought. Those who lived in roadside shacks and wore rags for clothes could not easily turn down a free drink or a bite to eat, and it was no different with a chance to party. But sobbing at a funeral or shouting hurrahs at a wedding for a few coins never made anyone a member of the festival, and the people rocking on the tarmac to the sensuous soukous or swaying in the streets cheering on the president’s motorcade were no different. Theirs was little more than a dance of death for a country that was already on its way out of this world.

The truth was that Mobutu had no one to lean on anymore, least of all the vaunted masses that had turned out to salute him. For proof, with incomparably smaller means, Etienne Tshisekedi, the popular leader of the opposition and head of the Democratic Union for Social Progress, staged a return to Kinshasa that same week after a prolonged absence from the country and managed to draw crowds nearly as large as Mobutu’s. More perplexing still, given that the two men were bitter political rivals, many of the revelers had turned out for both events.

“This is the Zaire we have become. The same youth that cheers Mobutu today will cheer Tshisekedi with the same fervor tomorrow, and eventually, why not Kabila, too,” said Jean-Baptiste Sondji, a political activist doctor at Mama Yemo, Kinshasa’s biggest hospital, which was named for Mobutu’s mother. “That is the real legacy of Mobutu: the compromising of an entire generation of young people who have grown up without schools and without values.”

The Great Man had chosen the practicable end of the Great River to issue his rallying cry. Ten miles or more across in places and almost unimaginable in its power, the Zaire River unfurls like an immense serpent whose tail lies in the deep south, its midsection running west along the equator, and its head basking at the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. It has not only given the country its name, but its very definition. But for all of its magnificence, for all of its much vaunted potential to light an entire hemisphere with hydroelectric power, it is a river impeded by huge boulders, broken in the image of the country itself, and sadly condemned never to fulfill its promise.

From the other navigable limit of the river, the end was already approaching for Mobutu. Though quiet still, Kisangani was about to assume the role that it had played so often in the short and tragic history of Zaire. Battles for the city had served as hinges slamming the doors on entire eras, helping close the book on every regime the country had known, from colonial rule to the
indépendantiste
struggle after Lumumba’s assassination, and it would soon lower the boom on the famous survivor himself, Mobutu.

I flew into Kisangani aboard a Caravelle jetliner with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata. By that time, early in February 1997, the government had declared Kisangani a strategic zone, and hitching a ride on a relief flight was virtually the only way to get there. The UNHCR had promised the handful of reporters that it allowed aboard the flight a tour of a makeshift camp for Rwandan Hutu refugees at a place called Tingi-Tingi, and we were all expected to return to Kinshasa that evening aboard another chartered plane, or continue onward to Uganda with Ogata. I harbored a secret plan, however, to drop out of sight at the end of the day and make my way into the city by the bend in the river to report from there.

The scene at Kisangani’s airport reminded me of the way split personalities were depicted in old Hollywood films. With an invisible line the only thing dividing them, fierce-looking Serbian and Romanian mercenaries leading Mobutu’s war effort shared the tarmac with international relief workers who were running a major humanitarian operation. The foreign staffers from UNHCR and the World Food Programme winced as they acknowledged, just outside Ogata’s earshot, that crated weapons and ammunition, along with uniforms and other supplies, were making their way into the bellies of the shiny old DC-3s, the aluminum-skinned workhorses that were ferrying sacks of food and medicines to the desperate Hutu. They insisted this was the price of cooperation from the local authorities.

It was unclear how much Ogata’s aides knew of this piggybacking. But the surrealistic scene of mercenaries and aid workers sharing the same workspace led to equally surreal conversations when Ogata and local officials began exchanging greetings in the stifling hangar that served as the arrival lounge. Omar Léa Sisi, the potbellied governor of Manièma Province, either did not understand or was feigning confusion over the purpose of an international relief operation.

Dressed in a silk abacost, the buttoned tunic and pants outfit that Mobutu had once decreed as the only formal clothing fitting for Zairian men,
⁶
the governor spoke of obtaining UN help in winning back lost territory, and warned there would be stricter conditions on relief operations if such assistance was not forthcoming. Ogata, a handsome woman whose petite stature and crusty upper-class Japanese manners belied her toughness, stood her ground, and hammered away at UN demands for safe corridors for the refugees and for the relief operations that were helping them.

The reality on the ground in this part of Zaire, where the war was quickly moving toward a defining moment, would yield to neither of these visions, although ultimately the governor’s take would prove far closer to reality. East of Kisangani, the government was employing a few dozen Serbian mercenaries and a few thousand Hutu fighters to hold off the rebels, and just as they had done since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Hutu fighters were hiding among tens of thousands of Hutu refugees to shield themselves from attack.

Unfortunately for the governor, for Mobutu and, most of all, for the refugees, neither the human shields nor the mercenaries were of any tactical use in stopping the rebel advance. That is because what was happening, although unacknowledged, was more than a rebellion; it was the pursuit of Rwanda’s civil war into the heart of Zaire, and in this struggle, moral complications presented no more obstacle to the invaders than the feeble military resistance they faced. Ethnic cleansing had always lain at the heart of Rwanda’s civil wars, and if Kabila’s AFDL had to exterminate 100,000 or more refugees in order to settle their score with the armed Hutu
génocidaires
hiding among them, so be it.

“African solutions to African problems,” Washington’s code name for the war, was an exercise in moral bankruptcy arguably more crass and even more complete than the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide. As it did in 1994, Washington pretended not to know the extent of the murder that was taking place in central Zaire lest it become a hot issue back home, drawing TV cameras and forcing action of some kind. By the time most of the dust had settled, six years after Zaire was first plunged into war, 3.3 million people had died in the eastern half of the country alone, more than four times as many people as had died in the Rwandan genocide.
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Moreover, by some neat trick of misdirection, once Mobutu was gone, the worst of the slaughter and starvation went almost entirely unnoticed abroad.

Clinton administration officials often grew impatient with questions about the human toll associated with the Kabila army’s seemingly effortless advance through the Zairian countryside. On a visit to Kinshasa, David J. Scheffer, Washington’s ambassador at large for war crimes issues, once angrily dismissed my concerns about the murder of Hutu refugees by Kabila’s Rwandan Tutsi troops. Scheffer was far from alone in this attitude. Almost across the board, American officials had written off the Hutu as a pariah population, and no one had time for questions about their fate.

The U.S. ambassador to Zaire, Daniel Howard Simpson, ever fond of blustery talk, reduced the Hutu problem to a simple formula. “They are the bad guys,” he once told me. This attitude would persist long after the war, as Washington ran political interference within the United Nations on behalf of Kabila as his new regime stymied all efforts to investigate mass killings that occurred during the AFDL’s triumphant march from one end of the country to the other.

We in the press obligingly failed to cover what was arguably the war’s most important feature, its human toll. We certainly didn’t have the excuse of disinterest from the outside world, since Mobutu’s demise had been on the front pages of newspapers for months. Some reasoned that it was too dangerous to trek through the war zones in the wake of Kabila’s rebels, and in fairness the terrain was dangerous and unusually inaccessible. It still haunts me to think, however, that something far more insidious lay behind our failure.

Evildoing by the rebels fouled up an all too compelling story line. Mobutu was the villainous dictator, someone the press had loved to hate for years, and now even the American government had stopped propping him up. By contrast, Kabila had emerged as a jovial, canny foil. He had quickly learned how to keep the press happy with his blunt, boastful statements and colorful appearances before the cameras. He gave us the illusion that we were covering the war by allowing reporters to fly in briefly when a town had been freshly captured—that is, after any sign of atrocities had been carefully cleaned up.

As we turned the war into a black-and-white affair, with Mobutu and his Hutu allies playing the irredeemable bad guys, our most important failure was in suspending disbelief over the flimsy cover story of an uprising in the east by an obscure ethnic group. From start to finish this war had been nothing less than a Tutsi invasion from Rwanda.

The most powerful factor at work behind our self-deception was an entirely natural sympathy for the Tutsi following the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. From that simple starting point, emotionally overpowering but deeply flawed analogies with Israel and with European Jewry and the Holocaust began to drive Washington’s policies in Central Africa. Philip Gourevitch, whose compelling writing on the Rwandan genocide strongly influenced Clinton administration policy toward the region, wrote in
The New Yorker:

Despite Rwanda’s size, General Kagame, who became the country’s President in April, has built its Army into the most formidable fighting force in central Africa, and he has done so without recourse to sophisticated weaponry. Rather, what distinguishes his commanders and soldiers is their ferocious motivation. Having single-handedly brought the genocide to a halt, in 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Army has continued to treat its almost ceaseless battlefield engagements as one long struggle for national survival. (The analogy that’s sometimes made between Rwanda’s aggressive defense policy and that of Israel—another small country with a vivid memory of genocide which has endured persistent threats of annihilation from its neighbors—is inexact but not unfounded.)