Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

by Jason K. Stearns

It is this legacy of institutional weakness that for many Congolese is almost as depressing as their physical suffering. Since the 1970s until today, the Congolese state has not had an effective army, administration, or judiciary, nor have its leaders been interested in creating strong institutions. Instead, they have seen the state apparatus as a threat, to be kept weak so as to better manipulate it. This has left a bitter Congolese paradox: a state that is everywhere and oppressive but that is defunct and dysfunctional.

This is one of the paradoxes of the first war. The population was so tired of Mobutu that they were ready to welcome their liberator on whatever terms. The Hutu refugees hadn’t been welcome in the first place; any massacre was their own business. For the local population, this paradox was resolved by separating the rebels into two groups: the aggressive Tutsi killers and the Congolese freedom fighters.

Why did the Rwandan soldiers kill so many refugees? There were certainly some individual cases of revenge, as there had been in Rwanda when the RPF arrived. After all, many RPF soldiers had lost family members and wanted payback. The Rwandan army, however, was known for its strict discipline and tight command and control. It is very unlikely that soldiers would have been able to carry out such large-scale executions as in Mbandaka, for example, without an order from their commanders.

Sixteen years after the Rwandan genocide, it remains difficult to write about Rwandan history. For many, the moral shock of the Rwandan genocide was so overpowering that it eclipsed all subsequent events in the region. Massacres that came after were always measured up against the immensity of the genocide: If 80,000 refugees died in the Congo, that may be terrible but nonetheless minor compared with the 800,000 in Rwanda. The Rwandan government may have overstepped, but isn’t that understandable given the tragedy the people suffered?

kuvunja mbavu,

Twelve years later, Kizito seemed to have remembered little of the ideological training. The reason for their struggle was apparent for him and all other recruits: Mobutu needed to go.

Finally, he told them to shoot in the air three times before they entered their houses to scare away evil spirits. “The old man had funny ideas sometimes,” Kizito remembered. “He was superstitious—‘Don’t wear flip-flops at roadblocks.’‘Don’t ride a bicycle if you have a gun.’”That night, people in Bukavu thought another war had broken out. An hour after the soldiers left the schoolyard, shooting broke out all through town as the recruits chased away evil spirits.

His chieftaincy was not just symbolic. In 1980, during his fiftieth birthday celebrations, he was named King of the Bangala during an opulent coronation ceremony.3 “Only God is above you,”the officiator announced. He was hailed as Mobutu Moyi, or Mobutu Sun King.4 That was not his only similarity with King Louis XIV of France. Through the 1974 constitution, he became head of all branches of government and could legislate by decree and change the constitution at his discretion. In some years he personally disposed of 20 percent of the budget. He was truly the father of the nation: He often presided over ceremonies where he cut ribbons on road projects or brought medicine to a hospital, magnanimous gifts from the father to his children. Visitors to Mobutu’s palace—even foreign diplomats—could often expect to walk away with thousands of dollars in “presents.”5

Tutsi conspiracy to create a Hima empire,”

The Old Leopard, however, no longer had the power he used to. Since he had lifted the ban on political parties in 1990, he had slowly been relegated to a more symbolic role in politics. He spent most of his time in his jungle

palace in Gbadolite, five hundred miles from the capital, and left the day-to-day running of the country to his prime minister. For years, Mobutu had carefully pitted Zaire’s leading business and political leaders against each other to prevent them from challenging him. In the end, however, Mobutu’s divide-and-rule tactics had left him with a splintered, ineffective shell of a government.

With his back against the wall, Mobutu began thinking about negotiating. He fired his prime minister and handed power over to his long-standing rival, Etienne Tshisekedi, who promptly named a new cabinet, reserving some of the most important ministries for his “brother” Kabila.

The Old Leopard sent his national security advisor to South Africa to see whether Kabila was open for negotiations.

Finally, an Indian Hindu priest was found to officiate. Even though Habyarimana had been a devout Catholic, Mobutu told them just to get on with it. On May 15, 1997, Habyarimana’s body went up in flames in Kinshasa, over three years after his death. No one seems to know where his ashes are.

The next day, Mobutu drove to the airport at dawn, opting for a small, less conspicuous vehicle, accompanied by ten cars stuffed with suitcases. Other objects had preceded them and had been packed onto a 747 jet that was waiting for Mobutu and his entourage. He had so much luggage that he had to leave part of it at the airport in the vehicles. Abandoned expensive vehicles were becoming a common sight in Kinshasa, especially at the various ports where Mobutu officials were fleeing across the river to Brazzaville in canoes, speedboats, and ferries.

Kabila, who spoke broken Lingala—the language of the capital—and knew almost no one in town, was daunted by Kinshasa.

leaves. Contrary to rumor, he didn’t drink alcohol—he had high blood pressure and was diabetic—but consumed large quantities of strong, milky tea.3

The image his former advisors paint of the new president is one of a man inflated by his new power but also confused and stifled by loneliness. Several times, he scared his bodyguards by disappearing from his presidential compound at night and driving his car into town, where he would drive around alone, trying to catch the city—which he barely knew—off guard. His soldiers would scramble into pickup trucks and chase after him, only to see their president get out of his car and order them to get back to his palace. A former minister remembered being asked to supervise a dredging project on one of the city’s canals. “A few days after we began work, Mzee showed up at night, all alone in a battered Mercedes, to see how work was progressing. He gave us all a fright. Not that I was there to see him—it was 1 o’clock in the morning!”5

The celebration was momentarily interrupted by a group of around five hundred opposition activists in the crowd who chanted: “Where is Tshisekedi?” referring to the indefatigable opposition leader many wanted to have a role in the new government. They were soon drowned out by the marching band and Kabila supporters who answered with “Go to Togo!”—the small western African country where Mobutu had first fled after leaving Kinshasa.

Dozens of other politicians who defied the ban on party activities were rounded up and given similar treatment. The most illustrious was Etienne Tshisekedi. When Kabila first arrived in Kinshasa, Tshisekedi reached out, saying that he wanted to work with the new leadership. However, Tshisekedi quickly withdrew to a typically hardheaded position, demanding that the government be dissolved and that he be appointed prime minister, a position that had been given to him by the National Sovereign Conference in 1992. Kabila threw Tshisekedi into prison several times, but he proved impossible to shut up. Finally, in February 1997, Kabila lost his patience and had him deported to his remote home village of Kabeya-Kamwanga “with a tractor and some soy seeds so he can put his leadership skills to the service of our agricultural sector.”10

In retrospect, Kabila’s heavy-handedness does not make much sense. The public had been relatively favorable toward him at the beginning, and what

little opposition there was against him was disorganized and weak. Why did he squander the initial goodwill with such squabbles?

After six months in power, by the end of 1997, Kabila was becoming increasingly worried for his life. Nothing seemed to be working—his quixotic plans for the country were stymied by disorganization around him and his own erratic behavior. The coffers of the state were empty, and donors were reluctant to give money to the regime. At the same time, the Rwandan military had permeated the security services in Kinshasa. A Rwandan, Captain David, was Kabila’s main bodyguard and accompanied him everywhere—he held his glasses, his notebook, and his pen for him. He stood in front of his door when Mzee slept. He rode in the front seat of the presidential car. Another Rwandan, Captain Francis Gakwerere, was the commander of the presidential guard. Rumors of coup attempts filtered through to Kabila regularly, fueling his paranoia.

President Kabila had made his move. In his mind, if he waited too long, the Rwandans and Congolese Tutsi would remove him from power.

He needed his own force, and in desperation he drew on the largest, most determined mercenary troops available in the region: the ex-FAR, Habyarimana’s former army, which his AFDL rebellion had sought to defeat. It was a deal with the devil, one that precipitated Rwanda’s new invasion.

In July 1998, Laurent Kabila sacked Colonel James Kabarebe, the Rwandan officer who had been commander of the Congolese army, and asked all Rwandan troops to leave the country.

Malik began to reach out to other Tutsi soldiers, who were dispersed throughout Kinshasa’s various military camps. In case of trouble, he thought, it would be smart for them to assemble in one place to find safety in numbers. “When the Rwandans left, we stayed behind,” he said. “We thought we were Congolese, not Rwandan. We had fought the war so as to defend our citizenship. We weren’t about to be forced onto a plane to go to Kigali.”

chafed

“They were inexperienced, but the morale was high,” Malik remembered. “We had a key advantage: We were united; we were fighting for our survival. The others were just bandits.” That night the fighting started, heralding the beginning of the second congo war.

a second war of Congolese Rwandese tondefend themselves against Kabila

“Look, my son,”

“Our Rwandan friends have always dominated us. It was like this under Mobutu—they pushed him to undergo Zairianization, which they benefited from! They asked him to sign a decree that made all immigrants into citizens. Is that normal? The Tutsi in the east had everything, while the Congolese were stuck with nothing.”

crescendoed

“You know, Japan dominated China. That is normal. But I will not let our great country be dominated by its tiny neighbor. Can a toad swallow an elephant? No!”

Meanwhile, the Rwandans had taken control of much of the eastern Congo in a matter of hours. While Colonel Kabarebe had been commander of the Congolese army, he had prepositioned units loyal to him with stockpiles of weapons in the eastern Congo. When he was sacked, he gave orders to these units to rebel against Kabila. With support of Rwandan troops who crossed the border, they took control of Goma and Bukavu and began advancing on Kisangani.

Hubris can breed fantastic courage.

After taking the border towns, Colonel Kabarebe decided to go straight for the jugular by leapfrogging Kabila’s ramshackle army and attacking the capital, 1,000 miles away. It was one of the mos...

odyssey

Who had made the first move in sparking the war? From interviews with Rwandans and Congolese involved in planning the war, it is not clear whether Kabila began recruiting ex-FAR before Kabarebe began deploying his boys to the east. What is clear is that, after only a few months of Kabila being in power, both sides realized that their relationship was going sour, driven by Kabila’s paranoia and Rwanda’s obsession with control.

For Kigali, at a time when the northwest of Rwanda was consumed by the resumption of a bitter civil war, Kabila’s recruitment of its enemy constituted a strategic threat as well as a personal betrayal. Its reaction, however, was a prime example of the hubris that had come to characterize the regime. Instead of creating a buffer zone in the east of the country and using multilateral pressure to deal with Kabila, Kigali decided to single-handedly remove him from power, presumably to install a new, friendlier proxy in his place.

With a mutiny festering in the slums of Kinshasa, and rebels advancing rapidly from the west, Kabila knew that he would not be able to hold out without the support of the region. A regional summit of the South African Development Community was quickly called, and Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Angola, and Zimbabwe glowered at each other across a table without coming to a conclusion.

When Rwanda attempted anew to overthrow the regime in Kinshasa, this time without rallying a regional alliance around them, Mugabe saw his investments in jeopardy.

At Malik Kijege’s makeshift headquarters at the Tshatshi military camp, he began receiving distress calls from Tutsis hiding in Kinshasa. According to the reports he received, Kinshasa was quickly succumbing to the throes of anti-Tutsi frenzy. Once again, leaders had resorted to ethnic diatribe to rally the population behind them.

Kabila addressed a march in downtown Kinshasa, where he whipped up the crowd against the Tutsi invaders. The demonstration was full of histrionics. “They want to create a Tutsi empire,” the president announced, dressed in military fatigues. His information minister, Didier Mumengi, also dressed in a green uniform, told the crowd that the Tutsi rebels had “embarked on the extermination of the Congolese people of Bukavu.” Tshala Mwana, a famous singer and allegedly the president’s mistress, led the parade dressed in white, tugging two goats on a leash with signs identifying them as Deo Bugera and Bizima Karaha, the two most famous Tutsi in Kabila’s government who had defected to join the rebellion. Some of the marchers brandished signs: “We will make Rwanda the twelfth province of the Congo,” and “No to Tutsi expansion in the DRC and Africa.” As the cheering crowd looked on, the famous, brawny wrestler Edingwe—he could often be seen jogging and singing with his followers along

The line between the Rwandan government and the Tutsi people as a whole was quickly blurring.

Demagogues in Kinshasa bore a heavy responsibility in whipping up ethnic animosities in the capital. But they didn’t have to work too hard. Rwandan troops had humiliated and angered residents in the capital during their year-long stay. Kinois—as the inhabitants of the capital were known—had been working for years against Mobutu’s dictatorship. They had marched in the tens of thousands and had seen their brothers and sisters tortured and killed, only to see their victory snatched away by a bunch of foreigners. As Kinois often quip: “We put Mobutu in the ambulance. All Kabila did was drive the corpse to the cemetery.” Then the new rulers, who didn’t speak their language and didn’t look like them, began beating them and telling the women they dressed like prostitutes. They felt emasculated and abandoned to hunger and poverty.

Back at the Tshatshi military camp, Malik Kijege fielded calls from Tutsi soldiers around the country. Congolese Tutsi had been left in military bases around the country after the Rwandans left. As soon as the rebels announced their insurgency against Kabila, these Tutsi were seen as Rwanda’s fifth column and were attacked. In Kisangani and Kalemie, dozens were killed. Over a hundred Tutsi officers in a training camp in Kamina, in the southern Katanga Province, were rounded up and executed.

It was as if the mobs believed treason was genetically encoded in Tutsi identity.

One of the army generals took the floor and solemnly told his colleagues that they wouldn’t be able to defend the city. The finance minister then cleared his throat and, somewhat embarrassed, announced that he had made the decision to empty the state’s coffers. “I have tallied the money left in the Central Bank,” he told the stunned room. “There is $22,000 for each of us. I have put it in sacks in a truck outside. Use it well.”

Finally, just as the city had lost hope, the tide turned. On August 18, seeking international legitimacy for intervening, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe convened a meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) security committee, an organ over which he presided. They hastily approved a military intervention to support Kabila against “foreign aggression,” although they did not have the quorum or the mandate to do so. The decision also deepened a row between Mugabe and President Nelson Mandela, who advocated a diplomatic approach.24 Mugabe, with typical gusto, told Mandela, “Those who want to keep out, fine, let them keep out. But let them keep [their] silence about those who want to help.”

As the Angolans moved in from the west, cutting off the Rwandans’ rear base and supply chain, Zimbabwean and Congolese forces squeezed them from Kinshasa. “It looks like there will be a Banyamulenge sandwich,” a western diplomat commented, lumping all of the invading troops—Rwandans, Ugandans, Congolese—into one generic term.