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

by Jason K. Stearns

So how did Congolese experience the violence? Many Congolese never did; they only heard about it and suffered the economic and political consequences. But for millions of people in the east of the country, an area roughly the size of Texas, daily life was punctuated by confrontations with armed men.

It was this proxy war fought between Kigali and Kinshasa’s allies that caused the most suffering for civilians. Without providing any training, Kinshasa dropped tons of weapons and ammunition at various airports in the jungles of the eastern Congo for the Hutu militia as well as for Mai-Mai groups. The countryside became militarized, as discontented and unemployed youth joined militias and set up roadblocks to “tax” the local population. Family and land disputes, which had previously been settled in traditional courts, were now sometimes solved through violence, and communal feuds between rival clans or tribes resulted in skirmishes and targeted killings.

drunken wife arouses anger. Her shame cannot be hidden.”

Kilungutwe.

furtively

Mass violence does not just affect the families of the dead. It tears at the fabric of society and lodges in the minds of the witnesses and perpetrators alike. A decade after the violence, it seemed that the villagers were still living in its aftershocks.

“You act like we had a choice. We didn’t. We had to save ourselves,” he said as he navigated the potholes in the road. After a long pause, he added, “The war was good and bad for us.” Measuring his words carefully, he said, “But so many of us died. If you go to the high plateau, you won’t see a cemetery. But every family there has lost at least one child, if not more, to the war. Our dead are buried across the Congo. We have nowhere to go and mourn for them.”13 He estimated that up to a quarter of all youths joined the war. Very few of them had returned to the high plateau.

Their ascendance, however, only further soured relations with other communities. It was as if the RCD wanted to coerce the population into reconciliation. When confronted with resistance from local militias and civil society, which opposed what they perceived as Rwandan aggression, the RCD responded with repression. This merely fueled local resistance, and the region descended into vicious, cyclical violence.

“The biggest obstacle is that those who are in power, the minority . . . , they are like one riding on the back of a tiger. And they really want almost a water-tight assurance before they get off the back of the tiger because they feel if they get off the back of the tiger, it will eat them.”14

There will be long-term repercussions of the Banyamulenge’s participation in the two rebellions. In 2002, a opinion poll asked people whether they thought Banyamulenge were Congolese. Only 26 percent thought so.15 In 2004, when a Munyamulenge commander led a mutiny against the Congolese army in the eastern border town of Bukavu, the population there reacted by launching a vicious witch hunt against Tutsi in town. The United Nations had to evacuate the entire Tutsi population, around 3,000 women, men, and children with mattresses and bags piled high on UN cars, from town. In 2007, when rumors spread in the southern town of Moba that a convoy of Banyamulenge refugees might be returning home from Zambia, local politicians provoked riots, protesting the “return of foreigners to our country.” These resentments are in part bred by opportunist demagogues but are also grounded in the brutal rule by the AFDL and RCD in the eastern Congo between 1996 and 2003.

Kabila was paranoid but not necessarily wrong. There was good reason for western corporate interests to be angered. Kabila had reneged on several mining contracts, most notably with Banro, a Canadian company, and with Anglo American, a London-based mining giant.

Inflation, corruption, and general administrative stagnation: These were the characteristics of Laurent Kabila’s regime. In retrospect, Kabila’s supporters blame all of his regime’s woes on the war. In reality, however, Mzee helped bring his problems on himself through a slew of incoherent and poorly executed initiatives.

“Mzee wanted solutions now, not two years in the future. We would go to him with elaborate plans for the economy,” his information minister remembered, “but he would say‘Two years! I will be dead in two years. Bring me projects that can bring us cash in two weeks!’”

The war scuttled all plans for long-term reform and prompted quick fixes that only further debilitated the state. The diamond industry was another example. With the former cash cows of the economy—the state-run copper and cobalt companies—moribund, the government was almost solely reliant on diamonds and oil, which made up 75 percent of exports.8 However, Kabila’s monetary policy prompted diamond sellers to smuggle most of their goods to neighboring countries to avoid transactions in Congolese francs. To make matters worse, in August 2000 the president granted a monopoly of all diamond sales to Dan Gertler, a young Israeli tycoon, in return for $20 million a year. The move was intended to provide the government with some much-needed cash, but as a result Kabila crippled the sector and alienated the powerful Lebanese diamond trading community in Kinshasa. Without smuggling, the entire diamond market in the Congo was estimated to be worth $600 million. Under Kabila’s whimsical policies, Congolese exports shrunk to barely $175 million.

It was telling that the most important front of the Congo war was being fought almost entirely by foreign troops on both sides. “The Rwandans didn’t trust the RCD with such an important task,” remembered Colonel Maurice Gateretse, the commander of regular Burundian army troops. “They had behaved so badly that we radioed back to their headquarters, saying they should be removed. They would use up a whole clip in thirty minutes and come and ask for more. These guys were more interested in pillaging the villages than fighting.”

With the Rwandans just a few miles away, the army high command, including General Joseph Kabila, tried to board a helicopter to flee back to Lubumbashi, only to find that there was no fuel for that either. “It was like Mobutu all over again,” a presidential aide told me. “Someone had sold all the helicopter fuel to make a profit. We were the victims of our own ineptitude.”

President Laurent Kabila, who had been following the fighting from Lubumbashi, two hundred miles away, was devastated. For twenty-four hours he had no news from his son Joseph, whom he considered the closest member of his confused, sprawling family network. When he heard that his son and the rest of the army command had fled to Zambia, he had them all arrested, including Joseph, and brought back to the Congo.

Desperate, Kabila flew to Angola, where he met with President Edouardo Dos Santos. There, the message was even more severe. By the end of 2000, the Angolan army, which had never sent many troops to the front line, had badly thrashed Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels in the north of the country and was no longer so dependent on Kabila’s military collaboration. One of Kabila’s aides recalled: “Dos Santos told him to liberalize the diamond trade, float the exchange rate, and meet with his opponents.”19 In other words: Everything you have tried has failed. The stick hasn’t worked; you have to try with some carrots now.

So who ordered the killing of Mzee? Congolese imagination is knotted around Kabila’s death, entangled in multiple narratives and histories that compete to explain why the scrawny bodyguard shot the president. Part of the problem is that there were too many people who had a reason, who stood to benefit from his death. As the Economist quipped, fifty million people—the country’s entire population—had a motive. By the time of his death, Kabila had managed to offend or alienate not only his enemies but also most of his allies.

Masasu was arrested along with over fifty other soldiers. Several weeks later, on November 27, 2000, he was executed on the front line at Pweto.

Masasu’s execution prompted riots in military camps in Kinshasa, and hundreds of kadogo were arrested or fled across the river to Brazzaville. Although details are murky, at least several dozen were executed by firing squad in the capital.25 It was then, according to interviews of kadogo carried out by a French journalist, that a fateful meeting was held among the young Kivutians who had remained in the president’s bodyguard.26 “I will kill him,” Rashidi Kasereka is reported to have said, furious over the killing of his friends, to a group of twenty other presidential guards, who cheered their approval.

The Le Monde journalists, who spoke with several of the fugitives, concluded that the assassination had been the work of a bunch of bitter former child soldiers who were seeking revenge. This is possible. However, the whole affair—the lax security at the presidency, the escape from prison, the murder of the Lebanese—seems to be too well choreographed, too slickly greased to have been the doing of a few renegade bodyguards. There are several indications that Rwanda was directly involved. First, according to the Congolese security services, before fleeing, the Masasu crew admitted to being in cahoots with Kigali. Second, when they did flee, along with several affluent Lebanese businessmen, they made their way directly to Rwanda, where some were eventually given influential political and business positions by the government. Last, a former Rwandan security official told me that he had seen Colonel James Kabarebe on the day of the assassination. Kabarebe, who was still running Congo operations for the Rwandan army and would soon be promoted to become head of the army, reportedly slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Good news from Kinshasa. Our boys did it.”28

Others, however, dismiss the Rwandan conspiracy theory.

Any number of narrative strands could have ended in Laurent Kabila’s death.

As so often in the Congo, the truth may never be known. Observers of Congolese politics should steel themselves with a deep skepticism of simple truths in general. Information, in particular regarding matters of state, is often rooted in hearsay and rumor. Indeed, politicians have become adept at using rumors as a tactical weapon, spreading them on purpose to distract from the truth or to smear their opponents.

At one point, he castigated Edy Kapend for having had children with more than one woman. “We practice monogamy here—we don’t recognize polygamy!”31 The audience groaned in dismay.

The court did not provide the accused with decent defense lawyers and barred independent observers from the courtroom for much of the trial.

The prosecutors were military officers and as such answered to their superiors, a fact that undermined their independence. Ma...

including Rashidi’s, without any evidence to indicate they were involved. Emile Mota, the economic affairs advisor who had been present during the assassination, was arrested while he was on the witness stand because he allegedly had contradicted himself. At no point did anybody provide convincing evidence that any of t...

The judge eventually sentenced thirty people to death, ten of whom had b...

If there is one thing the Congolese will remember Mzee for, it is the war. It consumed both Kabila and his government and pushed them into a frenzy of patriotism and, at times, xenophobia. He became obsessed with winning. After all, he had grown up a rebel and felt much more at ease in trying to win a war than to rule a country. But when he became a martyr to his most dear cause, the country heaved a sigh of relief.

“Illegal, illegal! What the hell does ‘illegal’ mean?” Mwenze Kongolo responded when I asked what he thought about the “illegal exploitation” of Congolese resources by foreign companies and states. Mwenze had been the powerful interior minister under Laurent Kabila, and he was himself a shareholder in several mining deals. “We needed money to finance the war. We used our mines and resources to stave off foreign aggression. Is that illegal?”

ohh dear!

The Congo is often referred to as a geological scandal. This is not an exaggeration.

The notion that the war was fueled by international mining capital eager to get its hands on the Congo’s wealth does not hold water; the war slowed down privatization of the sector by a decade, as insecurity and administrative chaos prevented large corporations from investing. It was not until 2005 that major new contracts in Katanga were approved and investors began to invest significant funds.

One of Kabila’s lawyers remembers having warned the president against funding a private company with state resources. The president laughed and told him, “But this law you are talking about, it is man who made it, no?”16

Like an entrepreneur trying to fend off bankruptcy, Kabila started putting up his country’s most valuable assets as collateral to secure further loans.

According to several high-ranking Zimbabwean officials, when Rautenbach was removed from the leadership of Gécamines in March 2000, he threatened to reveal exactly how much President Mugabe and Justice Minister Mnangagwa had made during his tenure at the Congolese parastatal.

“The Congo, at least, got what it wanted: military assistance.”35

coltan (used for capacitors in cell phones and video game consoles), tin, and diamonds. The key difference is that a racket run largely by Rwandans and their allies, not by Kinshasa, was perceived as foreign exploitation, a strange distinction given that Laurent Kabila had been brought to power by the Rwandans and had not been confirmed by elections.

“They were very organized; they provided military escorts to mineral shipments so that we couldn’t stop them at the border; they decided which businessmen could do business. But I also saw Rwandan officers jailed and beaten for having stolen money!”49 Indeed, according to one human rights report, despite the profits coming out of the Congo, civil servants in Rwanda were asked to give up to one month’s salary per annum as contribution to the war effort.50 For many Rwandans, from the presidency down to the school teacher, the war in the Congo was an ideological project, not just an opportunity to plunder.

There was also a host of smaller companies, such as Great Lakes General Trade, which was co-managed by Major Dan Munyuza, an influential RPA officer who worked for the external intelligence office. The chief of security for Rwanda in the Congo, Major Jean Bosco Kazura, was a partner in another Kigali-based company that imported coffee and diamonds from the Congo. According to UN investigators, General James Kabarebe himself would sometimes coordinate the purchase and transport of coltan, tin, and gold through Rwanda.

Business in the Congo required a healthy dose of pragmatism. For many, cut-and-dry morality was out of place here.

Eagle Wings Resources,

This supply chain was unearthed by UN investigators and other analysts, triggering an immediate reaction from international business circles. Some denied allegations outright; others protested that there was nothing illegal about buying or transporting minerals from the eastern Congo.

This is partly true. International law does little to regulate human rights abuses associated with trade.

In other words, consumers are not held responsible for the conditions under which minerals are produced. In the Congo, despite the occasional hue and cry raised by the media, corporate responsibility has been largely ignored—the supply chain is

more convoluted, passing through traders, brokers, smelters, and processing companies.

The tin and coltan that come from the Congo are mixed with those from Brazil, Russia, and China before they make it into our cell phones and laptops. There is a burgeoning consensus in international law that we should care about the conditions under which the products we consume—sweatpants, sneakers, and even timber—are produced. If we can hold companies accountable for their business practices, we will give an incentive to the Congolese government to clean up the mining sector. The “confl...

There are several versions of the story of how Joseph Kabila was chosen to succeed his father. A popular one goes as follows: The day after Laurent Kabila’s assassination, the inner cabal of the presidency meets to decide who would become president. Around a table are the Who’s Who of Congolese power politics: Katangan strongmen, the high brass of the army, and the regime’s economic kingpins.

Of course, this is not what really happened. The truth is buried under hundreds of competing rumors and may never be entirely uncovered. But according to various people who took part in the meetings, the following is as accurate as we might get.