Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (33 page)

For the small gallery of reporters who had waited for the meeting with Kabila to end, though, Richardson had this upbeat message. “It was a discovery on both sides. It was a good meeting,” he said repeatedly, again trotting out some of the boilerplate he had used earlier in the day about the transition. “Mr. Kabila assured me that any Alliance soldiers involved in human rights violations would be punished.”

Vitally, Richardson said, Kabila had dropped his sixty-day deadline for the Hutu refugees who remained in Zaire to leave the country. Henceforth, this would merely be a goal. Meanwhile, UN relief workers were to be allowed back into rebel-held zones, including areas where there had been reports of atrocities.

After we left the villa, Richardson shared his personal take on Kabila. America’s newest African friend was “a street-smart, charismatic person with a quick intelligence but a very narrow vision and perspective, simply because he’s been in the bush all these years,” he said. “I told him that if he wanted a relationship with the United States, democracy, human rights and free-market economics were going to be important. I told him that he had taken a huge hit on the human rights issue, and that this was going to be important for us. ‘Clean up your act, because you’ll be a pariah if this stuff continues.’

“I told him you’re going to need us, and that’s when the breakthrough came,” Richardson continued. “We established a tie, and the ambassador [Simpson] even got his fax and phone numbers.” In the tense and dramatic days ahead, I would come to realize that of all the talk, the exchange of phone numbers would be most important.

As a parting gift, Richardson said he had given Kabila a New York Yankees cap.

Our traveling party checked out of our hotel early the next morning, and I grabbed a coffee and croissant on the veranda, where I found Ambassador Simpson looking crisp and distinctly satisfied in his tan Brooks Brothers suit. He did his best to brush me off, but when Richardson joined us and behaved with his customary friendliness, the ambassador was obliged to play along.

We were to fly to rebel-held Kisangani, where we would make a brief stop so that Richardson could demonstrate his concern for the plight of the Hutu refugees and meet with the local authorities. Once we were airborne, Richardson’s confidences continued briefly. He told me he had addressed Kabila as “president,” and that this had disarmed him. “Kabila told me that he was surprised to get a visit from somebody like me. He said, I thought you Americans were still tilting toward Mobutu.”

At first blush, Kabila’s reported comment seemed ordinary enough. After all, the United States had helped Mobutu knock off Lumumba, and had supported him unstintingly until now. Moreover, if the outside world knew little detail about Kabila’s life, the American intelligence agencies undoubtedly knew much more, and the closer one looked, the uglier the picture became.

There was good reason the Kabila strut we saw on CNN, an endlessly replayed clip showing the rebel leader reviewing his young boot-clad troops in Kisangani or Goma, resembled that of a streetcorner hustler. He had perfected it the old-fashioned way, as a genuine thug. He was a survivor who had never given up on his dreams of wealth and power, even if his ideology, a utopian Marxism much influenced by China’s Cultural Revolution, had long ago lost its fervor.

For years, Kabila had the merit of running the only armed opposition to Mobutu. His own obscure little rebellion had begun in October 1967, when the young, would-be revolutionary traversed Lake Tanganyika at the head of a band of sixteen men and set up camp in the mountains of Zaire’s South Kivu Province, armed with a total of three revolvers.

Che Guevara, who had come to the Congo with a detachment of Cuban revolutionaries to bolster the Simbas in their fight against Mobutu’s mercenaries, had all but written off Kabila two years earlier. In the very last lines of his Congo diary,
Pasajes,
he said of the then erratic young man that “he has not yet developed an ideology or displayed the seriousness and spirit of sacrifice necessary to be the leader of a revolution. . . . He is young and may change, but I . . . have very great doubts that he will be able to overcome his deficiencies.”

Kabila’s life story bespoke extraordinary determination, but in service of what? Any attempts to answer that question quickly lead into extraordinarily murky territory. In the early days, Kabila had once preached that all of the country’s wealth would be placed at the disposal of the people. Money would be abolished, and liberated Zaire would function through some kind of magical accounting system where every citizen would be given chits and “people’s stores” would provide for their needs in food and clothing.

For a few years, at least, this evocation of paradise seemed to appeal to the Bemba ethnic group that predominates in the Fizi area. The rebel leader’s delusions of grandeur soon spun out of control, though, even as the territory under his group’s dominion stagnated and shrank. Eventually Kabila accumulated more titles than Mobutu himself, claiming to be president of the republic, head of his Popular Revolutionary Party, commander in chief of the Popular Armed Forces, president of the Popular Assembly and foreign minister, and when the number two and number three officials in the revolutionary hierarchy died, their posts were simply eliminated.

Kabila’s propagandists hailed even the smallest skirmish as a major battle, although many of the clashes with Mobutu’s army were staged. It was convenient for local commanders to have a threat like the evanescent Popular Armed Forces around, if only to keep the salaries flowing from distant Kinshasa.

By the mid-1970s the rebellion was not looking so promising, and Kabila turned toward outright hustling, poaching elephants for their ivory, selling leopard skins and dealing himself into the underground gold trade that has long been a feature of life in Zaire’s eastern hinterland.

Ultimately, Kabila forced his way onto Washington’s radar in 1975 by kidnapping three American students and a Dutch researcher. They were released by his rebels sixty-seven days later, after an undisclosed sum was discreetly paid to the rebellion. By 1979, he had morphed from a localized incarnation of Mao into Kurtz, Conrad’s monster in
Heart of Darkness,
and was ruling the zone under his control through sheer terror and atrocity. With his unpaid fighters deserting and local populations rebelling against him, he organized a bizarre purge of suspected sorcerers, poisoning an estimated two thousand elderly people in a modern-day version of the Salem witch trials. “Toward this end, he made a concoction of roots and herbs,” writes William B. Cosma. “It was a very strong potion, so strong that any physically weak person would go dizzy if he swallowed it or had it splashed in his eyes. Dizziness, though, was a sign of sorcery, and any person showing signs of it after this test was branded a sorcerer and burned alive.”

Not long afterward, Kabila reportedly came to the attention of the United States in yet another way. In the late 1970s, an American emissary, Henry McDonald, reportedly visited him in his Fizi redoubt to persuade him to end his rebellion and join the Mobutu government. Kabila is said to have thought favorably of the idea, but in the end he found Kinshasa’s price wanting. “Since he was not satisfied, he decided to remain in the opposition, in order to make his presence felt and to enrich himself by exploiting the riches of the region, even if his party was declining,” writes Cosma.

Through most of the 1980s, Kabila could boast only a tiny band of men under arms in the mountains in Fizi, perhaps eighty at most. For himself, he preferred a nearly invisible exile, mostly in Tanzania, usually operating under the pseudonym Francis Mutware. That was, until the Rwandans came calling in 1996 with a plan to invade Zaire.

Since the mysterious start of Kabila’s 1996 rebellion, Washington had been unable to escape suspicion that it had secretly been the uprising’s sponsor. The “evidence” was fragmentary at best, but given its history in the region, the United States had only itself to blame for the blend of skepticism and outright cynicism that observers manifested toward its every step in Zaire.

In the months immediately prior to Kabila’s rebellion, the United States had trained hundreds of Rwandan troops in everything from psychological operations to tactical special forces exercises. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, had trained at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and could be presumed to have made many valuable American contacts. And in any event, Kagame had visited Washington in August 1996, just six weeks before his country launched its invasion, to discuss the threat his regime faced from Hutu refugees massed across the border, in Zaire.

Senior officials from the American Embassy in Rwanda reportedly had been sighted leaving Kabila’s residence in Goma, the eastern Zairian city that was the rebellion’s first headquarters, in November 1996. By April 1997, Dennis Hankins had been posted to Goma. And there were persistent reports of American troops spotted in Rwanda even after the war began.
¹¹

As our white State Department jet soared over a dense, dark and immensely wet world of endless green, Richardson’s Kabila anecdotes petered out and I was left to chat in the cramped quarters with a cluster of other Clinton administration officials. These ranged from the CIA’s man aboard to Sean McCormick, who ran African affairs on the National Security Council. The conversation quickly turned to the theme of the rumors linking Kabila to the United States, and over the next hour or so, a thumbnail official narrative was spun. The bottom line, I was told, was that because of the attacks on Rwanda from Hutu refugee camps in Zaire, Washington had known that trouble was coming to East Africa, but was caught entirely by surprise by Kabila’s sweep across the country.

“I was on the April 1996 mission with [then Deputy CIA Director] George Tenet to Zaire, and he told Mobutu that if he doesn’t take care of this situation it is going to come back and bite him in the ass,” McCormick said. “We came up with a plan in July to get the refugees to return back to their country, gradually reducing the camps. The Rwandans and Ugandans felt good about this, but nobody in the international community would accept it. We were out there alone, and finally, the Rwandans threw up their hands and said we’re fed up.”

There was an uneasy moment of silence, and I felt as if I was being sized up by a bunch of very eager salesmen. Should I press ahead with my most serious reservations, fed by the ache that still haunted me from seeing the faces of innocent people tracked by death in places like Tingi-Tingi and Ubundu, or should I let their story unfurl all of its own energy, limiting myself to pro forma questions to show that I was engaged?

The CIA man, who had lived up to the secretive image of his profession throughout the trip, sharing the merest scraps of dialogue with me and then tuning me out before I could pin him down on anything, including his name, suddenly piped up. “We didn’t know about [plans for a rebellion]. We weren’t informed about it. We didn’t have any intel on it until the attacks first started in the Uvira region,” he said. “We knew that at a minimum [the Rwandan army] wanted to push the refugees back from the border, and at a maximum, in my view, they would want to kill them.

“When the rebellion took off, we were caught playing catch-up, and the Zairians got steamrolled. There is no wink and a nod. There was never a wink and a nod.”

We were running against the clock in Kisangani. There was an absurd proposition behind the stopover: a photo-op amid a holocaust. In the forest less than thirty miles away, extraordinarily unspeakable things had been happening. According to the latest reports, the AFDL had blocked access to one of the last refugee-gathering points south of Kisangani, a place of horrific death with no more descriptive name than its distance marker, Kilometer 42. Bulldozers had been sighted heading south down the road from Kisangani, and relief agency officials who had passed nearby on a train said the area reeked of incinerated bodies. Stories were spreading from Zairian villagers of daily roundups of the emaciated and diseased Hutu who straggled up the road toward Kisangani. Mini-massacres had become the routine, and women and children were given no more mercy than the men, who were ostensibly suspected of carrying out the anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda three years before.

Mocking Kabila’s promises, UN officials were being turned back by Tutsi soldiers every time they tried to venture down the road that leads south out of town. The pretense for their refusal to allow forward passage was that they had never received any orders to that effect. Each night, meanwhile, under the cover of the equatorial forest, the bonfires and the bulldozers continued to do their work.

Reports reached us of a fresh arrival of refugees into town, and soon after our landing we rushed to one of Kisangani’s river ports to witness it. Our timing was perfect. With a sweeping arcade of flamboyant trees framing the scene in red against the silver-hot sky, Richardson approached the docks with his party bunched closely around him. Aides quickly ushered him toward a distraught mother who carried an infant swaddled in a colorful scrap of indigo cloth. Someone whispered something in Richardson’s ear about the baby needing urgent medical care. Richardson’s face bore the most basic expression of human sympathy and recognition of life’s fragility, and his pity appeared entirely genuine. Nonetheless, as he spoke a few words of sympathy to the mother, there was an inescapable feeling of an American electoral campaign stop. Then, at the very moment he reached for the baby, its short life expired.

It took us all a few minutes to gather our composure, but soon enough the caravan was in motion again. We went to see the local governor, Jean Sitolo, freshly appointed by the AFDL, and from wrenching pathos we segued seamlessly into pious sermons. “It is too bad you were not able to visit Biaro. Our alliance has been accused of massacring refugees, but whatever incidents have occurred are things that have happened between the refugees themselves. Don’t forget, because of hunger, because they have been walking for two years [
sic
], many of them are dying.”