Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (27 page)

Laurent Kabila’s improvised army, the AFDL, arrived in Tingi-Tingi on February 28, 1997. Many sick or weak refugees did not manage to flee. Dozens were crushed to death or drowned following a stampede on a nearby bridge. Some 2,000 survived the attacks and were airlifted back to Rwanda by aid organizations.

Others were killed. A worker for the local Red Cross, who, ten years later, was still too afraid to tell me his name, said he had returned several days afterward to find bodies bludgeoned to death in the camp’s tented health centers. Others had fallen, intravenous needles still in their arms, in the forests nearby. A local truck driver, who had been commandeered by the AFDL to help clean up the town after the attack, told me there were dead bodies everywhere, refugees who had been too weak to flee and had then been bayoneted by the soldiers. “They didn’t use bullets on the refugees—they used knives,” he told me. His eyes glazed over as he remembered the image of an infant sucking on his dead mother’s breast, trying in vain to get some sustenance from her cold body. Reverend Kapala, who had fled into the forest for one night and then returned, told me, “They killed any male refugee over the age of twelve. They slit their throats. Not the women or children. Just the men.”

However, when I separately asked the truck driver, the minister, and the Red Cross worker how each had felt about the AFDL, they all quickly responded, “It was a liberation! We were overjoyed.”

I was amazed. I pressed Reverend Kapala: “What about their killing of refugees? How can you call them liberators?”

He shrugged. “That was a Rwandan affair. It didn’t concern us.” He told me the story of a brave local man, who, during a public meeting shortly after the AFDL’s arrival, asked the local commander why they killed so much. “He answered, ‘Show me the Congolese we killed. There are none.’ And it was true. They didn’t kill any Congolese.”

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.

After their flight from Tingi-Tingi, the refugees marched toward Kisangani, only to find their path blocked again by the Zairian army at Ubundu, a small town sixty miles south of Kisangani. After several days, the local commander allowed Beatrice’s group to pass, in return for five hundred dollars. Leaders went around to the thousands of refugees, collecting tattered and soiled banknotes from different currencies until they had the sum. Most of the refugees, however, stayed behind, too tired or afraid to continue.

In the meantime, the AFDL had already conquered Kisangani, the country’s third largest city. Some 85,000 refugees were stuck in the camps along the train line between Ubundu and Kisangani. They knew that if the international community did not come to their rescue, they would be forced to follow Beatrice and the others, crossing the mighty Lualaba River and plunging once again into the inhospitable jungle, where there were no villages or food for dozens of miles.

Humanitarian organizations followed the refugee stream, hopscotching from one camp to the next, packing their bags every time the AFDL approached. They set up shop in various camps around Ubundu in early April, providing elementary health care and nutrition to the despondent refugees. The conditions they found were terrible: In some camps, mortality rates were five times higher than the technical definition of an “out-of-control emergency.”
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Nevertheless, by this time the AFDL soldiers had arrived in the camps and began regulating humanitarian access. Foreign health workers were only allowed into the camps for a few hours during the day.

Finally, on April 20, the AFDL soldiers made their move. Without warning, Rwandan soldiers shut down all humanitarian access to the camps south of Kisangani. When diplomats and aid workers asked, they were told the security situation had suddenly deteriorated. Then, several planeloads of well-equipped Rwandan soldiers arrived at Kisangani’s airport and immediately headed toward the camps. The next day, the Rwandan soldiers attacked them. Congolese workers in the camps reported well-armed soldiers in uniforms participating in the attack, lobbing mortars and grenades into the dense thicket of tents and people during the nighttime attack.
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One nurse working for Doctors Without Borders recalled: “One day, they dropped bombs on the camp; everybody fled, leaving everything behind and scattering in the equatorial forest—there were many dead. The AFDL put the cadavers into mass graves and burnt them.”
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When journalists and humanitarian organizations were allowed back to the camps three days later, they found them ransacked. The thousands of refugees who were there had all disappeared. Doctors Without Borders had been providing medical treatment to 6,250 patients who were too weak even to walk short distances. When they didn’t find any trace of them after one week, they assumed they had died, either violently or from disease and malnutrition.

How many of the Rwandan Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda during the genocide died in the Congo? From the beginning, the refugee crisis was bogged down in number games. One major problem was the lack of a starting figure: Rwandan officials challenged the United Nations’ figure of 1.1 million refugees in the camps before the invasion, arguing that aid estimates err on the high side so that no one is deprived of food or medicine. The ex-FAR and former government officials in the camps had refused to allow a census, themselves inflating their population in order to receive more aid. Doctors Without Borders’ estimate was 950,000, although Rwandan officials sometimes place it even lower. In the early days of the AFDL invasion, between 400,000 and 650,000 refugees returned to Rwanda, and a further 320,000 refugees were either settled in UN camps or repatriated over the course of 1997, a total of 720,000 to 970,000 refugees. As the starting figure is not clear, this number is not very helpful: Anywhere between zero and 380,000 refugees could still have been missing.
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Also, just because refugees were missing, they weren’t necessarily dead. Some had repatriated spontaneously, without UNHCR help; many others were hiding in the mountains of the eastern Congo, and others had settled with friends and relatives in villages and cities across the region.

It is more fruitful to base estimates on eyewitness accounts. When in July 1997, after eight months of walking, a group of refugees arrived on the other side of the Congo River in neighboring Republic of Congo, Doctors Without Borders conducted a survey of 266 randomly selected people, asking them how many members of their families had survived the trek. The result was disturbing: Only 17.5 percent of people in their families had made it, while 20 percent had been killed and a further 60 percent had disappeared, meaning they had been separated from them at some point in the journey. Over half of those killed were women; it wasn’t just ex-FAR being hunted down. If that survey was representative of the rest of the refugees—the sample size is too small to be wholly reliable—then at least 60,000 refugees had been killed, while the whereabouts of another 180,000 were unknown.

Reports by journalists and human rights groups confirm this magnitude of the killings. Although the AFDL repeatedly denied access to international human rights investigators, making it difficult to confirm many reports issued by churches and civil society groups, there is no doubt that massacres took place. The UN human rights envoy, the Chilean judge Roberto Garreton, received reports from local groups that between 8,000 and 12,000 people were massacred by the AFDL in the eastern Congo, including Congolese Hutu who were accused of complicity with the ex-FAR. In the Chimanga refugee camp forty miles west of Bukavu, eyewitness reports collected by Amnesty International tell of forty AFDL soldiers separating about five hundred men from women and children and murdering them. Close by, a Voice of America reporter found a mass grave containing the remains of a hundred people who, according to villagers, were refugees massacred by the rebels. Rwandan Bibles and identity cards were scattered amid human remains and UN food bags.
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In the Hutu villages I visited north of Goma a decade later, villagers consistently spoke of RPF commanders calling meetings and then tying up and executing dozens of men. They showed me cisterns and latrines with skeletal remains still showing.

Finally, more than a decade after the massacres, a UN team went back to investigate some of the worst massacres of the Congo wars, including those against the Hutu refugees. They interviewed over a hundred witnesses of the refugee massacres, including people who had survived and some who had helped bury the victims. They concluded that Rwandan troops and their AFDL allies killed tens of thousands of refugees, mostly in cold blood. These were not people caught in the crossfire: The report details how the invading troops singled out and killed the refugees, often with hatchets, stones, or knives. “The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who posed no threat to the attacking forces.”
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Controversially, the report concludes that the Rwandan troops may have been guilty of acts of genocide against the Hutu, given the systematic nature of the killing.
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One of the few places where refugees were killed in plain sight of hundreds of Congolese eyewitnesses was in Mbandaka, where the Congo River separates the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the smaller, former French colony, the Republic of the Congo. The Rwandan army and its Congolese allies had by this time pursued the refugees for over 1,000 miles over mountains, through jungles and savannahs. At Mbandaka, the refugees were blocked by the expanse of the Congo River, which is over a mile wide at that point.