Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (39 page)

After his incendiary speech, Kabila had retreated to Lubumbashi, 1,000 miles from Kinshasa and near the border with Zambia. It looked to be a good place from which to flee the Congo—if he had to, which seemed ever more likely. From there he continued his diplomatic offensive to bring in Angolan, Namibian, and Zimbabwean troops. He left a confused war council behind in Kinshasa: a bunch of his ministers, mostly civilians dressed in military garb, who appeared on national television and tried to calm the population. “Our army had disintegrated,” Didier Mumengi remembered. “Our best units had gone westwards to stop the advance of the rebels. We were left with a bunch of policemen.” Mumengi himself was seen almost daily at press conferences, looking out of place in his green fatigues.

It seemed impossible to stop the Rwandan advance. They were moving twenty miles a day, capturing army stockpiles and sending government soldiers scattering. Commander David, who had been in charge of President Kabila’s bodyguard, was part of the rebel advance. He had kept an address book with telephone numbers of Kabila’s ministers and advisors. As the rebels advanced, David would make taunting phone calls to Kinshasa.

“Mumengi, you better pack your bags—we will be in Kinshasa tomorrow night,” he told the information minister when they were still two hundred miles away. He rang other ministers to give them updates on how far they had reached and to ridicule the Congolese army’s feeble efforts.

Kabila ordered his entire cabinet to Lubumbashi. Senior members of government, especially those from Katanga, heeded his call, packing their families into SUVs. At the airport, luxury vehicles crammed the tarmac, unloading mattresses, suitcases, and entire wardrobes to send to Lubumbashi. Didier Mumengi, who didn’t know anyone in Lubumbashi, decided to stay, against the pleas of his wife, who implored him to flee. He resorted to giving his distressed family sleeping pills so they could sleep through the night.

Then, without warning, the lights went out throughout the city. The Rwandan offensive had captured the Inga Dam, the huge hydroelectric power plant on the Congo River a hundred and fifty miles west of Kinshasa. The city of five million people went dark, with only a few hotels and office buildings lit by backup generators. Even those generators were soon winding down, as the rebels also cut the pipeline bringing fuel to the city. People were stuck in elevators, food rotted in freezers, doctors in some hospital emergency rooms had to operate with flashlights, and water pumps stopped working. When the energy minister, Babi Mbayi, gave a phone interview to a foreign journalist, saying that they had some technical problems with the electricity supply, Commander David called him from his satellite phone and said, “Babi, you think this is a technical problem? Wait till we reach Kinshasa.”

Rwanda’s decision to cut electricity to the capital sticks in the memory of Kinois to this day. That the rebels would jeopardize the lives of sick hospital patients and hamstring water and fuel supply was the last straw for many and only further justified their violent hatred of the Tutsi.

The city’s fate was looking increasingly sealed. The ministers who had stayed behind in Kinshasa held an emergency meeting at the ministry of planning. As a sign of how dire the situation had become, the army commander sent soldiers to provide security for the ministers, but they showed up without guns, loafing about sheepishly. 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.
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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.”
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By the morning of the following day, four hundred Zimbabwean troops were digging trenches around Kinshasa’s Njili airport, and several attack helicopters patrolled the skies. Two days later, Angolan president Dos Santos, who had been sitting on the fence, made up his mind that it was better to have the devil you know ruling Kinshasa than a political unknown.
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Thousands of Angolan troops began streaming across the border with tanks and armored personnel carriers to recapture the Kitona military base from the Rwandans. The Angolan military, which brought with it attack helicopters and MiG 23 fighter bombers, began raining bombs and artillery fire down on the Rwandan-led troops. Malik Kijege remembered the Angolan air force hitting an oil pipeline, sending a plume of fire into the night, illuminating the scattering rebel forces.

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.
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Within days, the tide had turned. With no escape route, the rebels made a desperate run for Kinshasa, hoping they would be able to fulfill their mission with the ammunition and food they had left. At night, rebel troops in civilian dress began infiltrating the densely populated Masina and Njili neighborhoods on the northwestern outskirts of town, close to the airport. Bolstered by Zimbabwean and Angolan troops, Laurent Kabila returned to Kinshasa and announced that victory was theirs. Exhorting people to take up sticks and spears to defend the city, he declared that, “ The people must be completely mobilized and armed to crush the aggressors.”
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His cigar-smoking chief of staff was less subtle. “The rebels are vermin, microbes which must be methodically eradicated,” he said on state radio.
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The population heeded the call. They pounced on a dozen people they suspected were rebels, looped tires around their necks, doused them in gasoline, and made them into human torches. Charred bodies lined one of the main streets in the popular Masina neighborhood. A foreign television crew captured on film two Congolese soldiers throwing a man off a bridge and shooting him dead as he tried, with his legs broken, to crawl out of the water to safety. The images went around the world and were later memorialized on the Internet. It isn’t clear, however, whether these final casualties were Tutsi. The Rwandans had recruited many of Mobutu’s former soldiers. Eyewitnesses suggest that it was these recruits, mostly youths from the western Congo, who were sent as spies into Kinshasa, as they knew their way around and could blend into the local population.
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The last part of the battle for Kinshasa featured a group of several hundred of these soldiers stripping off their uniforms before being cornered in a field of eucalyptus trees outside Kinshasa. Kabila’s chief of staff laughed as he told the story at a press conference, cigar in mouth: “The rebels are like monkeys, swinging in the trees with no clothes.”
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As with many episodes of the war, the battle for Kinshasa was not without its share of surreal moments. A group of around seventy Tutsi was stuck in the Burundian embassy for several weeks, unable to move because of the fighting. They had congregated there from throughout Kinshasa in the hope that the Tutsi-led government of Burundi would provide them protection. The nearby Swiss embassy sent packages of food and water to keep them afloat, but the living conditions were deteriorating by the day. The embassy was housed in a small building, and a dozen people slept in each room. Ambassador Martin Sindabizera, himself a Tutsi, paced back and forth through the corridors, speaking with Burundian president Buyoya about possible evacuation plans. His phone rang nonstop with requests from Tutsi throughout Kinshasa—and even several Hutu who also felt targeted—to come and get them. “I wasn’t able to do anything for most of them. It was soul-wrenching to hear their pleas hour after hour and feel so helpless.”
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When he received word that there was an influential Rwandan family trapped not far from the embassy, Sindabizera decided to go himself. On the street in front of their hideout, several policemen stopped his car and told him to get out. As he stepped out, one of them yelled: “
Betaye masasi!
” After a year in Kinshasa, the ambassador knew enough Lingala to understand what that meant: Shoot him! The policeman loaded his gun, but an older soldier stopped him. “He has diplomatic license plates,” he pointed out calmly. “You can’t shoot him just like that. We have rules in this country.” Giving way to this reasoning, the soldiers took him in for interrogation. In a small cell at the nearby police station, the ambassador found a bizarre group of people, all of whom were alleged to be guilty of plotting against the state: two of his own advisors, whom he had sent ahead to evacuate the Rwandan family; a group of five mixed-race women in tight jeans and makeup, accused of having been mistresses of Tutsi politicians in Kinshasa; and a dozen cowed street children and soldiers who may have been involved in the rebellion or were just victims of a shakedown. “It was generalized paranoia,” the ambassador remembered. “They pulled in people to make money, for the shape of their noses, for anything at all.” After four hours of interrogation, the ambassador was set free. “Don’t talk to the BBC!” they ordered.

Back at the embassy, the situation was getting worse by the day. Several of the people seeking refuge had medical conditions, and he didn’t think they would be able to hold out much longer. The sewage system was breaking down, and the water pumps only worked intermittently. Finally, Burundian president Pierre Buyoya decided on a risky evacuation. He sent a jet from Bujumbura with several trusted soldiers, while the ambassador sent a trusted Indian businessman with several thousand dollars down the fifteen-mile road to the airport to dole out bribes to all of the roadblock commanders. He kept the biggest sum for the commander of the airport. They would make a run for it.

The ambassador laughed when he remembered the operation. “The pilot thought he was flying to Brazzaville. Only a fool would have accepted to fly a Burundian aircraft into Kinshasa airport during that mess.” Since the Brazzaville airport was just several miles across the river from the Kinshasa landing strip, it was easy to pull off. Several minutes before landing, the Burundian army officer on board pulled out a pistol in the cockpit. “Change of plans,” he told the terrified pilot. “We are landing in Kinshasa.”

The Burundian convoy, crammed to capacity with children, women, and diplomats, hurtled through the deserted streets as the bribed policemen and soldiers pulled away the roadblocks they had set up. At the airport, the passengers rushed onto the plane. At the last moment, just as the plane was beginning to taxi onto the runway, several pickups full of soldiers sped in front of it, blocking its path. The ambassador called the airport commander, alarmed, asking him what had happened with their arrangement.

“I can’t do anything, sir,” he responded. “It’s the presidential guard.” The ambassador sighed, looking down the rows of the airplane, full of anxious faces and crying children. “I thought the game was over,” he remembered. “I was sure that Kabila must have pulled the plug on our operation.” Having seen what had happened to other Tutsi in Kinshasa, they expected the worst. The ambassador told the pilot to lower the boarding ramp so he could talk to the Congolese commander. The few Burundian officers on the plane loaded their pistols and waited anxiously.