In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (27 page)

When the AFDL's
representatives started calling the BBC offices in Nairobi in late 1996, claiming they would march all the way to Kinshasa, journalists dismissed them with a weary shrug as yet another unknown guerrilla movement, the length of its constituent acronyms only rivalled by its obscurity, making wild plans and farcical claims. Africa is full of them: they surface, splinter into factions—yet more acronyms—only to disappear with equal suddenness.

Anywhere else in the world, the AFDL story would have probably been one of raids on helpless villages, a few clashes with the army, limited annexations of land. A hotch-potch of credos, experiences and motivations, its membership ranged from communists to US-educated academics and village thugs. They had barely had time to work out either a clear structure or an ideological line when south Kivu's deputy governor pushed them into the limelight. Laurent Kabila, the spokesman-turned-leader, was a Maoist with keen commercial instincts, who had funded a fiefdom in eastern Zaire by smuggling out gold and ivory, a trade enlivened by an occasional spot of kidnapping of Westerners. Some of his colleagues thought they were fighting for the overthrow of capitalism, some for the survival of Zaire's Tutsi community, some for the end of Mobutu.

Sure enough, stories from Kivu soon began filtering through: of rape and looting, car-jackings and murder, hysterical fighters on the run. But on examination these turned out not to be atrocities committed by defeated rebels. At the first hint of an encounter with the
AFDL and their Rwandan and Ugandan allies, Zaire's hated army was grabbing what it could find, stealing the four-wheel drive vehicles owned by the aid agencies and heading for the interior.

As Kinshasa promised a ‘devastating counterattack' that never materialised, town after town ‘fell' to the AFDL, whose fighters, in their trademark black wellington boots, could barely keep up with the army's accelerating rout. Despite ineffectual UN appeals for a ceasefire, it became clear this was a war in which very little actual fighting was going on. Conquests began to follow a predictable routine. The incoming rebels would make it clear they intended to take a certain town. Alerted by the arrival of the first drunk army deserters that they were about to face a security crisis, local dignitaries would pool funds and lay on trucks or planes to evacuate the retreating FAZ. If the community could not afford the transport, it hit the road, more afraid of its own army's brutality than anything the rebels could do.

If Mobutu's regime could not quite believe what was happening, neither could the West. With the vantage point of historical hindsight, the telegrams sent by Daniel Simpson, US ambassador in Kinshasa at the time, show an extraordinary knack for getting it completely wrong. They are a measure of how thoroughly Zaire's diplomatic corps—like the country's population—had fallen under the Mobutu spell. ‘The dramatic parts are almost over. The Rwandans have completed what they came to do,' Simpson told Washington in early November. Mid-month, with the AFDL still extending its campaign, he slapped down notions that the rebels enjoyed support outside the Kivu region. Any idea that the movement had supporters throughout the country was ‘just silly'.

In early December, Simpson ruled out any risk of the rebels turning west and heading for the capital. ‘A south Lebanon-type buffer state is all that Rwanda and Uganda have signed on for,' he said. In January 1997, during a lull that preceded Angola's army joining the anti-Mobutu onslaught, Simpson concluded: ‘The Rwandan-Uganda backed rebellion in the east of Zaire is falling apart.'

Whatever Big Vegetables in Kinshasa came to believe, the AFDL's lightning advance was not the result of massive logistical support from Anglophone Western nations determined to destroy their former ally. Zaire's security system was collapsing like a maggot-eaten fruit. As village after village greeted the AFDL ‘liberators', the campaign Rwanda and Uganda had launched to eliminate a border problem transformed itself into something else entirely: the takeover of a vast country. To misquote Churchill, never in the field of military history had so much territory been captured by so few with such little effort.

 

Zaire's national embarrassment
of an army traced its roots back to the Force Publique of the colonial era, which, while hated, had been ruthlessly effective. Its officers had been taught in the best military academies of the US, France, Belgium and Israel, trained by experts from Germany, Egypt, China and South Korea, and supplied with some of the most sophisticated equipment ever seen in Africa. France had provided a batch of Mirage jets; the CIA technicians to maintain its aircraft. In the 1970s it had been regarded as credible enough to contribute to international peace-keeping operations. Other African nations had even sent their officers to Zaire's centres of military excellence for training.

During the first decade of his rule the army had been Mobutu's pride and joy—modernised, expanded and restructured. The former sergeant's original ascension was premised on his success in curbing an army mutiny, his understanding of what made the ordinary subaltern tick. His ability to stay in power long after support had waned had depended in part on public dread of the men who were now quietly stripping off their uniforms and melting into the crowd. No one, surely, could be more aware of the importance of army morale than Mobutu. So what had gone wrong?

I met the man who thought he knew the answer in the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris. Outside, the sun was blazing down
on tourists scrunching the gravel of the Tuileries Gardens, but here it was dark. As a result, his photosensitive lenses had turned clear and I could see his eyes, usually hidden behind dark glasses. He was slightly smaller than I remembered and for a moment I wondered how this quiet, soberly dressed man—his only visible extravagance a diamond-studded gold watch—could ever have become a figure of such controversy.

But it was when he started talking that I was reminded of his nickname. It is not something one likes to mention in his company, but Honoré Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Atumba is commonly known amongst Zaireans as the ‘Terminator', a reference to the horrors carried out by the ‘owls', the sinister force responsible for night-time interrogations and disappearances which cracked down on opposition activists and troublesome students during the five years he spent as head of the intelligence service. And there is something about the Terminator's voice that strikes a chill to the heart. It is clipped, slightly nasal and instantly recognisable. His French is impeccable, his phrases wind their way through subsections, qualifications and subtleties, pointing to a coldly precise brain behind. It is a sophistication which has determined the course of his life.

He was a brilliant, seminary-educated young man when he was talent-spotted by Mobutu. Presenting the student body's complaints to the president, he made such a good case Mobutu told the head of his intelligence services to follow his academic career and recruit him on graduation. At his mother's suggestion, he let drop ambitions of becoming a priest, while holding on to the Christian faith with peculiar fervour. The secular world called. It was to bring him decidedly unmonastic levels of wealth while sharing some of the characteristics of the priesthood: a familiarity with occult forces and intimate secrets, an awareness of the machinations unseen by the common man, and, finally, privileged access to a supreme being held in awe by mere mortals. As the Jesuits proved during the Inquisition, spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just.

Several foreign assignments were followed by a posting as ambassador, the directorship of the SNIP intelligence service, three stints as Defence Minister and nomination as Mobutu's special security adviser. The Terminator succeeded where Janssen, the white playboy venturing out of his depth, had failed. He was privy to the president's most secret thoughts, entrusted with the most delicate of diplomatic missions. His role, which won him the sobriquet of ‘Special' from Mobutu, made him a natural target of Kinshasa's scurrilous rag-sheets. Journalists speculated about his business interests, cartoonists depicted him—with sideburns and signature sunglasses—as a kind of thuggish spiv hatching dark plots with fellow aide Vundwawe Te Pemako, the two real powers behind the throne left vacant while Mobutu disported himself in Gbadolite.

It is that impression Ngbanda had set out to dismantle with his account of Mobutu's last moments, written from comfortable exile in South Africa. While talking of his beloved ‘Marshal' with intimacy and affection, the Terminator nonetheless delivers a series of killer punches. Painting a pitiful picture of a vacillating president, surprisingly naïve and often in floods of tears, Ngbanda's message is clear. Despite his key position as presidential confidant, he would never do more than recommend. His advice was often ignored or applied only after the moment had passed by a head of state overtaken by events. The ensuing débâcle could be blamed on the family, the generals, the West, but not, repeat not, on the president's security adviser.

It is a stance that infuriates many members of the former elite, including Mobutu's own family. ‘It is just too easy for the former aides to keep saying: “We gave Mobutu good advice but he never followed it,” fulminated son Nzanga, proud of the fact that he has had no contact with the Terminator since leaving Kinshasa. ‘If a president doesn't listen to your advice for ten years, you should resign. I think a bit of
mea culpa
would have been appropriate from people like Ngbanda.'

And there are moments in Ngbanda's narrative when the rewriting of history to ensure he emerges unscathed becomes a little too
blatant. Given how close he was to the pulsating heart of power, it is surprising how often the Terminator is taken by surprise, how frequently foreign ambassadors or heads of state have to spell out to this insider facts all Kinshasa has already suspected. Yet put to one side all the carefully paraded innocence, all the self-justification, and the powers of analysis that so impressed Mobutu make themselves felt. The Terminator's critique of the Zairean armed forces—that body that turned on its own society and tore at its own entrails like some rabid animal—is too well-argued for even his worst enemies to do much more than nod in glum agreement.

For Honoré Ngbanda, the problem could be traced back to the management technique on which Mobutu had founded his regime. Pursued through the decades, the tactic of divide and rule emerged as little more than inaction turned into an art form, a vacuum where decision-making should be. Yes, it offered stability of a sort, but this was the stability of a taut elastic, the calm at the heart of a hundred forces tugging in different directions. To really achieve something, to build a bridge, pave a road or win a war, such forces must, however briefly, pull in the same direction. Just as he made concerted action impossible at a political level, Mobutu, the two-time
coup
-maker, was careful to ensure the armed forces never boasted a unified command structure that could be exploited by a popular rival.

His attitude to the army underwent a fundamental change in the late 1970s, when he woke to the danger represented by a disciplined, motivated force. In 1975 a group of officers from the central Tetela region were arrested on charges of plotting a takeover. Three years later another alleged
coup
attempt was foiled. Thirteen people were executed and more than 200 officers from Kasai, Bandundu and Shaba purged.

Mobutu had already been pushing into retirement older officers who had helped him seize power. Now the army lost a huge swathe of its brightest and best-trained. Kasaians were regarded as untrustworthy, hailing as they did from the province of Tshisekedi. But Bandundu and Shaba were also declared off-limits in recruitment drives as the armed forces acquired an increasingly equatorial tinge.
The tribalisation of the armed forces was not new. Like all colonial masters, Belgium had tended to classify Congolese ethnic groups into ‘war-like' and ‘non-war-like' categories. Mobutu's tribesmen had been labelled natural warriors and, as a result, already held a disproportionate number of army posts. Mobutu now took that principle to new extremes as he ensured the security forces' top echelons were ethnically predisposed to his rule.

The West kept pouring funding, equipment and experts into Zaire in an attempt to establish a respectable army. But it served little purpose. Increasingly, experience and professionalism were regarded as irrelevant when it came to doling out top jobs, allotted to people from northern Haut Zaire or Equateur province. Soon, even that limited recruitment pool narrowed to the North Ubangi region from which the Ngbandi hailed. With the Special Presidential Division (DSP), recruited overwhelmingly from the Ngbandi, the principle was taken to its logical extreme. Outsiders in Kinshasa, regarded with fear by the local population, their loyalty was virtually guaranteed. While publicly preaching Zairean nationhood, Mobutu only trusted his own tribe, it was clear, with his safety.

Amongst the Ngbandi, members of Mobutu's family did best, with general's stars doled out generously to cousins and brothers-in-law. But Mobutu knew his own relatives too well to feel entirely at home even with that arrangement. To distract the generals, he kept them uncertain of their positions, constantly bickering amongst themselves. Using a method perfected by Adolf Hitler, Mobutu would give similar responsibilities to bitter opponents, then sit back and watch the sparks fly. ‘Each defence minister or general had, at the head of the army or in Mobutu's entourage, an “opponent” against whom he had to defend himself: Bumba was attacked by Molongya, Singa was assailed by Lomponda; Likulia insulted Eluki; Mahele put Eluki through the hoops while Singa, back at Defence, was targeted by those who had nominated Likulia as his secretary of state…and so it went on,' recalled the Terminator. Such rivalry, he stressed, was not a regrettable accident, it was the very basis on which the armed forces were run.