Stringer (22 page)

He sought to convince; I accepted. “That's an interesting perspective.”

He leaned back. “I know.”
“Je sais.”

He was too smug.

“I don't know what the courts will think.”

“Which courts?” He waved at my face dismissively. But it surprised me now that the general was willing to go so far in his trust of the government. I asked, “What if they break their promise?”

There was silence; sensing weakness, I pressured. “Aren't you worried?”

He searched my face. “Do you know something?”

It was perhaps the only real moment between us.

“No.”

But I became uneasy; I asked him a few questions about the disarmament plan; and I wanted to know about his time as a nurse—for he had once worked for the Red Cross. It was when his wife and daughters were killed by a militia raid on their home, he said, that he took up arms, “so no one would have to suffer like I did.” He almost seemed a martyr.

The government would acquiesce to nearly all the general's demands. He was appointed colonel in the army, the state arranged a banquet in his honor and his ranking officers were accommodated as promised. The colonel offered the army his expertise, helping to plan raids on his old allies among the militias. He was commended by senior officers; a promotion seemed coming. Some months later the president summoned Colonel Mathieu to Kinshasa, lodging him at the Grand Hotel. The colonel ate and drank while waiting for his audience. He was collected one day and taken to prison. He was stripped of his rank. The pardon was rescinded, and Mathieu—now only Mathieu—was deported to face war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Stalked by the scouts, I took a walk. Some of the fighters wore
leopard skins over their chests. Others had gray ash on their foreheads in crosses. A group played a game with stones, for want of marbles, catapulting the pebbles with their forefingers. Some held up tall bundles of hay and banana leaves: procession paraphernalia. The crop stood beside them, looking almost human. Ali looked as if he was trying to approach the general, who was posing for Riccardo, standing tall and pointing at Bunia. The meeting had left me agitated, because of Mathieu. I had tried to relate those atrocity stories to his face: I had pushed, and pierced, and where I had expected strength I had felt fragility. Mathieu's talk of peace crimes—it seemed a kind of realization of what he had done, and half a plea of insanity, for comprehension of his condition. I walked more quickly. And I spoke in sharp tones, approaching one of the boys. His name was Olivier. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. But he said it wasn't a joint. He drew a clump of marijuana from his pocket; smoking off duty was against the battalion's rules, he said. The weed was rationed for combat. We stared at each other. I gestured to Ali.
“Chalo,”
he mouthed. “Let's go.”

The scouts had placed heavy rocks under our tires, in case we had tried to escape in a hurry. Now they were leading the procession up the hill. We dragged out the rocks ourselves. The sky was overcast. Heavy drops began to fall on our windshield. The wiper squealed. In places of mud the wheels slipped as we descended. The fighters at the check posts demanded cigarettes. Some jeeps passed us, going uphill: they slowed to stare into our car, and at us. They seemed anxious, to be looking for someone. We were silent on the drive. The rain seemed to open the savanna, making it wide. The jeep felt intimate.

I typed up my dispatch at an internet café that I had specially arranged to be open late. The editor worked in a frenzy. That Mathieu's militia was disarming would be front-page news; he wanted to beat the other agencies. We did. This was to be the big story I had tried for so long to obtain. But the thrill was moderate.
And the editor too seemed spent, his intensity as though from an addiction, producing in him, once it was finished, a deep enervation. My feet crunched over the sand. Normally the noise, on the open street, would have made me self-conscious; but the people were turned away, seeming absorbed in their own affairs. I came into the house. The lights were off. The tap trickled, slowly filling my cup. I felt quiet. Before stepping into bed, by compulsion, I listened for sounds—expecting, as on most nights, to hear an unusual movement, a furtive scrape. On this night there was no alertness to wrestle with. I discovered the mosquito net had developed a hole, and I covered myself completely with the hairy blanket.

In Équateur, the environment, the world, had seemed old, unshifting. But here the war and mining had, for a century, shifted the people and the land. So this was a stasis in continual movement: the ways of thinking had become frozen, so that each change seemed unexpected, and severed from the previous change. There could never be a whole understanding; there was only reaction.

I dreamed that night about the family—that something unhappy had happened. The house's gate had almost come off, and there was a terrible ambience in the house, Nana walking in circles, talking desperately. The next day I called them. Jose picked up and said they were fine. I felt my dream was even more real.

21

C
ongo's borders were closed. The government statement was solemnly read out on all the radios, despite its insignificance: the country was vast, and its frontiers highly porous. Anyone could have walked or driven in without detection, even on the day of the vote.

I arrived at the polls at 5:30 a.m., a half hour before they would open; voters were already in line. They were mainly the elderly, perhaps hoping to be home before the sun grew hot. A few younger citizens courteously let them pass; there was, after all, no reason to rush. We waited for the hour. The people were solemn. They twitched, squirmed. When I moved to the front they turned to stare: it was normal. I asked them to show their cards; they lifted the orange plastic in unison. Generally I had found the Congolese shy to be photographed, particularly in the provinces. But here the people edged sideways and out of the queue, eager to squeeze into my frame; it was disconcerting. I began to feel that the abnormal obedience and the shuffling of feet were the acting out of a part. It seemed merely another reaction, this performance of democracy. And when voters turned to journalists that day I sensed they were seeking something from
the world—a reward, perhaps, that they believed they had been promised.

The vote was fragile. Including those for seats in the provincial parliaments, twenty thousand candidates were listed on the ballots.
Twenty thousand
. The organizers had wanted to include all Congolese, to shun no one; but the proportions had become bloated, unmanageable, almost comic. Voters juggled with newspaper-sized ballot sheets, each page a three-foot square. A single ballot sometimes counted six pages. And millions of bales of such pages, with 300,000 electoral agents, had to be delivered to the country's interiors, to the fifty thousand polling stations to open that morning. Congo's roads—only a couple of hundred paved miles in a country half the size of Europe—were insufficient, so the UN had to activate Africa's largest air operation: special planes and helicopters that supplied innumerable cars, motorbikes, bicycles and pirogues. The smallest necessity was imported from abroad and conveyed through this network—kerosene lamps, generators, uniforms, pens, notepads, paper clips, chalk, cases of money for salaries, and food rations. The complexity caused delays. And here the fragility showed. Agents went unpaid for weeks. There were allegations that salaries had been “eaten” by superiors. Election workers went on strike. Some torched their precious polling equipment. The tension mounted; small dramas played out. At a base near Bunia a soldier shot dead an agent who had told him to travel a hundred miles to vote. The agent had made the error—the law had confused him. The soldier's lawyer pleaded insanity. It might have worked if the world had not been watching: the military tribunal, seeming keen to prove its commitment to the vote, ordered the soldier executed.

From across the country came stories of villagers who had walked for days, supplies on their heads, families in tow, to reach a polling station. Most could not explain the vote, or why they showed such determination, but they seemed to bear a deep faith that what they were doing was right, and that it would somehow
help them. And here also society showed its symmetry: turnout was higher than 80 percent in many districts worst hit by the war. The contradictions I witnessed on that day reflected, in fact, other confusions—of history; and in some way, of Mobutu's conflicted relationship with his idol and father figure Patrice Lumumba.

On June 30, 1960, not a month after assuming power, Lumumba forced an abrupt independence from Belgium. Already before the proclamation there had been killings. The implosion was now immediate: within days the army mutinied against its Belgian officers. Nearly all the Europeans fled the country, leaving behind only a few
évolués
with any administrative skills. People were recklessly promoted: among them Lumumba's personal secretary, a scrawny twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Mobutu, was given charge of the army. And Belgium, spurned, tried to exploit the turmoil. Hoping to retain control of the copper mines it split the nascent country by supporting the province of Katanga's secession. Belgian soldiers were deployed against the Congolese army. Lumumba appealed to the UN. Peacekeepers were sent, but they were unable, sometimes unwilling, to remove the Belgians. The violence did not abate. The secession still threatened. A desperate Lumumba appealed to the Soviet Union.

And the dictator raised his head. In a classic Cold War move the CIA cultivated the malleable and ruthless Mobutu. Lumumba seemed unable to suspect the protégé he had handpicked and mentored; his trust was sweepingly betrayed. The first arrest he escaped. Mobutu then sent him to Katanga. Shortly before his death Lumumba showed sympathy for his former secretary, saying the young man did not know what he was doing—the relationship to him still held meaning; he showed that confusion. Congo's hero of independence, it is said, was caught and cut to pieces by his enemies and scattered across the jungle from an airplane—the body was so dismantled out of a fear that otherwise his spirit would reassemble and return to haunt its killers.

Mobutu appeared liberated: now freed from Lumumba's fiery politics and wholly backed by the UN and the West, Mobutu gradually marshaled the force to crush Katanga's secession. In a second coup in 1965 he disbanded the government. He then instated himself president. Upcoming elections were canceled, allegedly in the interest of national security. Peace was reestablished. The Europeans returned. The Americans as well, for business. The economy was restored. Mobutu was praised. In 1970 he was received by Nixon for a twelve-day official visit—one of only a handful of leaders so honored. So Lumumba's death seemed already ignored, and forgotten by the world. But in Congo, strangely, Mobutu resurrected his former idol, declaring him a national hero and building him a monument. He also promised to salvage Lumumba's vision. With the blessings of his Western allies, in 1970 he organized elections.

Congolese were obliged to vote; the ballot showed a single candidate; the police and army went from door to door, harassing people. It was a further treachery.

Mobutu's methods—assassination, dictatorship, repression—had ample precedent in African history; he did not invent these. But in characteristic fashion Mobutu transformed the destruction, and made it extreme. It was Mobutu's trap to introduce two ballots, so that people had to choose between a green ballot for “unity” and a red ballot for “disorder.” He said it was difficult for his people even to understand this, the need for two ballots—how to explain all of democracy? But his ridicule of the Congolese (and of Lumumba's work) was allowed to stand: the country was too rich, and the dictator was needed as an ally. For the majority of Mobutu's dictatorship the CIA used Kinshasa as a base to quash communism in Africa, and in return America, France and Belgium helped to militarily suppress Mobutu's opposition. The foreign patronage proved crucial to cementing Mobutu as dictator, and to restricting, stunting and eventually arresting the emergence of his people.

It explained the unpreparedness and ignorance in Congo; in the society I found, the decades of damage had become rooted. A man asked me before the vote, “Is Constitution a man or a woman?” At the polls I met a woman who tried to vote with beans. She did not know how to use a pencil, the officially prescribed tool with which to mark ballots, so she had brought carefully counted beans that corresponded to her candidate's number. There were efforts to educate: a tireless Congolese nun had set up a series of literacy camps. She taught the
X
as the motion of a woman's hands when grinding leaves, and the check symbol as the shape of a mortar. But the camps were few and held only in the cities, and on the day of the vote many villagers arrived at the polls after long journeys holding pebbles and peas. The literate had their own difficulties: election officials would later say they found scribbled beside candidates' names notes like “I love you!” and “God's child.”

Those ballots were disqualified.

I had become acquainted with an American official sent by his embassy to monitor the vote. We had breakfasted together at the Hotel Ituri. The American was young and he spoke quickly, in a flurry of ideas. He had come to Congo from Venezuela, and before the Foreign Service had worked in a prominent corporation. On Election Day we met for lunch, as we had planned, to share our observations. I listed some of the irregularities I had seen: ballot boxes improperly shut, officials marking ballots for people. “But does it matter?” the American said, suddenly pulling us out of the conversation.

“Meaning?”

“I don't think anyone really cares about Congo”—it was not an uncommon opinion, but the American official said it with a certain pride, as though he had reached that conclusion independently.

I asked why the West was spending a billion dollars on the elections. “That's not small money.”

“It
is
. Elections are nice, but it's not why we're here”—his voice trailed off.

“Phelps Dodge?” The firm had a large mining operation in Katanga.

He shrugged.

I learned that Kabila, despite publicly proclaiming mining reforms, was quietly according lucrative concessions to foreign companies. He was under pressure: the companies benefiting were from the countries funding the vote and, as the American indicated, aided in negotiations by their embassies.

It seemed a dangerous hypocrisy: to raise a people's aspirations with the intent to betray.

While waiting in line at one polling station I found myself beside an elderly woman. She was shy, and wouldn't talk easily. When I brought up Lumumba she clicked her tongue and looked away. But her neighbor, a girl, had overheard; and she began to prod the old woman, to tease her in Swahili. “Tell us, tell us.” A man before us also turned. The woman finally looked up at us all. “I hope this time the winner has more luck,” she said, smiling wryly. “Our country has had enough martyrs.”

At the end of the day, once the last voters had left and the polls had closed, I stayed behind in a classroom to watch the officials count. The room felt like a cave. We were illuminated only by dim kerosene lanterns, which gave the official orange tunics a rich glow. It was 2:00 a.m. when the last box was snipped open with scissors. And the large, white ballots were spread over the table, around which were seated nine Congolese officials. The single man standing unfolded a ballot. “Kabila,” he called, holding it open at his chest. The others leaned forward to inspect it. There was a round of nods. With a piece of chalk a tally mark was drawn on the blackboard. The sheet was placed at the top of a pile. More Kabilas were called. Then a Bemba. More nods and a tally. This ballot was also placed on the pile.