Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book covers the civil war of Congo, a long period from the mid-nineties to mid-oughts. It portrays the people participating, the forces and the geopolitical games between nations. It also gives a voice to the people itself. w

🎨 Impressions

I got astonished at how much the tribal and ethnical differences between the Hutu and Tutsi communities contributed to this war and the consequences of such hate.

Also, it was astonishing how little attention this conflict had. At least the Rwanda massacre got a fucking film.

You can say a lot about Africa, but never doubt their sense of humor. They have some of the funniest political jokes in the world. Take, for example Grace Mugabe, who has the following nicknames:

Gucci Grace
Greedy Grace
"Dis"-Grace My notes from this book are quite extensive, and I think one reason for that is the lack of other materials around this topic made me more able to absorb the knowledge.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Power is Eaten Whole. —CONGOLESE SAYING
The Congolese war must be put among the other great human cataclysms of our time: the World Wars, the Great Leap Forward in China, the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides.
Newspapers with extensive foreign coverage, gave Darfur nearly four times the coverage it gave the Congo in 2006, when Congolese were dying of war-related causes at nearly ten times the rate of those in Darfur.
Even Nicholas Kristof, the Times columnist who has campaigned vigorously for humanitarian crises around the world, initially used the confusion of the Congo as a justification for reporting on it less—it is less evil because it is less ideologically defined.
This brutality prompted the first international human rights campaign, led by missionaries and activists, including Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle. Under pressure, King Leopold capitulated and handed the country over to the Belgian government in 1908.
“In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless. That’s the system here. That’s just the reality of things. If you don’t bribe a bit and play to people’s prejudices, someone else who does will replace you.” He winked and added, “Even you, if you were thrown into this system, you would do the same. Or sink.”
The Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara spent almost a year in the Congo in 1965 fighting with rebels in the east before he abandoned the struggle. Malnourished and depressed, he concluded they “weren’t ready for the revolution.” The Congo has always defied the idealists.
“The anti-Tutsi propaganda was part of our military tactics,” he said, smiling affably. “We didn’t believe it, but in a guerrilla war you have to motivate soldiers and indoctrinate the population.”
His guilt came from his obedience, his mindless desire to please his hierarchy.
In late 1990, the political situation in the country deteriorated rapidly. A range of factors contributed to this: The price of Rwanda’s main exports, tin and tea, had collapsed over recent years, leading to a contraction of the national budget by 40 percent. The same year, after seventeen years of one-party rule, Habyarimana decided to open his country to multiparty democracy, prompting a proliferation of political parties with affiliated radio stations and newsletters, some of which resorted to explicit ethnic hate-mongering.
When talking about the genocide, he emphasized the military, not the human dimension: “The army deployed most of its forces to massacre civilians, diverting trucks, ammunition, and manpower to slaughter them. The genocide caused our resistance to crumble. It was a cafouillage, a real mess.”
The words “chaos,” “mess,” and “confusion” recurred in my discussions with the general. They contrasted with his refrain that all he tried to do during this time was obey orders and uphold discipline. They were two conflicting ways of absolving himself from responsibility, but also means of coping morally and psychologically with the killing around him.
He was, however, part of an organization that caused the deaths of over 800,000 people, and he was in a position to save lives. When I pressed Rwarakabije about his loyalty to the army, even when it became obvious that many of his superiors were involved in the massacres, he shook his head, exasperated: “You are much too logical about this! We were in the middle of a war. We didn’t have time to think whether we were complicit in a genocide—we were just trying to survive!”
“He was a disciplinarian to the core. He never really asked why he was fighting; that was for the politicians to decide. And when the politicians ran, he just kept on fighting, like a robot.”
Recent studies of the genocide have also revealed the importance of local politics in determining whether an area carried out genocide or not. Seasonal laborers and the landless, for example, were more likely to be manipulated by rural elites who stood to lose if the Hutu regime lost power.
Since the Tutsi forces were known as inyenzi, or cockroaches, this offensive was dubbed Operation Insecticide.
Anatole Sucyendore was a Hutu doctor who had fled to Goma with the other refugees but had returned to Rwanda several months later to work in the Gisenyi hospital, despite numerous death threats. On February 25, 1995, Hutu rebels broke into his house, shot the doctor, stabbed his two-year-old infant to death, and severely injured his wife and other child.
“Did you ever order the killing of civilians?” “No, never.” “But civilians were killed.” Rwarakabije sighed and fidgeted with his loose watch again. “Chain of command ... I’m not sure you can apply that to our rebellion.” “You didn’t control some of your own commanders?” “My troops, yes. But the civilian ideologues, the extremists, no.
Rwarakabije ducked and weaved, denying responsibility, blaming massacres on others, using ends to justify means. “Where elephants fight,” he said, “the grass is trampled.” It was a convenient metaphor. Almost every commander I met in the region used it when I asked them about abuses against civilians.
Back to the description of Eichmann’s trial: “Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”
The refugee camps were set up in July 1994 and stayed in place for over two years. Some would swell to contain more than 400,000 inhabitants, becoming the largest refugee camps in the world and larger than any city in eastern Zaire. Together they housed over a million people. In a perverse way, they provoked a mobilization of international resources that the genocide never had.
Women had other problems, as well. The aid organizations running the camps didn’t provide sanitary napkins, and women had to use rags or tear up sheets to use instead. As there was little soap, these scraps of cloth became hard and caked with blood. To their humiliation, women had no choice but to try to wash these in the same pots they used for cooking. “The bloodied water snaked in rivulets between the tents and little puddles of blood formed here and there.”
In late 1994, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spent $1 million each day on operations in the camps. Its effort was effective: Within weeks of deployment, mortality dropped steeply, saving thousands of lives. At the same time, however, it became obvious that the aid was also sustaining the perpetrators of the genocide
Doctors Without Borders, put it: “How can physicians continue to assist Rwandan refugees when by doing so they are also supporting killers?” And they were supporting killers. Camp leaders refused to allow UNHCR to count the refugees for over half a year, inflating their numbers so as to pocket the surplus food, blankets, and clothes for themselves.
In Ngara, Tanzania, food for 120,000 “ghost refugees” was being skimmed off the top, while in Bukavu leaders pocketed aid for 50,000 refugees over six months.
Even after censuses were carried out, leaders stole the food of those most in need, pushing thousands of children into severe malnutrition.
The response, as so often in the region, was to throw money at the humanitarian crisis but not to address the political causes.
As a senior French official was quoted anonymously as saying: “We cannot let anglophone countries decide on the future of a francophone one.
The RPF, who were already disgusted by international inaction during the genocide, watched in despair. “By early 1996, it was clear to us that the international community would not take action,”
Africa has the shape of a pistol, and Congo is its trigger. —FRANTZ FANON
No family was spared by the violence. Over 90 percent of children and youths had witnessed violence and believed they would die; only slightly fewer had experienced a death in their family.
A study published in a psychiatric journal estimated that one-fourth of all Rwandans suffered from posttraumatic stress syndrome.1 They called these people ihahamuka, “without lungs” or “breathless with fear.” They would walk through town, catatonic, jumping when a bus honked or someone came up behind them unannounced.
After the overthrow of the Habyarimana regime, RPF leaders celebrated victory in Kigali; Ugandan waragi—a strong gin made out of millet—was a favorite. Mixed with Coca Cola, it was dubbed “Kigali Libre” by RPF officers.
Kagame fulminated to the press: “I think we have learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of people who claim that they want to make this world a better place.”
In a region where international donors supply on average half of government budgets, and where the legacy of French, U.S., and Russian power politics was apparent, blatant violations of sovereignty had to be planned carefully
The war with UNITA was understandably an obsession for the Angolan government. In 1996, there were 1.2 million displaced people in the country, amounting to 10 percent of the total population, and the government was spending over half of its budget on the military.
Never had so many African countries united militarily behind one cause, leading some to dub the war Africa’s World War.
It was a regional conflict, pitting a new generation of young, visionary African leaders against Mobutu Sese Seko, the continent’s dinosaur. Never had so many African countries united militarily behind one cause, leading some to dub the war Africa’s World War.
“His morphology is suspicious,” one sometimes heard people saying when they suspected someone of being Tutsi. As if you could tell someone’s subversion by his bone structure or the slant of his nose.
Across the border, in Burundi, where many Banyamulenge fled, they were call kijuju after a local plant that looked like cassava but couldn’t be eaten—a useless, treacherous substance.
Like layers of an onion, the Congo war contains wars within wars. There was not one Congo war, or even two, but at least forty or fifty different, interlocking wars.
In my interviews, I often made the mistake of asking the interviewee to start from the beginning. “The beginning?” A look of bemused condescension would follow—what does this young foreigner know about our beginnings? “Good idea. Well, in 1885, at the Conference of Berlin. ...”
A diligent student of Machiavelli—The Prince could often be seen on his bedside table—Mobutu had mastered the art of divide-and-rule politics.
Being part of a minority community in such a turbulent area means living in a pressure cooker in which family loyalty means everything; Papy could recite his clan genealogy six generations back.
“As soon as the RPF conquered Rwanda,” he told me, “they set their sights on invading Zaire, much sooner than most people realize.”
Tembele, whom a UN official remembered as “famous for being afraid of his own soldiers” and stealing cars from the refugees, had been bribed by the Rwandans and even provided Bugera with one of his lieutenants as a liaison officer, institutionalizing his treason.
It is amazing to what extent the ethnic stereotypes and conflicts that were born in Rwanda have contaminated the rest of the region.
One day, when I was arguing that you had to understand Tutsi paranoia, as it had its roots in the massacre of up to 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda during the genocide, she replied, “Eight hundred thousand? Obviously it wasn’t enough. There are still some left.”
Laurent Kabila’s presence is hard to miss in Kinshasa. In the middle of town, he towers as a forty-foot statue (thanks to North Korean sculptors, experts in state-sponsored hagiography),
The Chinese were not the only ones to misjudge the strength of socialism. Che Guevara led an expedition to support Kabila’s insurrection in the eastern Congo in 1965. Fidel Castro’s government, newly in power, had immediately embarked on exporting their revolutionary and anti-imperialist ideology elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Che’s experience, as well as the insurrection, ended in disaster. The beginning words of his Congo journal were: “This is the history of a failure.”
The nadir was perhaps reached in 1975, when Kabila’s forces snuck into Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research camp in western Tanzania and kidnapped four American and Dutch students. They subjected their captives to lectures on Marxism and Leninism while demanding a ransom of $500,000. This was the last straw for Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, who had been tolerating the rebels out of disdain for Mobutu.
According to accounts that filtered out from his commanders, Kabila would resort to a Mobutist subterfuge, regularly sleeping with his commanders’ wives as a display of power and humiliation.
Karegeya laughed at me when I questioned their choice of a rebel leader. “You act like we had a lot of options! By 1996, Mobutu had co-opted or locked up almost all of his opposition, with the possible exception of Tshisekedi. Kabila might have been old-school, but he had not been bought off. We gave him some credit for that.”
Years later, Bugera laughed when he heard Masasu’s name. “You know he ended up being a popular commander, very popular. But then, he was a kid! They said he had a political party, but he was the only member in it.”
For many Congolese who had labored long—and ultimately unsuccessfully—to overthrow Mobutu peacefully, Kabila was a living symbol of foreign meddling in their country. It is one of the Congo’s historical ironies that the same man came to be seen as a bulwark of patriotism and resistance against Rwandan aggression.
“A tree trunk does not turn itself into a crocodile because it has spent some time in the water. In the same way, a Tutsi will forever remain a Tutsi, with his or her perfidy, craftiness and dishonesty.”
By 1996, social conditions in Zaire were ripe for youth-led violence. Due to Mobutu’s predation and disastrous economic policies, the country’s infrastructure and industry had collapsed. By 1996, the country had been through seven years of economic contraction.
Zairians earned just over half of what they had been making in 1990. According to the United Nations, a full 27 million people, or 60 percent of the population, were undernourished. Even when people were paid, the money was worth little: Inflation soared to 5,000 percent in 1996.
In negotiating bribes, the local official’s main leverage is time.
The chief leaned over and whispered: “The United States is using earthquakes as a weapon of war to destabilize the province!”
Alex, a Munyamulenge boy in an Arsenal T-shirt and jeans, demurred: “I don’t know why we have to inherit the sins of our fathers and brothers. For them, we are all guilty.” He paused, then added, “We are all targets.”
“Our problem is with leadership,” Remy said in the car. “Imagine that we were CIA agents trying to start a new rebellion here. We would have bought them all off for twenty dollars.”
The heat in the small room became unbearable. The air was getting heavy; in the distance they could hear a thunderstorm moving down the floodplain from Rwanda. The storms from the east were the worst; Congolese used to quip that “all bad things come from Rwanda.”
Seleelwa was eager to speak with us about the beginning of the war. “Nobody has ever come to hear our story,” he lamented. “Not the United Nations, not our own government, nobody.”
Prosecute those leaders, and they will start the war again, the prevailing wisdom goes. Plus, some Congolese leaders say, war is nasty, and people die. One erudite politician reminded me:“Didn’t General Ulysses Grant give an amnesty for Confederate soldiers after the American Civil War? Didn’t the Spanish do the same for crimes committed under Franco? Why should it be different for us?” Unfortunately, the impunity has thus far brought little peace, and the criminals of yesterday become the recidivists of tomorrow.
“We didn’t have an army; we had individuals,” Nabyolwa remembered.
By 1996, Zaire was a teetering house of cards—as the Economist quipped, “They call it a country. In fact it is just a Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa.”
The army that Nabyolwa joined in 1973 was a jumble of contradictions. Like the rest of the state apparatus, it was present everywhere, harassing and taxing the population, but effective nowhere.
Mobutu famously declared in a speech to the army, “You have guns; you don’t need a salary.”
It was another manifestation of his famous “Article 15,” a fictitious clause in an obsolete constitution that called for the population to do anything
Is difficult to overstate the impact these policies
It was another manifestation of his famous “Article 15,” a fictitious clause in an obsolete constitution that called for the population to do anything they needed to do to survive. Débrouillez-vous (“improvise” or “get by”) became the modus operandi for Zairians of all classes, in particular the armed forces.
Every time you send us into battle, we get attacked!’ “‘But that’s what war is about!’ “‘You are a sadist!’”
Internal tensions also hampered operations. The French, mostly former soldiers from the Foreign Legion, were better connected and paid up to five times as much as the Serbs—up to $10,000 per month for the officers. But the Serbs controlled most of the aircraft and heavy weaponry, old machines leased at inflated prices from the Yugoslav army. The French accused their counterparts of amateurism; the Serbs retorted that the last time the French had won a serious battle was at Austerlitz in 1805.
It is easy to make a mockery of Mobutu’s army and government, to reduce the events that led to his demise to a comedy of errors carried on by a bunch of incompetent, bumbling generals in Kinshasa. But it was not for lack of training or expertise that the Zairian army lost the war. The security forces included a legion of intelligent officers trained at some of the world’s best military academies. The problem was the decaying, corrupt structures within which they worked. Lacking proper institutions since independence, Mobutu had corroded his own state in order to prevent any challengers to his power from emerging, eroding that very power in the process.
“The real challenge in the Congo,” Nabyolwa told me, “is not how to reform the army, but how to reform the men in the army! There is a serious problem with Homo congoliensis!”
Asked Papy why he did it. It was an order, he replied. Why did your commander want to do it? He shrugged. That was the mentality at the time. They needed to fear the AFDL. They had committed genocide. It was revenge, he said. But it was also a warning: Don’t try to mess with us.
I asked Papy why he did it. It was an order, he replied. Why did your commander want to do it? He shrugged. That was the mentality at the time. They needed to fear the AFDL. They had committed genocide. It was revenge, he said. But it was also a warning: Don’t try to mess with us.
If 80,000 refugees died in the Congo, that may be terrible but nonetheless minor compared with the 800,000 in Rwanda.
The rationale for child recruitment was simple: Many commanders consider that children make better, more loyal, and fearless soldiers. One commander of a local Mai-Mai militia told me: “You never know who you can trust. At least with the kadogo, you know they will never betray you.”
For the most part, the kind of combat that soldiers engaged in was guerrilla warfare, involving risky ambushes and close-quarter fighting with the enemy. Soldiers did not have protective gear, and artillery was in scant supply. If you wanted to hit the enemy, you needed to be close enough to be effective with an AK-47—within two hundred meters of the target. Children were often the only soldiers who had the guts to engage in many of the operations, who actually obeyed orders, and whose sense of danger was not as well developed as that of older soldiers. The use of children as vanguard special forces
Mobutu’s health began to fail him again. Within a month, he was back in Europe for further treatment. The vicious tongues in the capital began to wag with new rumors of his ill health. When the Central Bank issued yet another new banknote to keep track of rising inflation, it was quickly dubbed “the Prostate.” Just like the president’s gland, it was inflating daily. Just like the illness, these banknotes could seriously damage your health.
A cat goes to a monastery, but she still remains a cat. —CONGOLESE SAYING
Kinshasa had become the third largest city in Africa and among the top twenty in the world, but it seemed like an oversized village. There was no functioning postal service or public transit system, and despite an overabundance of rainfall, over two million city dwellers did not have direct access to a water supply. Ninety-five percent of the population worked in the informal sector: lugging bags of cassava, shining shoes, hawking everything from aphrodisiacs to cigarettes and nail polish along the bustling streets. Tens of thousands of civil servants still showed up for work in old suits and ties—but were rarely paid.
Him on the country’s economy. It wasn’t a pretty picture. The country’s income had shrunk to a third of what it had been at independence in 1960. Inflation was at 750 percent. Between 1988 and 1996, copper production had plummeted from 506,000 to 38,000 tons, while industrial diamond production dropped from 10 million to 6.5 million carats. Coffee, palm oil, and tea production followed the same trend. Only 5 percent of the population had salaried jobs; many of those worked for the state on salaries as low as five dollars a month.
When Kabila’s forces arrived in Kinshasa, one of their first stops naturally had been the Central Bank. The future vice governor of the bank had the honor of opening the vaults, only to find the huge cement chambers empty. A lonely fifty French franc note was left in one of the drawers, “as an insult.”
Even Nelson Mandela, the dean of African democracy, deemed it “suicidal” for Kabila to allow free party activities before he had a firm grip on the government.
Kabila threw Tshisekedi into prison several times, but he proved impossible to shut up. Finally, in February 1997, Kabila lost his patience and had him deported to his remote home village of Kabeya-Kamwanga “with a tractor and some soy seeds so he can put his leadership skills to the service of our agricultural sector.”
Senior U.S. diplomat and the Congolese head of state were not good. Several months before her visit, during the height of the refugee crisis, Albright had called Kabila, threatening serious consequences if he didn’t allow investigators into the country to find out what had happened with the missing Rwandan refugees. Kabila had hung up on Albright mid-sentence, muttering, “Imperialist!”
“It was like what the Americans did with the Baath Party in Iraq,” one official in the Ministry of Mines told me. “From one day to the next, everybody was gone.”
Two of the new ministers had had run-ins with the law abroad. Thomas Kanza, who was in charge of regional cooperation and aid, was unable to deal with the U.S. government because he was wanted in Tennessee for fleeing a $300,000 fine for fraud. Celestin Lwangy’s nomination for justice minister elicited some chuckles in the Belgian press, as he had served eight months in prison in Belgium for illegally hooking up his electricity supply to the power grid.
Head of state, the refugee crisis dominated discussions. Immediately after he was sworn in, all contacts with the Congo’s traditional donors—Belgium, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—focused on the alleged massacres.
According to Bugera, a delegation of military officials from various southern African countries was visiting Kinshasa to see how the formation of the new army was proceeding. Many countries had invested in this project by sending officers to help train the new recruits and integrate Congo’s fractured militias. During a long meeting with Kabila, a Tanzanian commander excused himself, saying he had to use the toilet. Kabila looked around sheepishly and finally ordered a bodyguard to find the key for the toilet. The bodyguard ran about, but was unable to come up with the key. Finally, the Tanzanian was taken to a toilet in another building much further away. After their meeting was finished, Kabila reprimanded his bodyguard with a laugh, fishing a key out of his pocket: “You idiot! I had the key the whole time! All my money is stored in that toilet—I couldn’t let him in there!”
No matter how hard you throw a dead fish in the water, it still won’t swim. —CONGOLESE SAYING
When he arrived to take over his office from his Rwandan predecessor, he allegedly brought a goat with him that he proceeded to slaughter so as to chase away the evil spirits.
General Celestin Kifwa, the new commander, was over sixty years old and incompetent. They called him a fetisheur, a witch doctor, as it was rumored that he believed in magic potions and in consulting the ancestors to make decisions. When he arrived to take over his office from his Rwandan predecessor, he allegedly brought a goat with him that he proceeded to slaughter so as to chase away the evil spirits.
Fighting surrounding them. “You know, Japan dominated China. That is normal. But I will not let our great country be dominated by its tiny neighbor. Can a toad swallow an elephant? No!”
Began to complain that they would be killed if they landed at the heavily fortified airbase. “Don’t worry,” Butera said. “We have our people at the airport.” Using the pilot’s high-frequency radio, he programmed a frequency he said belonged to their commander on the ground. A surprisingly clear voice responded to his call in calm English: “All clear, afande. You can land.” What the pilot did not know was that the radio Butera was calling actually belonged to his deputy commander, who was lounging in a seat at the back of the plane.
Despite the pistol-waving Rwandan behind him, the pilot began to complain that they would be killed if they landed at the heavily fortified airbase. “Don’t worry,” Butera said. “We have our people at the airport.” Using the pilot’s high-frequency radio, he programmed a frequency he said belonged to their commander on the ground. A surprisingly clear voice responded to his call in calm English: “All clear, afande. You can land.” What the pilot did not know was that the radio Butera was calling actually belonged to his deputy commander, who was lounging in a seat at the back of the plane.
Sometimes even the Rwandans foul things up: Butera had forgotten to take down the pin code for the satellite phone, without which it was useless. In Kigali, his commanding officers waited in vain for word from the young soldier, while he tried frantically to punch in different six-digit combinations. No luck. (The correct code was apparently 123456.) The pilot also failed to reach Kigali on his ham radio.
As Kinois often quip: “We put Mobutu in the ambulance. All Kabila did was drive the corpse to the cemetery.”
Former colleague of his quoted a Swahili proverb to me: “Don’t get into a ship with a hole in the bottom; it will eventually sink.”
A Congolese friend once described the curse of Congolese politics as “the reverse Midas effect.” “Anything touched by politics in the Congo turns to shit,” he told me. “It doesn’t matter if the Holy Father himself decides to run for president, he will inevitably come out corrupt, power-hungry, and guilty of breaking all ten of the holy commandments.”
According to François Mwamba, the head of their finances, they rarely got more than $50,000 a month. “Once, I had to spend ten hours on the back of a motorcycle, hanging on to a kid with an AK-47 strapped on his back, just to collect $2,000 from a bank in the jungle town of Banalia,” Mwamba told me. “Do you think I would be doing that if we were flush with cash?”
Swahili saying: Shukrani ya punda ni teke (The gratitude of a donkey is a kick).
They had experience in war, like many Congolese. They knew that AK-47s had enough power to go through a brick wall and still kill: “You really need two brick walls to protect yourself.”
He was friends with some of the Rwandan officers and spent the evenings drinking waragi gin, smoking, and talking with them. Most were well-educated and curious about international affairs; they discussed the similarities and differences between wars in the Balkans and those in Central Africa.
“I was sad I couldn’t bury my son next to his siblings,” Philippe said in a calm voice. “But we still remember his birthday every year. We eat fried catfish, his favorite.” He paused again for a long time. “ I was also angered by the arrogance of these two countries. Coming to settle their differences 300 miles from home, killing innocent civilians. What did we ever do to them?”
Death does not sound a trumpet. —CONGOLESE SAYING
In June 2000, a nonprofit charity published a mortality study that estimated that 1.7 million people had died as a result of the conflict between August 1998 and May 2000.
In 2004, the charity estimated that 3.8 million had died because of the war since 1998.1
On the wall there was a faded picture of Jesus in a wooden frame with a saying in Swahili: “A drunken wife arouses anger. Her shame cannot be hidden.”
Some of them had radios, and they gave the nickname “Kosovo” to their hometown of Kasika after they heard of the war and massacres in the Balkans. The main difference, of course, was that the press was giving the small Balkan region, barely a sixth the size of South Kivu Province, nonstop coverage, while no foreign journalist visited Kasika for a decade.
Social life was deeply affected as well. The death of their traditional chief, along with the only priest, left the community without any leaders.
I ask them if they could ever forgive the soldiers for what they did. “Forgive whom? We don’t even know who did it,” someone outside Patrice’s house said.
“We are still living through the massacre,” one elder who had lost his wife and two children told me. “There has been no justice, not even a sign on a tree, or a monument in the honor of those who died that day.”11 “We all lived in the forests like animals for five years,” said a man in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap. “Our children are all illiterate because of this. Go to primary school here, and you will find fifteen-year-olds sitting on the benches.” The conversation
“We are still living through the massacre,” one elder who had lost his wife and two children told me. “There has been no justice, not even a sign on a tree, or a monument in the honor of those who died that day.”11 “We all lived in the forests like animals for five years,” said a man in a plaid shirt and a baseball cap. “Our children are all illiterate because of this. Go to primary school here, and you will find fifteen-year-olds sitting on the benches.”
According to United Nations reports, over 200,000 women have been raped in the eastern Congo since 1998. Demographic surveys suggest that up to 39 percent of women have experienced sexual violence, at the hands of civilians or military personnel, at some point in their lives.
When asked about the reasons for the war, a full half of Kinois answered that they thought it was “a conspiracy of western powers,” while 19 percent thought it was due to “Tutsi hegemony in central Africa.”
“It was like Mobutu all over again,” a presidential aide told me. “Someone had sold all the helicopter fuel to make a profit. We were the victims of our own ineptitude.”
So who ordered the killing of Mzee? Congolese imagination is knotted around Kabila’s death, entangled in multiple narratives and histories that compete to explain why the scrawny bodyguard shot the president. Part of the problem is that there were too many people who had a reason, who stood to benefit from his death. As the Economist quipped, fifty million people—the country’s entire population—had a motive. By the time of his death, Kabila had managed to offend or alienate not only his enemies but also most of his allies.
People weave rumors and myths together over drinks or while waiting for taxis to help give meaning to their lives. It may, for example, be easier to believe that Joseph Kabila’s real name is Hippolyte Kanambé and that he is a Rwandan, acting in the interests of Paul Kagame, or to believe that the conflict in the Congo was all an American corporate conspiracy to extract minerals from the country. Either might be easier to swallow than the complex, tangled reality. Doesn’t it give more meaning to the Congolese’s grim everyday existence?
The International Monetary Fund, working from incomplete budgetary data that probably excluded some revenue, concluded that at the height of the war in 2000, the Congolese government was spending 70 percent of its expenditures on “sovereign and security items,” a budget line that was managed entirely by the presidency and dedicated mostly to the war.
According to a World Bank study, if you paid all of your taxes in the Congo—a full thirty-two different payments—you would be dishing out 230 percent of your profits.
Several months later, a UN report concluded that Rwanda and Uganda were plundering the eastern Congo for personal enrichment and in order to finance the war.
Figuring out how power works in Kinshasa is a complicated affair. Foreign businessmen arriving from Europe or China have to spend weeks to get to the right people in government. Connections are everything. Il a un bon carnet d’adresses—“He has a good address book”—is high praise from entrepreneurs in the capital.
A key word in the Congolese lexicon of corruption is enveloppe. If you want to buy votes in Parliament to squelch the audit of your state-run company, you pass around envelopes. When you want to obtain a lucrative contract to supply the police with beans and rice, you make sure the officials on the procurement board all get envelopes delivered to their home. The operative verb is usually “to circulate,” and typically used in the passive voice, as if the envelopes were floating around on their own accord. On a fait circuler des enveloppes (envelopes were circulated around). The enveloppe preserves the dignity of the recipient: You avoid the crude embarrassment of receiving naked cash from your benefactor. After all, who can turn down an anonymous envelope whose contents are unknown?
Reforming the state will require tackling entrenched interests and mafia-like networks that permeate the administration. In doing so, he risks offending powerful people, who could then try to unseat him. In 2004, after a botched coup attempt in downtown Kinshasa, I remember speaking with outraged security agents who told me, “We know who is behind [the coup attempt], but we can’t do anything!”
Historians often use the Latin phrase bellum se ipsum alet to describe the phenomenon—the war feeds itself. This is a concept many Congolese commanders would understand.
The only viable means of popular mobilization remains ethnicity, although even that has been gutted of much of its moral content by generations of customary rulers co-opted and repressed by the state. These ethnicity-based organizations, whether political parties or armed groups, mobilize for greater resources for their own narrow community, not for the public good.
In large part, however, our sins have been of omission. We simply do not care enough. Contrary to what some Congolese believe, President Obama does not wake up to a security briefing on the Congo with his morning scone. Generally, we do not care about a strange war fought by black people somewhere in the middle of Africa. This sad hypocrisy is easy to see—NATO sent 50,000 troops from some of the best armies to Kosovo in 1999, a country one-fifth the size of South Kivu. In the Congo, the UN peacekeeping mission plateaued at 20,000 troops, mostly from South Asia, ill-equipped and with little will to carry out risky military operations. In exchange, the Congo has received plentiful humanitarian aid—a short-term solution to a big problem.