Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

want elections, not erections,” some of Tshisekedi’s rabble-rousers inveighed, poking fun at the Rwandan tendency to switch

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absence of a strong government. At the height of the war, there were upwards of forty Congolese armed groups in the eastern Congo alone, while nine different African states deployed troops. This complexity has thwarted journalists and diplomats alike, but the book suggests: beware of oversimplification; it will get you into trouble. In this sense, I recommend the opposite of William of Occam’s famous razor: We should not always try to simplify for the sake of theoretical clarity. Get into the grime and grit of the story, rub up against its intricacy.

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This emphasis on the conflict’s complexity provided the philosophical thrust of the book. How should we define responsibility and guilt in the Congo, when the violence is of a very different nature than, for example, the Nazi-led Holocaust? A majority of the Congolese victims died from hunger, starvation, and illness brought about as a side effect of the conflict. There was no industrial architecture of genocide, no master plan to exterminate the country’s citizens. I do not say this to minimize the suffering or to excuse the many horrific crimes, some

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since made public, the companies that bought stakes in these mines paid around one-tenth of that price, only to turn around and resell their shares on the international market for the full value, making a fortune. The beneficiaries were all unknown companies based in the British Virgin Islands, some of which had been created just months before the sales took place. Many of the companies were linked to Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, a close associate of President Kabila. Although it is impossible to prove profits from these sales benefited Kabila’s campaign, a presidential aide confided to me that similar sales, also involving Gertler, had helped finance their 2006 campaign.

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I will not make any predictions. If the past is anything to judge by, Congolese politics will continue to surprise and bewilder, frustrate and inspire. As Koffi Olomide sang: Lokuta eyaka na ascenseur, kasi vérité eyei na escalier mpe ekomi. Lies come up in the elevator; the truth takes the stairs but gets here eventually.

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Power is Eaten Whole. —CONGOLESE SAYING

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Many asked me, “Why are you writing this book?” When I told them that I wanted to understand the roots of the violence that has engulfed the country since 1996, they often replied with a question, “Who are you to understand what I am telling you?”

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A local, illiterate warlord with an amulet of cowries, colonial-era coins, and monkey skulls around his neck shook his head at me when I took his picture, telling me to erase it: “You’re going to take my picture to Europe and show it to other white people. What do they know about my life?” He was afraid, he told me, that they would laugh at him, think he was a macaque, some forest monkey.

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He had good reason to be skeptical. There is a long history of taking pictures and stories from Central Africa out of context. In 1904, an American missionary brought Ota Benga, a pygmy from the central Congo, to the United States. He was placed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, where his filed teeth, disproportionate limbs and tricks helped attract 40,000 visitors a day. He was exhibited alongside an orangutan, with whom he performed tricks, in order to emphasize Africans’ similarities with apes. An editorial in the New York Times, rejecting calls for his release, remarked that “pygmies are very low in the human scale… . The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.”

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How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective? How do you put a human face on a figure like “four million” when most of the casualties perish unsensationally, as a result of disease, far away from television cameras?

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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. He writes: Darfur is a case of genocide, while Congo is a tragedy of war and poverty… . Militias slaughter each other, but it’s not about an ethnic group in the government using its military force to kill other groups. And that is what Darfur has been about: An Arab government in Khartoum arming Arab militias to kill members of black African tribes. We all have within us a moral compass, and that is moved partly by the level of human suffering. I grant that the suffering is greater in Congo. But our compass is also moved by human evil, and that is greater in Darfur. There’s no greater crime than genocide, and that is Sudan’s specialty.2 What is the evil

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Herself a Jewish escapee from the Holocaust, Arendt was above all interested in the nature of evil. For her, the mass killing of Jews had been possible through a massive bureaucracy that dehumanized the victims and dispersed responsibility through the administrative apparatus. Eichmann was not a psychopath but a conformist. “I was just doing my job,” he told the court in Jerusalem. This, Arendt argued, was the banality of evil.

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This book takes Arendt’s insight as its starting point. The Congo obviously does not have the anonymous bureaucracy that the Third Reich did. Most of the killing and rape have been carried out at short range, often with hatchets, knives, and machetes. It is difficult not to attribute personal responsibility to the killers and leaders of the wars.

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The answers to these questions lie deeply embedded in the region’s history. But instead of being a story of a brutal bureaucratic machine, the Congo is a story of the opposite: a country in which the state has been eroded over centuries and where once the fighting began, each community seemed to have its own militia, fighting brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies with each other. It was more like seventeenth-century Europe and the Thirty Years’ War than Nazi Germany.

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“I don’t like these uncles mayonnaise-fries3 for their responsibility in the debacle of our country: seventy-five years of colonization, one [Congolese] priest by 1917, five [Congolese] warrant officers in an army of sergeants and corporals in 1960, plus five pseudo-university graduates at independence; a privileged few chosen based on questionable criteria to receive a hasty training to become managers of the country. And who made a mess of it.”4

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In his Machiavellian bid to become a regional power broker, Mobutu had come to host over ten different foreign armed groups on his territory, which angered his neighbors to no end. By 1996, a regional coalition led by Angola, Uganda, and Rwanda had formed to overthrow Mobutu.

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What is this system? As a Congolese friend and parliamentarian told me as I was finishing this book: “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.”

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either. 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.

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Finally, in one of our last interviews, he broke down and started telling me about how he had worked for a Rwandan death squad in the eastern border town of Goma in 1997. Together with sixty other soldiers, they had been tasked with rounding up dissidents; often the definition of “dissident” was stretched to include any Hutu refugee. Papy could kill up to a hundred of these dissidents—sometimes old women and young children—a day, usually using a rope to crush their windpipes and strangle them. “Why did you do it?” “I had to. If I hadn’t, it would have been suspicious,” he replied, but then looked at me. “You know, you can’t really explain these things. For us soldiers, killing comes easy. It has become part of our lives. I have lost five members of my family during the war. You have to understand that. You have to understand the history of my family—how we were persecuted, then favored by Mobutu, how we were denied citizenship and laughed at at school. How they spat in my face. Then you can judge me.” But it was clear that he didn’t think I could ever understand.

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Nevertheless, this book is an attempt to do just that: to explain the social, political, and institutional forces that made it possible for a family man to become a mass murderer. Kamanzi, and all those like him, were not inherently predisposed to evil. Some other explanation is called for.

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The conflict in the Congo has many causes, but the most immediate ones came across the border from Rwanda, a country ninety times smaller. In 1994, violence unfolded there that was many times larger than anything the modern African continent had ever seen, killing a sixth of the population and sending another sixth into refugee camps. This genocide helped create the conditions for another cataclysm in neighboring Congo, just as terrible in terms of loss of life, albeit very different in nature.

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was one of the largest population movements of modern times; over half a million people packed into a two-lane highway forty miles long. The air was filled with the rumble of thousands of flip-flops and bare feet on the hot tarmac.

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The masses were leaving one of the largest, quickest slaughters of humankind at their backs. On April 6, 1994, Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down just before landing in the capital Kigali, ending the fragile cease-fire that had halted the civil war.1 Preying on the population’s fear of the Tutsi insurgents, Hutu extremists in the Rwandan government deployed killing squads and popular militias, who rallied others, saying they must kill or be killed.

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They drew up hit lists and manned roadblocks, checking identity cards for ethnic identity or just looking for stereotypical Tutsi features: a slender frame, high cheekbones, an aquiline nose. It mattered little that the Hutu and Tutsi identities themselves were historically as much class-based as morphological and that a rich, cattle-owning Hutu could be promoted to become a Tutsi. Or that there had been extensive intermarriage between the ethnicities, meaning that in many cases the physical stereotypes had little meaning.

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Between 175,000 and 210,000 people took part in the butchery, using machetes, nail-studded clubs, hoes, and axes.2 The killing took place in public places: in churches, schools, and marketplaces, on roads, and in the fields. The entire population was involved in the drama, either as an organizer, a perpetrator, a victim, or a witness.

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and prepare to retake power in Kigali. One of their leaders, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, said in an interview that they would “wage a war that will be long and full of dead people until the minority Tutsi are finished and completely out of the country.”3

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I met Rwarakabije in Kigali in 2004. After spending a decade fighting a guerrilla war against the Rwandan government, he had surrendered and had been given a high-ranking, if somewhat ceremonial, job in Rwanda’s demobilization commission.4 Even though he had led a brutal insurgency that had claimed the lives of thousands of Rwandan civilians, he had not been involved in the 1994 genocide, and the government had chosen not to press charges.

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He lived in a house provided by the government and had an official car and guard (although it wasn’t clear if they were protecting him or keeping tabs on him). He now taught lessons on counterinsurgency and gave advice on how to deal with the remaining Hutu rebels across the border.

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“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.”

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less blood on his hands, his attitude reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi officer who ordered the transport of countless Jews to their death in concentration camps, as someone who had never been a Jew-hater and had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, his mindless desire to please his hierarchy.5 There were, however, far more differences than similarities between Eichmann and Rwarakabije. In the case of the Rwandan commander, there was little formal law and no dehumanizing bureaucracy to justify his actions. Rwarakabije was not just a cog in a machine whose nature he did not question. So what drove him?

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All that changed with independence in 1962. Rebelling against Tutsi domination, a new Hutu elite took power in the wake of pogroms, in which tens of thousands of Tutsi and many others fled. Over 300,000 Tutsi refugees emigrated to neighboring Uganda, the Congo, and Burundi, where many lived as refugees and second-class citizens.

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Upon his return to Rwanda, he was placed in the gendarmerie, a souped-up police force that dealt with internal security as well as matters of law and order. He was a career soldier who took pleasure in describing military tactics and logistics to me, but steered away from questions about politics.

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“It is strange to think this given everything that has happened in this country,” he told me, “but the army when I joined was a place of discipline and order, where people were not swayed so much by identity as by professionalism.”

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“I knew that members of the police were also carrying out massacres, but what could I do to stop them?” When I asked the general whether he had given orders to stop the killings, he nodded, then put his hands in the air. “Of course. But what could we do? We were no longer in control.” On his way to work every morning, Rwarakabije passed by roadblocks where Tutsi were picked out and hacked to death. The smell of rotting flesh hung in the air over Kigali; his children complained and cried in their beds at night. Crows circled in the skies, and packs of dogs roamed the streets, scavenging for dead bodies.

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And yet Rwarakabije continued to go to the office every day, continued to do his job. Unlike other officers, who defected to the RPF, Rwarakabije was determined to win the war. He sent his family to his home village in the north and only fled Kigali when it was clear the fight was lost. 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.

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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.

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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 thought they still had a chance to win the war, he said. They thought their flight to Zaire was a tactical retreat, nothing more.

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Even if he had decided to defect, it would not have been simple. Several of Rwarakabije’s colleagues surrendered to the RPF but were never heard from again. There were stories of President Habyarimana’s former officers turning themselves in only to be found the next day in a banana grove, their hands tied behind their back and their brains shot out.

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“Don’t forget that this was a war,” the avuncular general repeated. “If I had deserted, I could have been killed by my own commanders or by the RPF.” He paused and fiddled with his watch. “The genocide was terrible, of course,” he said. “I thought it was a huge mistake.” He saw the killing out of his office window, as it were, disagreed with it, and got on with his work.

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talked, to find dates and names he was uncertain of. He had highlighted important passages in yellow or circled them with a ballpoint pen. When I asked him when he would publish his own book, he smiled. “Not yet. The country is not yet ready for everything I have to say. It is too early.”

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and delicate appearance, their love of money, their capacity to adapt to any situation seem to indicate a Semitic origin.” Armed with rulers and measuring tape, craniometric Belgian administrators went about rigidifying with physical measurements the previously more fluid boundaries between Tutsi and Hutu identities.

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These colonial fantasies soon became engraved on the consciousness of the colonized, as well. The Tutsi elite, long favored under the Belgians, seized on the myths to justify their continued superiority, imbibing the stereotypes of Hutu—as espoused by a Belgian priest—as “the most common type of black, brachycephalic and prognathous, with agronomic taste and aptitudes, sociable and jovial … with thick lips and squashed noses, but so good, so simple, so loyal.”7 Hutu dissidents, in the meantime, appropriated the stereotypes of Tutsi as a race of crafty herders from Ethiopia to rally support against “the foreigners.”

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were moved more by fear, ideology, and local politics. In the popular imagination, the RPF had been cast as subhuman, as demons. By the time the genocide began, the…

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A Tutsi officer, having seized a village, was asked by one of the few Hutu who had stayed to lift up his shirt so the villagers could see if he had a tail, so sure were they that he was a devil.8 Even the sick and frail marched…

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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.9 The local strength of more extremist political parties reinforced pressure to carry out killings, as did the presence of Burundian Hutu refugees who had fled violence in their home country. In total, some 200,000 probably took part in the killing for many reasons: 10 Some were forced to do so by authorities; others…

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well as aid workers. It was one of the many absurdities of the Rwandan crisis: The French government and its contractors had made thirty-six shipments of weapons to Habyarimana’s government between 1990 and 1994, worth $11 million, and had deployed seven hundred fifty French troops, who helped with military training, planning, and even interrogation of RPF prisoners.12 Just months after they had finished helping to train the…

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The French troops did save Tutsi lives. They also, however, refused to arrest the Habyarimana government and army officials in their territory who were known to have organized massacres. Hate radio continued broadcasting unhindered from the area controlled by the French, exhorting the population to continue the extermination of Tutsi. Meanwhile, across the Zairian border in Goma, the base of French operations, at least five shipments of weapons from France were delivered to the ex-FAR leadership who had fled from Kigali.13 To add insult to injury, French president François Mitterrand personally authorized a donation of $40,000 to Habyarimana’s wife, one of the most…

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Behind the customs offices, however, an arms market had spontaneously sprung up, where ex-FAR officers negotiated to buy back their arms. An AK-47 went for $40 to $50, a Russian-made rocket launcher for just under $100. Other weapons were never handed over to the Zairians. Rwarakabije saw tons of ammunition smuggled through in trucks, hidden under bags of rice and maize. “We gave the border guards some money to look the other way. All they wanted was money.”

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The decay of the Zairian state and the influx of refugees drew a somber curtain over those days. Now the hotels hosted guests of a different caliber. The defeated Rwandan army commanders and politicians began checking into Hotel des Grands Lacs and Nyiragongo, Karibu, and Stella hotels and renting sumptuous villas on the lake. Journalists, fresh from the death-strewn camps, sat with politicians and army officers in their mansions on fake leather couches behind bougainvillea-draped walls.

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Most of the officers present had evacuated their families on chartered flights to Nairobi, Yaounde (Cameroon), and Paris. “We had lost the war,” Rwarakabije remembered. “Anyone who had enough money eventually left.” Rwarakabije himself was not so fortunate.

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troops had no military experience. Hundreds of prisoners were recruited; since they were among the only people who benefited from the mayhem, they tended to have high morale. Primary and secondary students, some as young as nine, were coaxed and coerced into training camps, forming the Twenty-Sixth Reserve Brigade.

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When I prodded Rwarakabije about the feared Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, who had carried out much of the genocidal killing, he scoffed, deriding their lack of discipline. “They drugged themselves on marijuana and cheap liquor, robbed the population. They were thugs,” he remembered. “Many of them eliminated themselves in the war. They would stagger onto the battlefield like zombies, high and drunk, and get picked off by the enemy.” For him, there was a world of difference between the FAR’s discipline and objective of overthrowing the new government in Rwanda and the Interahamwe’s ethnic vendetta.

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To raise spirits, the war council authorized the immediate payment of June and July salaries for all state employees and soldiers. They had brought with them the entire treasury of Rwanda, $30–40 million in Rwandan francs, which they stashed in a bank in downtown Goma. According to some reports, they were able to transfer over $100 million dollars in the early days of the genocide into private accounts; they had just collected the yearly taxes, and the coffers were flush with money.15 Most importantly, the commanders agreed on immediately launching guerrilla warfare against the new regime in Kigali. The expectations of the population were now especially palpable—the hopes of a million people, who were dying slow deaths in the camps, weighed on them. Since the Tutsi forces were known as inyenzi, or cockroaches, this offensive was dubbed Operation Insecticide.

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The other Rwarakabije I had to infer through human rights reports and interviews with victims. While he was commander of the Hutu rebels between 1996 and 2003, his troops were guilty of massacres, mass rape, and routine pillage in both the Congo and Rwanda. Given the tight discipline that reigned, it was difficult to imagine that the general did not know about his soldiers’ behavior. At the very least, he failed to punish them.

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the beginning we didn’t have many abuses. We even taught courses in international humanitarian law to our soldiers; some of our officers had done that training. But the troops got tired and hungry and started taking food by force from the population. We called it “pillage operations”—you would attack a village and take all of its cows and steal money.

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When I pushed him, Rwarakabije conceded: “You have to remember that we had 10,000 soldiers and their families to feed. And once the pillage started, soldiers lost control and raped and even killed sometimes. If we caught them, we punished them. At the beginning, we executed several soldiers for murder, but that gave us problems, so we started caning. I remember we gave one rapist 300 strokes of a stick on his naked buttocks and expelled him from the troops. But how did you know who raped? The villagers were afraid of us; they didn’t tell us. So most of the criminals went unpunished.”

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By October 1994, the Inzirabwoba—“those who are not afraid”—were infiltrating Rwanda from the refugee camps every week. Rwarakabije began leading nocturnal raids across the border. “We destroyed administrative buildings and killed local officials,” Rwarakabije explained,…

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They massacred thirty-seven people, mostly children. “Some killed out of hatred for Tutsi, others to prevent the survivors of the genocide from speaking out against them,” Rwarakabije remembered. Monitors from the United Nations tallied hundreds of killings of…

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was not just Tutsi who suffered. If Hutu refugees dared to return home from the camps, they were considered traitors. 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. Anonymous pamphlets distributed by Hutu militias in the camps give a taste of the rhetoric of the day: You Hutu fools, who keep giving money which is used to buy weapons to kill your fellows. You say you are studying. Don’t you know where those who studied are? How many studies did Kagame undertake, he to whom you give your money, who leads all the massacres? And You Tutsi, you have stretched your noses and necks because you think you have protectors! And…

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leader of the former government boasted to journalists from the comfort of his villa in Goma: “Even if the RPF has won a military victory, it will not have the power. It has only the bullets, we have the population.”17 Failing to beat the enemy, they would use blackmail, holding…

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The exiled leaders resorted to similar organizational models to those they had used in their homeland. The Rwandan administration had been a tightly woven mesh that reached from Kigali to the provincial authorities, down to the commune, sector, and cell, a chain of command that had made possible the mass murder of 800,000 people in just a hundred days. They grafted this grid onto the camps, regrouping refugees by their places of origin in…

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We had Tutsi with us in the camps! There were officers who had been in the Rwandan army and had fled with us. One of my bodyguards was Tutsi. We had to tell them not to stray too far from the barracks or the population could kill them.”

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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.

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He had joined because this is where he had ended up and what made sense for him to do when the civil war broke out; he could have tried to change it, but it would have been too difficult, too risky. 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.”

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The same went for many rank-and-file soldiers I met. Many had joined because they were poor and unemployed or because they wanted “to be a man”; a gun and a uniform were among the best tools of social empowerment. Ethnicity was fundamental in this dynamic.

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can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “Tutsi aggression” invoked as the reason for the war in the Congo, but it is not the origin of the conflict, as the quote from the BBC at the beginning of this chapter might have you believe. By limiting ourselves to the simplistic “Hutu militia killed half a million Tutsi,” we are suggesting that there is a reason for that violence implicit in those identities, that something about being Hutu and Tutsi caused the violence. While ethnicity is probably the strongest form of social organization in the region, we need to scratch behind that surface, to see what its history is, who is using it or being used by it, and for what reasons.

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Without proper health care, the disease killed the weak refugees within days, emptying their bodies of liquids through violent diarrhea and vomiting until their organs failed. By July 28, 1994, a thousand bodies were being collected a day and dumped unceremoniously into chalk-dusted pits by the dump-truck load.

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Foreign television crews who had not been able to reach Rwanda during the genocide now set up camp in Goma; the pictures of hundreds of chalk-dusted bodies tumbling into mass graves suggested a strange moral equivalency to the recent genocide, except that this catastrophe was easier to fix: Instead of a complicated web of violence in which military intervention would have been messy and bloody, here was a crisis that could be addressed by spending money. Over the next two years, donors spent over $2 billion on the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, more than twice as much as they spent on helping the new Rwandan government. 1 The RPF was furious. Vice President Paul Kagame lamented, “Personally, I think this question of refugees is being overplayed at the expense of all our other problems. We no longer talk about orphans, widows, victims [in Rwanda]. We’re only talking about refugees, refugees, refugees.”

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In the camps the living stretched out next to corpses, which nobody had the strength or the means to remove. Medical workers ran from patient to patient, jabbing intravenous liquids in their arms as fast as possible, often failing to find veins. Diarrhea stained people’s clothes and rags; everywhere, the…

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“Feeling useless is the worst,” she later wrote.3 Men would try to make extra money working in local fields or transporting sugarcane and cassava to the market, while women busied themselves washing the few…

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On the outskirts of the camps, bustling markets appeared, where looted goods from Rwanda were available along with the usual assortment of Chinese-made toothbrushes, soaps, cheap acrylic clothes, and bootleg tapes of Zairian, Rwandan, and western music. A UN official catalogued the amenities available in five camps around Goma: 2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 589 different shops, 62 hairdressers, 51 pharmacies, 30 tailors, 25 butchers, 5 blacksmiths and mechanics, 4 photographic studios, 3 cinemas, 2 hotels, and 1 slaughterhouse.4 Market stands advertised bags of generic, often expired or useless drugs, next to jars with traditional medicinal powders, roots, and concoctions. The camps were so well stocked that they became a hub of attraction for locals. Zairians from Bukavu and Goma trekked out to the camps to buy looted cars, stereos, and televisions. Youths from Bukavu went drinking on the weekends in the outdoor bars entrepreneurial refugees set up overlooking the lake, making sure…

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Youths and older men married girls as young as thirteen and fourteen, sometimes taking them in as their third or fourth wives. Some youths had brought with them pillaged goods and money from Rwanda and were able to afford the dowries of several girls. Often families had broken up, and marriage allowed youths to rebuild their fractured world. In some cases, wives had to share their tiny shack with several other women. These marriages were often short-lived and produced many fatherless children, adding to the hungry and sick in the camps.5 Beatrice, who traveled from camp to camp holding women’s rights workshops, heard story after story of women…

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although the real motive was probably just to steal their meager belongings. In her diary she wrote, “Such is the human being: when he is afraid, he sees enemies everywhere and thinks the only chance to stay alive is to exterminate them.”

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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.”9

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Disgusted and outraged by her life, she began writing at night in her blindé. “What had Muhawe and the thousands of other Rwandan children dying in the camps done? Was he, too, a génocidaire to have deserved this fate?” She began writing her own story, the horrors of the massacre of Tutsi, often crying herself to sleep.

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Aid groups launched one of the largest humanitarian operations the continent had seen, bringing forty-five organizations and over 1,600 relief workers to Goma alone. 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. As Alain Destexhe, the secretary-general of 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.10 Even after censuses were carried out, leaders stole the food of those most in need, pushing thousands of children into severe malnutrition. “We never had to worry about food,” Rwarakabije told me. “The United Nations supplied us with plenty.” As families starved, desperate mothers abandoned their infants at night at camp orphanages, where they were sure to get fed.

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What could have been done to solve the situation? A glimpse was provided on August 17, when, under pressure from the international community and domestic opposition, Zaire’s prime minister, Kengo wa Dondo, took matters into his own hands. The day before, donors had just lifted the arms embargo against Rwanda, and Kengo anticipated what was to come. He told diplomats that he was left with no choice but to begin the forceful repatriation of refugees. Over four days, Zairian soldiers brought 12,000 Hutu refugees to the border. The exercise went surprisingly well: Many refugees, glad to have an excuse to break free from the ex-FAR’s grip, voluntarily joined the convoys. Zairian local authorities, eager to see the troublesome guests go, helped ensure the operation went smoothly. Instead of a violent backlash by soldiers in the camps, 20,000 refugees, mostly youths thought to be militia members, fled into adjacent forests, fearing arrest by Zairian authorities. Against all expectations, there was no armed resistance. After four days, however, under pressure from Mobutu and diplomats, who denounced what they perceived as forced repatriation and a violation of international law, the operations ground to a halt.15

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Nations’ legal advisors, usually risk-averse, began asking whether the exceptional circumstances merited “bending the rules.” In April 1996, Denis McNamara, the UNHCR director of international protection, suggested that a forced return had become necessary as a result of pressure from Zaire, as well as a lack of money. He said, “We expect it to be highly criticized. But it’s a fact of life because it is unavoidable.”

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Mobutu had no interest in disbanding and separating the exiled government’s various armed forces from the refugees. When the new Rwandan government demanded that Kinshasa hand over the state assets that Habyarimana’s government had fled with, Mobutu gave them a few containers of rusty ammunition, two unusable helicopters, and heavy artillery in equally irreparable condition.18 The refugee crisis had injected new life into his ailing regime. The French, who, having “lost” Kigali to English-speaking rebels, were eager to maintain their influence over Africa’s largest French-speaking country, needed Mobutu’s permission to launch Operation Turquoise, while the United Nations courted Kinshasa to set up their huge humanitarian operation along the Rwandan border. On September 15, the UN Special Representative to Rwanda called on him to discuss the refugee crisis; on November 8, Mobutu arrived in Biarritz for the Franco-African summit. The dictator had leveraged his way back into the favor of his western allies.

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Mobutu’s relations with the Rwandan exile government were even more cordial. He had been a close friend of President Habyarimana, sending a battalion of Zairian troops to help defend Rwanda against the initial RPF invasion in 1990, and had quickly evacuated the dead president’s body to his hometown of Gbadolite. The dead president’s widow, Agathe Habyarimana, who had been a shadowy power behind the president, joined Mobutu in Gbadolite as well, using the jungle palace as her base during the genocide. In October 1994, she and her brother Seraphin Rwabukumba accompanied Mobutu on a state visit to Beijing; press reports suggest they secured $5 million in arms shipments from the Chinese government, circumventing the arms embargo by shipping the weapons to the Zairian government.19 The body of her husband lay refrigerated in Mobutu’s palace. Her host promised her that one day he would be buried in Rwanda.

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The U.S. Congress had, in the wake of their botched deployment in Somalia in 1993, enacted legislation that forbid U.S. troops to be placed under UN command. In the run-up to elections in November 1996, President Bill Clinton did not want to engage troops in a complicated, unpopular quagmire in central Africa. A State Department official involved in the decision-making process, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me: “Securing the camps was just too difficult; there was no stomach here for that kind of operation. In retrospect, could more have been done? Definitely.” After all, more was done in Bosnia, where the United States and its European allies dispatched 60,000 troops in 1995.

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taken power in Kigali from a French ally, Juvénal Habyarimana, and wasn’t it now trying to overthrow another, Mobutu Sese Seko? As a senior French official was quoted anonymously as saying: “We cannot let anglophone countries decide on the future of a francophone one. In any case, we want Mobutu back in, he cannot be dispensed with … and we are going to do it through this Rwanda business.”21 The French and Americans battled it out in the Security Council: Whenever Madeleine Albright pushed to get tough on Mobutu, France would threaten to veto; whenever Paris wanted to include strong language on human

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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,” Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s intelligence chief, remembered. In August 1996, Vice President Paul Kagame visited Washington, DC, where he spoke with the secretary of defense and the head of the National Security Council, warning them that he would be forced to act if the international community did not. A State Department advisor who attended the meetings said: “We didn’t fully grasp what he was trying to tell us. We didn’t realize they would invade.” Despite their remonstrations, it is difficult to believe that Washington officials, who had deployed a military training and de-mining team to Kigali to provide nonlethal assistance to the new government, were in the dark. “We knew what was up,” Rick Orth, the U.S. defense attaché in Kigali, said. “But I don’t think we ever gave the Rwandan government the thumbs-up.”

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debate soon got bogged down in a new diplomatic, Franco-Anglo spat. French foreign minister Hervé de Charette pushed for the deployment of the force, focusing on the plight of Hutu refugees: “We are looking after our national interests … but there are people in danger, there are a million.”23 The French exhorted the United States to “stop dragging its feet.” The British minister for Overseas Development, Lynda Chalker, called the French position “daft.”24 Among French government officials, the rumor mill was in full gear, with senior policy advisors suspecting there was an Anglo-Saxon plot to delay intervention to allow the Rwandan-backed invasion to make headway.

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Africa has the shape of a pistol, and Congo is its trigger. —FRANTZ FANON KIGALI, RWANDA, JULY 1994–SEPTEMBER 1996

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Not knowing when they would come back, or perhaps out of spite for the advancing rebels, fleeing militiamen and civilians had stripped doors off their hinges, removed glass panes from windows, and unearthed sewage pipes and miles of electric cable. Empty bullet casings littered the streets, which were patrolled by UN cars—the only ones apart from a few RPF pickups and civilian cars still on the roads.

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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. Many families adopted orphans of the genocide or took in distraught relatives. Paul Kagame himself took in five children.2

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The genocide formed the grim backdrop to the preparations for the RPF’s invasion of the Congo. It was the starting point for everything that followed in Rwanda: politics, culture, the economy—everything. It transfixed society and dominated the government’s vision for the future. More importantly, the empty houses and abandoned villages reminded the country’s leaders that the war was not yet over. On the radio in the west of the country, on the border with Congo, one could hear the government in exile broadcasting from the refugee camps, claiming to be Rwanda’s legitimate government. For the survivors of the genocide, many of whom had lost members of their families, the génocidaires’ presence in the camps was a living insult.

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Paul Kagame. Officially, the thirty-seven-year-old was vice president and minister of defense, but he had led the RPF since the early days of the rebellion and had firm control over the government. A gaunt, bony man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a methodical style of speaking, Kagame left an impression on people. He didn’t smoke, drink, or have much time for expensive clothes or beautiful women. He wasn’t given to flowery speech or elaborate protocol. His wardrobe apparently only contained drab, double-breasted suits that hung loosely from his thin frame, plain polo shirts, and combat fatigues. The only entertainment he apparently indulged in was tennis, which he played at the Sports Club with RPF colleagues and diplomats. Passersby would be alarmed by the soldiers standing guard with machine guns.

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Kagame’s obsessions were order and discipline. He personally expropriated his ministers’ vehicles when he thought those public funds could have been used for a better purpose. He exuded ambition, browbeating his ministers when they didn’t live up to his expectations. He complained to a journalist: “In the people here, there is something I cannot reconcile with. It’s people taking their time when they should be moving fast, people tolerating mediocrity when things could be done better. I feel they are not bothered, not feeling the pressure of wanting to be far ahead of where we are. That runs my whole system.”3

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is really the key to people’s lives, and obviously for me it relates back to the refugee camp, the lining up for food every day, the rationing. When we started primary school, we used to study under a tree. We used to write on our thighs with a piece of dry, hard grass, and the teacher would come over and look at your thigh, and write his mark with another piece of dry grass. You develop some sense of questioning, some sense of justice, saying, “Why do I live like this? Why should anybody live like this?”5

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After he finished high school, Kagame ventured across the border to see for himself what his fabled homeland had become. He was harassed for being a Tutsi, but he felt exhilarated by being among his people on his land. He sat in bars, sipping a soft drink and listening to conversations. He spent several afternoons walking by the presidential palace in Kigali, drawn magnetically to the seat of power that was at the root of his exile in Uganda, until security guards got suspicious and told him to scram.

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Back in Uganda, fellow refugees told him about a Ugandan rebellion that was being formed in Tanzania to overthrow the dictator Idi Amin, who had discriminated against the refugees for years. Led by Yoweri Museveni, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) recruited heavily among the Tutsi refugees. It seemed perfect for the twenty-two-year-old Kagame, who was itching to rise up out of the squalor of the camps. His stern and disciplined temperament drew him to work in military intelligence, a branch that shaped his outlook on politics. He received training in Tanzania, in Cuba, and, much later, at Fort Leavenworth in the United States.

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When the NRM took power in 1986, Kagame’s fierce discipline earned him a position at the head of the military courts, investigating and prosecuting soldiers’ breaches of discipline. Among detractors and supporters alike, he became known as “Pilato,” short for Pontius Pilate, because of the harsh way he dealt with any violation of the military code. Soldiers who stole from civilians or embezzled fuel from military stocks would be locked up; more serious violations could earn a place in front of a firing squad. “He can’t stand venality or indiscipline—it provokes an almost physical reaction of disgust in him,” a Ugandan journalist who knew him during this time, remembered.7

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Kagame was soon promoted to become the head of Ugandan military intelligence, a position that provided a perfect vantage point from which to pursue his true ambition: overthrowing the Rwandan government. He plotted together with other Rwandan refugees who had risen to leadership positions in the Ugandan army, positioning stocks of weapons and secretly recruiting other Rwandans to their cause.

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The guerrilla struggle in Rwanda was marked by self-sacrifice and harsh conditions. In the early years of the rebellion, the RPF was beaten back into the high-altitude bamboo forests of the volcanoes in northwestern Rwanda, where temperatures at night dropped to freezing and there was little food or dry firewood. Kagame enforced draconian discipline, executing soldiers suspected of treason or trying to desert.8 He perfected his hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, harrying the enemy, attacking convoys, but never engaging in large, conventional battles.

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People who met Kagame and his RPF colleagues during this time were impressed by the rebels’ dedication.

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The most famous Rwandan dance, intore, was a war dance that the RPF themselves sometimes practiced around the campfire, stamping their feet and mimicking cows’ horns with their arms.

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Kagame’s exploits and discipline earned him praise from around the world. General John Shalikashvili, the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, studied Kagame’s military tactics and praised him as one of the best guerrilla leaders in decades.9 “Kagame is an intellectual figure. I would rate him as a first-rate operational fighter,” a former director of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies said. “He understands discipline. He understands speed. He understands mobility.”10

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In early 1995, Kagame, usually known for his cool, deliberate style, began to lose his temper. “Whenever we brought up the issue of the refugee camps, he would raise his voice and bang his fist on the table,” a former government advisor recalled.

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In February 1995, Kagame traveled to his home commune of Tambwe, where he told gathered villagers, “I hope with all of my heart that they do attack! Let them try!” Several weeks later, he told journalists in Kigali that his government would pursue any criminals who attacked Rwanda by attacking the country where they were found.12 “We had told Mobutu publicly to move the camps from the border. He refused. We told the UN to move the camps. They refused. So we told them we would find a solution ourselves,” Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni said.13

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taken advantage of Zaire’s weak security services and Mobutu’s willingness to support his neighbors’ enemies, creating a complex web of alliances and proxy movements in the region that could confuse even close observers:   REBEL GROUPS BASED IN ZAIRE

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Kagame’s most obvious ally was Uganda. He had fought side-by-side with President Museveni for seven years, and then had served as his chief of intelligence for another four. The two had attended the same high school in southern Uganda, and Kagame had stayed with Ugandan military officers when he took leave from the front lines during the Rwandan civil war. Many other Rwandan commanders had also been born and raised in Uganda.

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older man warned Kagame: You need to have the backing of the world powers—the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom—to succeed in dramatically changing the constellation of power in Africa. As both Museveni and Kagame had learned in their own insurgencies, the international community was inherently hostile to foreign invasions but turned a blind eye to domestic rebellions that called themselves liberation struggles. Go look for Congolese rebels, he told Kagame, who could act as a fig leaf for Rwandan involvement. He introduced him to a veteran Congolese rebel leader based out of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s business capital on the Indian Ocean, whom he had met in the 1980s, a talkative and corpulent man called Laurent Kabila.

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He had allowed the Angolan rebels to traffic diamonds through Zaire for many years, skimming handsomely off the deals. When the international community imposed an arms embargo against UNITA in 1993, Mobutu provided fake paperwork to military providers in eastern Europe to allow Savimbi to buy weapons.17 The bearded rebel appeared regularly in Kinshasa, landing his aircraft at the international airport and meeting with Mobutu in full military regalia.

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The leader of this coalition was its youngest, smallest member: Rwanda. It was typical of the RPF, who had played David to Goliath several times before and would do so again later. At the outset, it seemed to be the perfect embodiment of a just war: Kigali was acting as a last resort based on legitimate security concerns.

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Rwanda from dictatorships. It was an alliance motivated in part by the strategic interests of individual governments, but also by a larger spirit of pan-Africanism. Not since the heyday of apartheid in South Africa had the continent seen this sort of mobilization behind a cause. For the leaders of the movement, it was a proud moment in African history, when Africans were doing it for themselves in face of prevarication from the west and United Nations. Zimbabwe provided tens of millions of dollars in military equipment and cash to the rebellion. Eritrea sent a battalion from its navy to conduct covert speedboat operations on Lake Kivu. Ethiopia and Tanzania sent military advisors. President Museveni recalled: “Progressive African opinion was galvanised.”

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Absent from these talks, however, were the Congolese. Their country was to be liberated for them by foreigners who knew little to nothing of their country. And of course, these foreigners would soon develop other interests than just toppling Mobutu. Within several years, the Congo was to become the graveyard for this lofty rhetoric of new African leadership as preached by Mbeki, Albright, and many others. Freedom fighters were downgraded to mere marauding rebels; self-defense looked ever more like an excuse for self-enrichment. Leaders who had denounced the big men of Africa who stayed in power for decades began appearing more and more like the very creatures they had fought against for so many decades.

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Congolese French, some words are known to illiterate farmers that educated Belgians and French rarely use. Morphologie was one of them; Banyamulenge would learn it as children, knowing that it connoted a vulnerability, a danger. “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.

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own myths, and adhered to particular conjugal habits. The Banyamulenge poet Muyengeza distilled these tensions, along with his community’s defiance, into a stanza: They came across They came across the shores of Lake Tanganyika They were swallowed by a python It found them too strong to crush.8 As in much of Africa, land

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The Banyamulenge’s siding with Mobutu marked their entry into regional politics and the origin of open hostilities with the neighboring communities. In 1966, Kabila’s rebels attacked a Banyamulenge village, forcing dozens into a church and massacring them, prompting hundreds of Banyamulenge to join Mobutu’s Forces Armées Zairoises (FAZ) and beat back the rebels from their pastures in the high plateau.10 Kabila’s troops’ abuses led Banyamulenge, who attach great value to cows, to dub him “the one who cuts cows’ teats.” Serukiza’s mother told him that no milk would flow where Kabila had been. “There are many ironies in our history,” Serukiza philosophized as a cool breeze blew in off the Congo River. “Who would have thought that Kabila would lead us many years later to overthrow Mobutu?”

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for “thing” as well as “penis.” “For them, we were no better than objects,” Serukiza remembered. 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. “They had songs they used to sing about us,” Serukiza said. “They were all variations on ‘Banyamulenge, go home to Rwanda.’ They also called us ‘RRR’: ‘Rwandans Return to Rwanda,’ or kafiri, uncircumcised—that was a huge insult for us. We aren’t Rwandans.” For many communities in the eastern Congo and elsewhere in Africa, elaborate circumcision rituals mark the graduation to manhood; Banyamulenge are usually not circumcised.

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Most Banyamulenge live in the remote villages of the high plateau, where the discrimination is less obvious and biting. But since they do not have good high schools, hospitals, or administrative offices, all Banyamulenge have to conduct regular pilgrimages to the lakeside towns of Uvira, Baraka, or Kalemie, where they are treated with disdain. “When you want to obtain a birth certificate, take a national exam, or get an ID, you had to walk three days to town,” Serukiza said. “There, they threw stones at us and called us names.”

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black day for Mobutu. After twenty-five years of autocratic misrule, his grip on power had slipped. The cold war—in which he had masterfully positioned himself as an ally of the west, garnering billions of dollars in aid—had come to an end. Several months before, his friend the Romanian president Nicolae Ceauşescu was accused of abuse of power and put in front of a firing squad with his wife, an event that deeply affected Mobutu. Shocked, he watched on television as Romanian soldiers manhandled the dictator’s limp, bloody body. Pressure was already coming from the United States, Belgium, and France, which had all supported him for many years, to reform. The economy had stagnated. Congolese wages were lower than at independence thirty years earlier. Inflation had climbed to over 500 percent.

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reminder: “Attention Zaireans and Bantu people! The Tutsi assassins are out to exterminate us. For centuries, the ungrateful and unmerciful Tutsi have used their powers, daughters and corruption to subject the Bantu. But we know the Tutsi, that race of vipers, drinkers of untrue blood. We will never allow them to fulfill their dreams in Kivuland.”

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influx of refugees further poisoned relations between the Tutsi and other communities, while politicians in Kinshasa cynically drew on anti-Tutsi sentiment to boost their popularity. After sending a commission to the Kivus to figure out what to do about the refugee camps, Mobutu’s government voted on simultaneous resolutions on April 28, 1995, regarding citizenship and the refugee crisis.14 The resolutions demanded “the repatriation, without condition or delay, of all Rwandan and Burundian refugees and immigrants.”15 In case there was any misunderstanding, Uvira’s mayor issued a circular to his officers, responding to a Banyamulenge letter of protest: “I have the honor to transmit the memorandum of a certain ethnicity unknown in Zaire called Banyamulenge… . I should also add that at the latest by 31.12.1995, they will all be chased from the national territory.”16

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Anti-Tutsi sentiment was exacerbated by a small group of Banyamulenge youths who, seeking adventure and responding to the call of their kin across the border, left in the early 1990s to join the RPF rebellion in neighboring Rwanda. Between 300 and 1,000 Banyamulenge joined this insurgency, although most did so surreptitiously, even stealing money from their families before quietly sneaking across the border at night.17 To many Congolese the Banyamulenge’s participation in the RPF war smacked of treason and reinforced their belief that, in their heart of hearts, the Banyamulenge were Rwandan.

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was killed in January 2001.” Several years after the creation of the AFDL, Bugera had fallen out with both Laurent Kabila and the Rwandans and left for a cozy exile in South Africa, where he reverted to his previous profession as an architect. Now balding and in his early fifties, he was wearing a blue polo shirt with a beige cardigan draped over his shoulders. He spoke slowly and deliberately, and had a dazed look about him.

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politics and pursue his career as an architect. He received a grant from a Canadian charity to begin a cattle ranching project with peasants in Masisi, and he became the real estate advisor to one of the large banks in Goma. One of Bugera’s former colleagues told me, “Bugera was never a politician. He was a businessman who was forced into politics. But he didn’t have the acumen for it. Politics in the Congo doesn’t work like a business ledger, where you can add up the pluses and minuses and get a logical result. You have to be able to understand political intrigue and outplay your opponent.” Bugera,

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represent the complexity of his history. “It is true that the Tutsi killed,” Bugera told me at one point. “But we all had brothers, schoolmates, uncles who had been killed. It’s all part of a whole. Can you portray that to your readers in Arizona or Berlin? Can you make them understand why someone would kill?”

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The ascendance of the Tutsi in North Kivu helps explain the virulent backlash against them. 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. In 1981, Mobutu reversed the citizenship law, decreeing that citizenship had to be obtained upon individual application and was only available for those who could trace their Congolese ancestry back to 1885. In theory, this not only stripped most Hutu and Tutsi in Masisi of their citizenship but also expropriated much of their property, since only Congolese could own such large concessions under the new law.7 For the “immigrants,” although most did not lose their land, this legal back and forth only underlined how tenuous their status was.

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early days of their rebellion, the RPF Radio Muhabura (“Radio Beacon”) broadcast on shortwave throughout North Kivu, providing the RPF’s version of the war and encouraging young men to take up arms to overthrow Habyarimana. At the village level in Rwanda and the Congo, they created umuryango (“family”) cells to mobilize new recruits and finances for their rebellion. “Each of our families gave whatever they could give to sponsor the movement. We held folk dances for fundraising and listened to RPF tapes smuggled across the border with songs and speeches on them,” Bugera remembered, smiling. Bugera had his first contact with the RPF through an affluent friend, whose family had helped fund the rebels since their creation. In 1993, Bugera sent

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continued his studies but joined the local Boy Scout troop that was being run as a premilitary education course by a local Tutsi leader. He and other Tutsi adolescents learned how to build bivouacs, give first aid, and dismantle and load an AK-47. In his free time, he baked mandazi, fried dough balls, and took them to the local market to raise money for the cause—a Congolese version of a neighborhood bake sale.

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But the hard side of war also became apparent. He learned of the death of two of his older brothers, who had died in the RPF’s final push to take Kigali in 1994. Then there was the genocide, when the countryside was filled with stinking corpses, when you couldn’t even drink the water in the wells because bodies had been thrown into them and contaminated the groundwater. Everybody seemed to be a killer or a victim or both.

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When the RPF sent him and a friend back to school in Rwanda—they wanted some of their young soldiers to catch up on the education they had missed—his friend attacked the Hutu teacher one night, strangling him with a rope, saying that he was a génocidaire. Papy sought solace briefly in a Pentecostal church, where he and other soldiers would speak in tongues and sing all night, but he left soon afterwards, finding it hard to relate with members of the congregation.

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when she saw her brother, an officer in the Rwandan army, on TV posing as a trader in a refugee camp. “The RPF could tell you with topographical precision where all of their enemy’s troops were located,” he said with admiration. “It was like having GPS.” By 1995, young Tutsi soldiers had started infiltrating Goma, armed with maps on which they drew ex-FAR positions and strategic targets. “It was like Mossad,” Bugera said, smiling proudly. “These guys were good.”

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General Yangandawele Tembele, Mobutu’s regional military commander, where he would receive information regarding troop movements and political developments. 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.10 In 1996, with Tembele’s help, Bugera boarded a plane for Kinshasa, where he bought weapons and ammunition from corrupt officers. He packed the goods into a chest freezer, put dinner plates on top to conceal them, and wrote “Gen. Tembele, Goma,” on the lid. The porters at the airport groaned under the weight, complaining: “What is in here, boss? Rocks?” Bugera laughed.

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“I was sitting around the camp in the evening, eating from a pot of plantains and beans with some other soldiers, when a friend of mine from Ngungu came up crying,” he remembered. “‘They attacked Ngungu, they attacked Ngungu,’ was all he said. I knew my family had been butchered.” Two of Papy’s brothers and several cousins were among several dozen Tutsi who were killed.

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Between 1995 and 1996, a total of 34,000 Tutsi fled to Rwanda from North Kivu. Barred by the RPF from owning radios, Papy and his friends gleaned bits and pieces of information about

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I never knew what to make of Papy. He was friendly and open, but rarely laughed or showed much emotion. His voice was a steady monotone, his body lacking the gesticulations typical of many Congolese. “The war sucked the life out of me,” he told me.

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He told the story of the wars by way of scars on his body—a shiny splotch on the back of his head from a piece of Zimbabwean shrapnel in 1999, a long thick scar that bunched up the flesh on his lower thigh from an ex-FAR bullet in 1996. He lifted up his T-shirt to show me a welt on his ribcage where a bullet had perforated his lung. Still, he smoked. “I’m not going to live long anyway, no need talking to me about cancer.”

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will do anything to protect our community, and it is true that many people want to destroy us. But there are also manipulators in the Tutsi community, who will use that fear in their own interest. ‘Oh, we must fight or the Hutu will kill us! Oh, take up your guns or Kabila will exterminate us!’ But you discover later that it isn’t true. We can’t spend the rest of our lives fearing other communities. We have to make that first step.” Then he shook his head. “But the stupid thing is that the Congolese government doesn’t seem to want us. There, too, there are opportunists who use the Tutsi threat to mobilize people. So we are stuck in the middle, between extremists.”

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It is amazing to what extent the ethnic stereotypes and conflicts that were born in Rwanda have contaminated the rest of the region. No other image plagues the Congolese imagination as much as that of the Tutsi aggressor. No other sentiment has justified as much violence in the Congo as anti-Tutsi ideology. Again and again, in the various waves of conflict in the Congo, the Tutsi community has taken center stage, as victims and killers. This antagonism is fueled by struggles over land tenure, citizenship, and access to resources, but also and most directly by popular prejudice and a vicious circle of revenge.

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It was difficult to avoid some sort of harassment—taxation, verbal abuse, torture, or worse—by Rwandan troops or their local allies. 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.”

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ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!   Population of South Kivu, Following the barbarous crimes committed in KAVUMU, MAKOBOLA, BURHINYI, MWENGA and BUNYAKIRI, massacres against our peaceful population of Bukavu are already being prepared by KAGAME, MUSEVENI and BUYOYA… . History does not contradict us. The terrible atrocities committed shortly before the beginning of the 20th century by the Tutsi kings prove sufficiently to what extent you are descended from CAIN. Just imagine: A Tutsi king, every time he wanted to stand up, had to lean on a spear that was plunged into the leg of a Hutu subject. The point was very sharp and covered with poison. What cruelty!   THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES AND THE VICTORY IS CERTAIN! OUR CAUSE IS NOBLE: PATRIOTISM AND SELF-DEFENSE!12

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These tracts tried to outdo each other in their extremism. The Congolese imagination, flailing around for clarity and trying to understand the violent upheaval the country has experienced, has latched onto the most basic building block of society: ethnicity. Instead of disabusing it of these stereotypes, successive leaders on both sides of the ethnic divide have only cynically fanned these flames.

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father insisted on speaking French with his children at home, which left his son with the smooth, urbane accent of an évolué, an African accepted into the exclusive colonial clique.

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It is not clear whether he even finished high school, but according to childhood friends, he could often be found in public libraries in Lubumbashi, the capital of the southern, mineral-rich Katanga Province, his nose buried in books. French Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes and Rousseau appear to have been favorites.1

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According to the few accounts from that period, his blinkered ambition appeared at an early age. Despite a slight limp that he developed when he was a child, he earned himself the nickname Chuma (made of iron) for his strength.

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Laurent Kabila was very authoritarian. When he said you weren’t playing, he wouldn’t change his opinion. In soccer, we respected him because he didn’t fool around. Kabila didn’t accept defeat, he was resolute and determined, he was above us. We feared him.”2

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The province harbored some of the richest mineral deposits in Africa, prompting Belgian businessmen to back a bid for secession of the province when the Congo became independent. The province, however, split in two when the north, dominated by Kabila’s Lubakat tribe, rejected secession. It was one of the many uprisings that broke out across the country following independence, sparked by both Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and local ethnic power blocs, now free from the shackles of a strong central state, that were trying to stake out their own interests.

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Kabila quickly immersed himself in this wave of violence, becoming a commander in a youth militia at the age of twenty.

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The sixty-year-old was kidnapped, beaten, and finally lynched by the same militia that his son belonged to. When word of his father’s death reached him, Kabila is said to have reacted calmly.

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Not only had the CIA helped in Lumumba’s assassination, but the United States and South Africa had helped assemble a contingent of white mercenaries to put down the various rebellions that had seized almost half the country in 1964.

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The mercenaries’ racism and brutality, as described by an Italian journalist, further stoked Guevara’s determination: “Occupying the town meant blowing out the doors with rounds of bazooka fire, going into the shops and taking anything they wanted that was movable… . After the looting came the killing. The shooting lasted for three days. Three days of executions, of lynching, of tortures, of screams, and of terror.”3 Pictures of white mercenaries smoking cigarettes and laughing, as behind them rebels’ bodies dangled loosely from trees, filtered out, although only an African American newspaper would print them.4 An added affront to Castro was the CIA’s hiring of Cuban exile pilots to provide air support to the mercenaries.

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personal challenge. For him, it was not just a matter of freeing the country from imperialists. “Our view was that the Congo problem was a world problem,” he wrote in his diary.5 During a three-month tour of Africa in early 1965, Che was pressed by other rebel movements for support, but he kept on coming back to the Congo. “Victory [in the Congo] would have repercussions throughout the continent, as would defeat,” he wrote. As he described an exchange he had with rebels from other countries, “I tried to make them understand that the real issue was not the liberation of any given state, but a common war against a common master.”

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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.” Suffering from internal divisions, lack of organization, and little military experience, the rebel offensives against the national army fell apart amid numerous Cuban and Congolese casualties. After seven months, Che was forced to withdraw, sick and dejected, his feet swollen from malnutrition.

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The only man who has genuine qualities of a mass leader is, in my view, Kabila. The purest of revolutionaries cannot lead a revolution unless he has certain qualities of a leader, but a man who has qualities of a leader cannot, simply for that reason, carry a revolution forward. It is essential to have revolutionary seriousness, an ideology that can guide action, a spirit of sacrifice that accompanies one’s actions. Up to now, Kabila has not shown that he possesses any of these qualities… . I have very great doubts about his ability to overcome his defects in the environment in which he operates.

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But the élan of his early years had waned; the charismatic revolutionary had lost his shine and began to look more and more like a common bandit.

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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. At one point, he had complained to the Cuban ambassador about their…

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Back in the Congo, Kabila’s activities were hardly more popular. In the late 1970s, Kabila tried to consolidate his power by launching a campaign against witch doctors, whom he considered a bad influence and a challenge to his rule. He ordered a strong herbal drink to be concocted, a sort of truth potion that would trigger dizziness and nausea in wizards. Of course, the herbs themselves were so strong that they elicited this response…

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With his prospects of rebellion dwindling and his reputation tarnished, Kabila retreated to Dar es Salaam, where he had good contacts with the Tanzanian intelligence service. They provided him with a house and a diplomatic passport and allowed him to take on a more laid-back lifestyle. He had a vintage typewriter, on which he would bang out letters to regional leaders and his commanders in the field. The few writings that remain from this time…

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At home, his family life was complicated by his fondness for women. He had affairs with his two live-in Congolese maids, Vumilia and Kessia, who “were promoted” to wives, and squabbles between them and his first wife, Sifa, sparked tensions in the household. In total, Kabila would have at least twenty-four children with six women, creating endless family intrigue and drama, especially after he became president. He had behaved similarly in the field. According to accounts that filtered out from his commanders,…

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Then, one afternoon, the Rwandan intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, turned up at Kabila’s house in the leafy Oyster Bay neighborhood of Dar es Salaam in the company of several Tanzanian officials. The veteran Congolese rebel was in a talkative mood, his spirits lifted by the possibility of renewed support. He explained that he still had several thousand troops he could mobilize in the Fizi area of South vu. “He was just happy that somebody was visiting him and asking him about his ideas,” Karegeya remembered. The aging rebel, perhaps thinking he was speaking to someone from the same bloodline, invoked his anti-imperialist struggle and lambasted Mobutu’s links to the west. He dug among his chest of papers to come up with some of his revolutionary pamphlets, and he even talked military strategy, proposing flanking maneuvers of the refugee camps and tactical feints. To Karegeya, who, like most

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colleagues, had by then endorsed the maxims of free-market capitalism, the “old man seemed like a relic of the past.” Kabila didn’t convince Karegeya, but then again, “we weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.”

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Karegeya later sent emissaries to Fizi to find Kabila’s rebels. His men spent weeks climbing mountains and trekking through forests on promises by their guides that the following day the rebels would appear. After several months, they gave up. And yet Karegeya persisted with Kabila. Many Congolese, especially those close to veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, now accuse Rwanda of having deliberately chosen a weak and marginal figure in order to manipulate…

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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,…

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Kabila arrived in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, from Dar es Salaam in July 1996 with almost nothing. He shacked up in a safe house in the affluent Kiyovu neighborhood of downtown Kigali, with a couple of suitcases. His only companions were his son, Joseph Kabila, who followed him everywhere, and several of his old rebel commanders, who “came in and out of the…

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The Rwandans had picked four strange bedfellows to lead the rebellion. Besides Kabila, there was Deo Bugera, the architect from North Kivu; Andre Kisase Ngandu, a bearded and aging commander who was leading a rebellion in the Ruwenzori Mountains, on Congo’s border with Uganda, and like Kabila traced his roots back to the rebellions of the 1960s, although he at least could still count several hundred active rebels under his command; and Anselme Masasu, a taciturn twenty-some-year-old from Bukavu who had a Rwandan mother and at the time was a sergeant in the Rwandan army. Years later, Bugera laughed when he heard Masasu’s name…

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Bugera remembered his first meeting with Kabila: “He was wearing sandals and one of those safari suits. He had uncut, blackened—I tell you, blackened!—toenails that stuck out over the end of his sandals. What a strange man, I thought! He didn’t look you in the eyes when he talked.” Bugera, who seemed privately to have hoped to become the rebellion’s leader, had heard about Kabila in the 1980s but nothing about him since then. According…

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These four men—two overhauled, aging guerrilla commanders, a twenty-something sergeant, and an architect—were meant to lift the…

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Kigali, the Rwandans embarked on some much-needed bonding exercises with their newly recruited rebel leaders. “The Rwandans are weird,” Bugera said. “They made us stay in a house together for three or four whole days, sleeping there, eating…

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fatigues, speaking mostly with the Rwandan officers who came in and out of the house, and keeping his distance from the two rebels thirty years his senior. Bugera huddled with other Tutsi leaders, who muttered bitterly about Kabila’s massacres of…

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with Vice President Kagame, who was constantly involved in the war preparations and seemed well-informed of the complexities of Congolese politics. The RPF strongman seemed more enthusiastic about the rebellion than the leaders themselves, exhorting the Congolese to understand their responsibilities in the struggle, but also to understand that the RPF and others were helping them liberate their country. He said, “ If we win the war, we will all win! It’s our victory!”

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Thus was born the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL). A grandiose name for a group that initially had little political or military significance other than providing a smoke screen for Rwandan and Ugandan involvement.

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Kabila was also smarter than most gave him credit for. He realized there was little he could do at the moment other than bide his time and try to position himself. After all, the Rwandans’ ambitions were initially strictly military, and they had given little thought to the government they would set up once they controlled the conquered territory. Given Kabila’s seniority, the Rwandans allowed him to become the movement’s spokesperson and to begin setting up a political directorate for it.

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liberated Congo. In an example of Rwandan hubris, the RPF planners desperately tried to foist ideology and sincerity upon the Congolese they had handpicked. As ingenious as Kagame’s military planners were, their political strategy ended up being simplistic and short-sighted. 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.

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on her way to farm her cassava field stumbled into their makeshift camp and began screaming at the sight of Tutsi soldiers armed to the teeth with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. They were tempted to kill her, but then let her go. She ran to the nearby military base, where she alerted Mobutu’s army. They surrounded the rebels and opened fire, killing ten and capturing five others. It was one of the few battles of the war that Mobutu would win. The war, still at the planning stage in Kigali, had been jump-started.1

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become routine when arguing that the Banyamulenge can never become Zairian: “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.”2

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Hundreds of Tutsi in eastern Zaire, but also in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, were harassed and beaten. The hysteria reached a fever pitch, in which anyone who had a thinnish, hooked nose and high cheekbones was targeted. At a border post with Rwanda, youths attacked and hacked to death a Malian businessman.5

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This misery provided fertile terrain for ethnic prejudice. In the crowds, youths were able to channel their anger against a visible, known enemy. Leaders like Anzuluni provided added incentives, such as free alcohol and modest wages for some of their organizers. The Banyamulenge, while poor, had attractive and inflation-free assets: cows. Soldiers and youths rustled thousands of head of cattle

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How can we explain this kind of brutality? It is difficult to describe the impact of abuse and dysfunctional government on the psyche of people in war-torn areas.

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One morning, I was packing to leave for Makobola, perhaps the most notorious massacre site, when a friend from a local human rights group called me on my cell phone. “Stop packing and turn on the radio,” he said.

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quickly tuned into a debate show on a local Protestant radio station to hear the member of a local political party say, “I wanted to draw your attention to President George Bush’s visit to Rwanda.” Bush was visiting Kigali as part of his whirlwind Africa tour. “Is it a coincidence that his visit comes at the same time as Nkunda withdraws from the peace process? At the same time as there is an American mercenary by the name of Johnson who is here in Bukavu, recruiting youths for the next Rwandan invasion?” He got my name wrong, but it was clear by his following description that he meant me. He said he had proof of my activity and that he would provide it.

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“Don’t you know it’s International Women’s Day today and I had to abandon my important activities in town to come climbing hills, running after you?” The woman huffed, leading us to her office, a bench under a mango tree. “All activities here have to be approved by me!” She chided us as we slalomed down through cassava fields.

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In negotiating bribes, the local official’s main leverage is time. Prudence, as her name turned out to be, had no real reason to detain us, other than the fact that she was in charge of security in town. With nothing on her hands—except, apparently, a Women’s Day celebration—she could easily wait us out. Back in town, she sat us down underneath a mango tree and subjected us to a long lecture on the Rwandan threat and the superpower conspiracy against the Congo.

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United States,” she glared at me. “Is it not the United States who supported Rwanda during the war to get at our mineral wealth? Don’t think just because we are black that we haven’t studied! Well—say something, speak!” She was clearly infuriated by my silence, which she interpreted as condescension. “Didn’t you hear that George Bush was in Rwanda the other day?” she said to her colleague, who nodded his head. “We have to be vigilant!” I feebly pointed out that I didn’t work for the U.S. government and showed her my documentation. “That’s what you say!” she retorted.

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We had almost agreed on “a fine” or “a recompense for her hike”—the two different euphemisms for the bribe—of around five dollars, when a local village chief turned up.

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“Hapana, hapana,” he slurred in Swahili, shaking his head. No, no, no. “What is this white man doing here? Don’t you know that I’m the chief here? Why are you talking to this woman?!” The situation got worse. “Haven’t you heard that Bush was in Kigali last week? Is this a coincidence?” The chief played with his digital watch, which was much too large for his boney wrist and had apparently stopped working a long time ago. “And just after the earthquake destroyed our towns!” Bukavu lay close to a continental rift and had been hit by a series of bad earthquakes several weeks before. The chief leaned over and whispered: “The United States is using earthquakes as a weapon of war to destabilize the province!”

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reconciliation, I asked the Bembe soccer team what they felt when they saw a Munyamulenge (singular of Banyamulenge) on the street. The captain of their team answered, “We are afraid. During the war, we didn’t know who is a civilian and who is a soldier. For us, every Tutsi man was a soldier. Whenever violence broke out, they pulled the guns out from underneath the beds.”

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answer provoked some rumbling on the other bench. “These are not just rumors,” the one with the Tanzanian accent said. “We all have family members who have been killed or raped by Banyamulenge.” “Have you heard of massacres committed against the Banyamulenge?” I asked the captain. “Against them?” He looked around at his teammates, who shook their heads. “No, we’ve never heard about that.”

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“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.”

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screaming and running. A body fell against their shelter, and his father made them all hold hands and pray. The body just lay there, like a fallen branch, against their tight tarp. Even if they had run, they wouldn’t have known where to go—better to stay and confront whatever was going to happen together. So they prayed, raising their voices above the screams. “Outside, in the light of lanterns we could see the other villagers watching. Some took part in the killing. Others just watched. But nobody did anything to help us.”

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cassava” into the boat, which they then paddled out into the lake. It was a big vessel; Alex estimated there to be around thirty or forty captives onboard. At around two hundred meters from shore, still within sight of their frantic families, the men were thrown into the water. Alex could see splashes of water where the men flopped and struggled in vain to keep their heads above water before they drowned. Some managed to keep afloat by wiggling their bodies for several minutes. On the beach, their families screamed out and cried but couldn’t do anything. His mother fainted. The soldiers watched,

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children were separated from the men

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looked feverish and faint asked a soldier for some water to drink. The soldier shook his head in disgust, telling him he was being disrespectful. He yanked him outside, leveled his AK-47, and, as Alex watched in horror, blew his brains out.

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Back at the prison, they found the prisoners who had been too weak to flee, including the president of the Banyamulenge community, and killed them.

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Congo. Colonialism and Mobutism eroded traditional authority and created uncertainty in everyday life. Various churches vigorously proselytized in the Congo throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; white missionaries still abound in remote corners of the country, puttering about in battered Land Rovers, fluently bantering in the local language or dialect.

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The prophet formed the physical and spiritual center of the community. Their founding belief is that Wahi Seleelwa is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, a distinction he inherited from his predecessor. As Seleelwa explained, after the death of their previous leader, whose picture hung on the wall behind him as he spoke to us, he was possessed by the spirit of Christ. Over the following years, he received the revelations of Christ, which his followers wrote down in their drably named “Communication Notebook,” which contains the main teachings of the church. Some of the passages would raise eyebrows among mainstream Christians: They allow polygamy (the prophet has three wives), have their own calendar with twelve-day months, and are governed by a conclave of elders dubbed the Four Living Beings.

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was, ripping into several people’s bodies. Women took babies off their backs and huddled over them, praying. They tried to hide between the benches and under the altar, and Neno felt bodies falling on top of him. “They saved my life: I felt bullets going into their bodies; they shielded me.” After several minutes, the soldiers stopped shooting. Neno could hear them debating outside. Then, the sound of tinder crackling broke the silence. “It was still dark outside, but all of a sudden there was a bright light I

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The soldiers had set fire to the thatched roof, in order to kill survivors and get rid of evidence. When Neno heard the soldiers say, “Let’s go,” he climbed out from underneath the bodies. The whole roof was on fire, and clumps of burning thatch and crossbeams were falling down. Neno managed to drag himself and seventeen other survivors out of the burning church. A hundred and three others died, including

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buried under the collapsed church,” Neno told me as we got ready to leave. “Nobody has even so much as put a memorial plaque there. You can still see the charred remains.” He shook his head. “We have nowhere to mourn our dead.” I asked him if he had ever heard of Banyamulenge who had been massacred. He looked surprised. “Banyamulenge? No. Never.”

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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.

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You monkey, you are destroying the seeds, that will be your food! —KOFFI OLOMIDE

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Over the past twenty years, Mobutu had cannibalized his own state, particularly his army. Not surprisingly for a leader who had taken power through a coup, Mobutu feared his own officers the most, and he made sure that they would not have the wherewithal to contest his power. He gutted his regular army, depriving it of resources and salaries, while he invested millions in separate, paramilitary units—the presidential guard and the garde civile—which he then pitted against each other. Throughout these various units, he named close associates, often members of his own Ngbandi tribe, as commanders and allowed them to get rich off extortion rackets, gun-smuggling, and illegal taxation. A similar situation prevailed in the intelligence services, which proliferated and spied on each other. “We didn’t have an army; we had individuals,” Nabyolwa remembered.1

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situation in Bukavu, a thousand miles away. When Nabyolwa radioed Kinshasa to tell them he urgently needed one battalion of special forces, the commander of the presidential guard answered, “We have problems in Kinshasa, too, you know. We need the soldiers here.” Mobutu had been in power for so long, Nabyolwa remembered, that no one could conceive of him failing, least of all to a Lilliputian neighbor like Rwanda.

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week after the demonstration, Nabyolwa tuned into Radio Rwanda to hear Prime Minister Pasteur Bizimungu give a speech. “There is no difference between the Interahamwe and the Zairian authorities,” he thundered. “Each time they mistreat us, Rwanda will get revenge… . If their gambit is to chase out those who have lived in the country for four hundred years, the only Banyamulenge we will welcome are the children and old women. The others must stay there to correct and give a lesson to those who want to chase them out.”3

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A few villagers ventured down to the hospital the following afternoon. The scene they saw turned their stomachs. Seventeen patients, mostly soldiers, lay dead in their beds and sprawled on the floor in the wards, bayoneted and shot to death. Broken glass, Mercurochrome, and intravenous fluids lay spilled around them. The attackers had looted the stock of medicines, spilling cartons of syringes and bandages on the floor. In the private quarters, they found the bodies of three nurses—Kadaguza, Simbi, and Maganya—in their white aprons, all shot by AFDL and Rwandan troops. At the nearby Catholic parish, several bodies of Zairian soldiers lay twisted in the courtyard. Inside, they found the bodies of two Catholic priests in their habits, also shot dead.4

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Retreating back to town, he reported to his commanding officer, telling him they urgently needed reinforcements. “He couldn’t have agreed more,” Nabyolwa remembered, laughing. “When he heard what had happened, he succumbed to a sudden stomach ailment. He packed his suitcase and said he was going to Kinshasa to get more troops. He was on the next plane out.”

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The following day, Nabyolwa’s mood was lifted briefly when he got word that a plane was arriving with the promised reinforcements. He hurried to the airport to receive the troops, only to see a cargo plane landing with a company of garde civile troops disembarking with their wives, children, and belongings. “There were two hundred shabbily dressed soldiers with pots and pans on their heads. Goats were running around the airstrip. They asked me where they could set up camp.” He moaned in dismay, holding his head in his hands. “Goats!”

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