Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (37 page)

On her first stop, in Ethiopia, Albright made a go at apologizing for the Clinton administration’s failure to halt the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “Let me begin that process here today by acknowledging that we—the international community—should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994 and called them what they were: genocide,” she told the Organization of African Unity, whose headquarters is in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Bill Clinton used much the same tepid language in the apology he delivered in person in Rwanda in March 1998. But what, I wondered, is the worth of an appeal for forgiveness that avoids acknowledgment of the original transgression? “In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda,” said a minutely researched critique of the Clinton administration’s behavior during the Rwandan genocide that appeared in
The Atlantic
magazine. “It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term ‘genocide,’ for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing ‘to try to limit what occurred.’ Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.”

In her speech to the OAU, Albright denounced a “culture of impunity that has claimed so many lives and done so much to discredit legitimate authority throughout the region,” yet she said nothing publicly about the roundup of journalists there days before she landed in Ethiopia, or the banning of the local rebroadcast of news from radio stations like the BBC and Voice of America. “Africa’s best new leaders,” Albright said, “have brought a new spirit of hope and accomplishment to their countries. . . . They are challenging the United States and the international community to get over the paternalism of the past, to stop thinking of its Africa policy as a none-too-successful rescue service and to begin seizing the opportunities to work with Africans to transform their continent.” These words were being spoken a week before she landed in Kinshasa to embrace Laurent Kabila.

If getting over paternalism meant such patronizing speeches, Africans could probably do just as well without them. America’s choice of African friends—countries that were not only not democratic but, for the most part, had no plans of ever becoming democratic—was bad enough. That the Clinton administration was endorsing this new authoritarianism at the very moment when vibrant but fragile democracies were taking root here and there across the continent was more than a pity. It was a disgrace.

Joseph Kapika, a senior aide to Etienne Tshisekedi, put it best to me a few days before Albright touched down in Kinshasa. “It is America that has decided that Paul Kagame is a great leader, and that Yoweri Museveni is a great leader. And now they want us to consider Kabila as a great leader. What we want to know is why it is that what was bad for the countries that lived under Soviet influence should be good for the Congolese?”

Albright’s party arrived in Kinshasa on December 11, 1997, and immediately plunged into private meetings with Kabila and members of his government.

Two days earlier, UN investigators had arrived in Mbandaka hoping to finally begin their investigation into the reported massacre there, only to be surrounded by a hostile mob and forced to take refuge in their hotel. The following day, 271 Tutsi, refugees who had fled to Congo to escape the strife in Rwanda, were slaughtered near Bukavu by marauding bands of Hutu militiamen armed with rifles, grenades and machetes. Later came reports of another anti-Tutsi attack inside Rwanda. Clearly, in Central Africa there was more than enough evil to go around.

On the morning of the twelfth, after Albright delivered a speech to a polite audience at the Intercontinental Hotel, I ran into her spokesman and closest aide, James Rubin, in a corridor nearby, and he seemed unusually eager to deliver his talking points. “The feeling is that we have to take a risk in Congo, because the danger to the entire region of chaos in this country is so great. Rather than wait until Kabila does everything we want on democracy, on inclusion, on human rights, the feeling is that he is a clear improvement on Mobutu, and [Albright’s] feeling was that we should emphasize the positive. The secretary believes that as the Congo goes, so goes the region, and this region matters, and so therefore does the Congo.”

Rubin was on such a roll I could scarcely get a word in. “If you look at Museveni, you look at Meles [prime minister of Ethiopia], and you look at Kagame, they are not saying they want huge amounts of money from us. They are saying they want us to help them work through their problems. . . . We want to show that this is a region where we can do diplomatic business, and hopefully a place where businesspeople can do business. Our best intelligence info tells us that this group of leaders is not personally corrupt, so that gives you an added sense of confidence.

“Actually a lot of my take comes from an even better source, and it comes to me directly. Philip Gourevitch is my sister’s boyfriend.” And with that, Rubin said he had to run. Albright was rushing to the Palace of the Nation, where she was to meet Kabila, and then give a joint news conference. I rode over to the palace a little while later with Pierre in his battered and wheezing Fiat. Kabila’s security detachment would not allow him to drop me in front of the gates, which give access to the large grassy grounds that surround the coldly formal Chinese-built presidential offices. I had to hoof it the last hundred yards or so, and as I turned the corner and crossed the street, nearing the entrance in the morning’s soupy air, I stumbled upon a beating. Uniformed soldiers with black truncheons were furiously laying into a handful of would-be protesters. When a couple of the soldiers turned toward me with what looked like hostile intent, I held up one of my collection of press cards and shouted repeatedly in Lingala, “Ba journaliste!” (I’m a journalist), to which they shrugged and returned to whacking the victims at hand.

The press had been asked to assemble early, and we found ourselves in a large marble hall, a clutch of American reporters who were traveling in the plane with the secretary and me off to one side, and several dozen Congolese and other African reporters across a small divide of empty space. I had been told that there would be time for only one or two questions each from the foreign and the Congolese press, so I tried to work with some of the traveling press on devising questions that would get at the heart of the human rights crisis in the country.

I felt certain that the news of the day would be dominated by the massacre in Bukavu. It was yet another monstrous crime, like so many atrocities before it in the eastern borderland with Rwanda, but in a way it made for a softball of a question, guaranteed to produce ringing condemnation but little new light. I wanted to make sure that Albright and Kabila faced a question about the arrest of opposition leaders in the Congo, and if time permitted, about the government’s failure to allow the forensic inspection team to set up operations in Mbandaka.

The traveling press was unaware of the arrest, beating and detention without charge of Arthur Zahidi Ngoma a couple of weeks earlier. This reflected a structural problem that afflicts any traveling press corps. There is rarely time for much advance preparation when they travel. They are moving about in lockstep with the president or the secretary of state, and have little time to report anything on the ground for themselves.

Working quickly, I filled in the reporter who seemed most intrigued by the political situation in Congo, Roy Gutman, then of
Newsday,
focusing on Ngoma’s arrest. Gutman asked me if I was sure of my facts, and I said I was, producing a printout of an article I had written about it in the
Times
a few days before. Ngoma had ran afoul of the Kabila government when his group, Forces of the Future, organized a political forum at the Memling Hotel. Kabila had pledged to hold “free” elections two years after seizing power, but in the meantime, only his ruling AFDL was allowed to function openly as a political party, and function it did, flying its blue flag outside the little store-front offices it opened in nearly every neighborhood of Kinshasa.

Kabila’s secret police had ordered Ngoma to cancel the forum, but a determined group of activists set up bunting downtown announcing the meeting, and distributed flyers on street corners urging people to come. On the second day of the meetings, security forces cordoned off the area around the hotel and began arresting people. Ngoma, who had not yet arrived, was tipped off and urged to stay away. Bravely, he sent word back to his lieutenants that they should invite the participants to his house, where the meeting could continue in the privacy of his courtyard.

When Ngoma’s compound began to fill with activists, journalists and curious passersby, Kabila’s police smashed the iron gate and began firing off live rounds and saturating the air with tear gas. Nearly everyone present was arrested. Once in detention, activists and journalists alike were stripped and beaten, one by one, some receiving as many as forty lashes.

A few days after that, I received a call from Arthur Ngoma’s brother, Kitwanga, who asked to meet me. Arthur had managed to send me a handwritten note from jail that he wanted published. It read, in part, “we have been subjected to illegal detention, physical and moral torture, and inhumane conditions of detention. But if this is the price we must pay, it is worth it for democracy.”

Albright’s press conference got off to a bad start when a Congolese reporter, picking up on Kabila’s own bitter comments in an interview published a few days before, asked why the United States was pledging “only” $35 to $45 million for the country’s reconstruction, “because we need billions and not millions of dollars.” Before Albright could respond, he put an equally plucky question to Kabila, asking him to explain the massacre the day before of “more than 200 DRC
¹³
citizens on Rwandan soil.”

“I believe that the package that we have proposed was actually quite a generous package that has a number of positive aspects to it,” Albright said, arching her hawkish eyebrows, immediately on the defensive. “We believe that rather than dispensing large sums of money through that kind of assistance, we should supplement our assistance with trade and investment.”

Kabila had glowered impatiently throughout Albright’s answer, as if he had just emerged from his twenty years in the bush and was getting his first real taste of the spotlight. “I will answer the two questions that I was asked,” he said, his chest puffing with eagerness. “In Bukavu, I can say it was a rearguard fighting of those who still believe—in the name of Congolese revolutionaries—in the management of the republic. . . . The killing of refugees—they are not two hundred; they are over eight hundred, and we have heard nothing from the international community. When we kill one Interahamwe, an assassin, people cry out for a commission of inquiry. I don’t have anything more to say on this.”

A few moments later, another Congolese reporter ventured farther onto controversial ground, asking, “Mr. President, there are reports that this morning the UN mission of the massacre of Rwandan refugees was blocked at the entrance to Mbandaka. How credible is this information?” For the space of a single answer, Kabila recovered his poise, even if what he was saying was an outright lie. “I should be informed of this issue before I can answer the question correctly. I am not aware that they were barred from doing their work. I do not know what happened there, because I was not there. I will wait until the minister of rehabilitation, who is in charge of this issue, makes a report to me. I know that they are in the field. We must know what is happening in the field; if they were barred or not.”

Kabila knew how tough African journalists could be, which is why he had been locking them up. Now it was Albright’s turn on the hot seat. “Ms. Albright, your government regrets having created and supported President Mobutu,” began Mwamba Wambumulamba, an editor from the Kinshasa newspaper
Le Potentiel.
“During your visit to Kampala, you showered praise on Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni. Some media reports even said that you presented him as the strongman of the subregion. Since Uganda is not an example of democracy and respect for human rights, is it possible that you are in the process of creating another Mobutu, just to regret it later?”

I fought to repress a smile, and felt a deep professional pride—joy, even—to hear such a foreceful question about America’s relationship with African democracy being asked. “First of all,” responded Albright, “let me say that there are many people here who are responsible for the existence and the development of Mr. Mobutu, and who still share the responsibility for that.” She was arch and seemed so surprised by the challenge that the best she could do was to recycle some stale tidbits from her OAU speech and from other “talking points.” She was rambling, almost incoherent. “I do not exactly know what comments people have been making about what I said about President Museveni. I made it quite clear, as I also did in Ethiopia with Prime Minister Meles, that Africa at this stage is fortunate to have a group of strong leaders who are interested in regional cooperation. I also spoke of the same subject in Rwanda during my visit there, and I am still speaking about it with President Kabila by telling him that he is one of these leaders. These presidents have the responsibility to work together and promote economic development, democratization and cooperation in this region of Africa.”

Finally, the foreign press’s chance to ask a question arrived and the moderator chose my colleague from
Newsday,
who stepped forward a little bit uncertainly, carrying his notebook and a little piece of paper upon which he had written Zahidi Ngoma’s name. “Madam Secretary, since you said that you favor freedom of association of the political opposition, some of the political leaders you might have wanted to meet here are all in jail—they have been jailed in the past couple of weeks. Have you asked President Kabila to release anybody who is in jail now for political association? Has he given you any assurances there will be general freedom of political association? Is there any link between U.S. aid to Congo and the freedom of political association?”