Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (34 page)

In October 1997, the minister of information, Raphael Ghenda, proposed outlawing direct foreign funding to nongovernmental organizations, saying that there should be a government intermediary set up for managing these funds.
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Several months later, the government went a step further, accusing all human rights groups en bloc of “destabilizing the government and contributing to the decrease in foreign aid by disseminating false reports and lies.” The government then began creating and sponsoring their own civil society groups, charged with reporting on human rights violations but also with informing the government of “foreign manipulations.”
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Soon, the government also began to pay “transport fees” for journalists attending press conferences, and in some cases the ministry of information made direct donations to impoverished newspaper editors. At the same time, they banned commercials on private radio stations, depriving them of all legitimate revenue. Security agents began regularly visiting the offices of radio stations and newspapers, asking editors what they had slated for the upcoming show or publication. Several senior editors were arrested and taken in for questioning when they published stories that embarrassed the government. The tactics came straight out of Mobutu’s bag of tricks—a mixture of coercion and co-optation—and were effective. The newspapers critical of the government,
Le Phare
,
Le Potentiel
, and
La Référence Plus
, began to water down their denunciations.

This repression led to a renowned diplomatic incident that helped seal Kabila’s fate as a pariah of the west. In December 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Kinshasa to meet with Kabila. Relations between the senior U.S. diplomat and the Congolese head of state were not good. Several months before her visit, during the height of the refugee crisis, Albright had called Kabila, threatening serious consequences if he didn’t allow investigators into the country to find out what had happened with the missing Rwandan refugees. Kabila had hung up on Albright mid-sentence, muttering, “Imperialist!”
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Nevertheless, the meeting went fairly well. Albright argued that it would be in Kabila’s own interest to open up political space to his critics, that it would make him look stronger, not weaker. As often, he was eloquent and affable, expressing himself in fluent English. When they walked into the rotunda of the presidential palace, where a press conference had been organized, he went first, rattling off a series of fairly uncontroversial statements. Then, an American journalist asked Kabila about the recent arrest of Zahidi Ngoma, pointing out that this had been interpreted as a crackdown on his opponents. Suddenly, Kabila became agitated and began berating the reporter. “This gentleman [Zahidi Ngoma] is not a politician,” Kabila said, jabbing a finger in the air. “He’s not a political leader. Do you call a political leader those who come on the street to incite people to kill each other ... who manufacture political pamphlets with the intent of dividing people? Do you call people like that political leaders? Do you let people like that out on the street?”
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Then Kabila put his fingers up in a
V
for victory and said, “Viva democracy!”
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The Americans were not amused.

In retrospect, Kabila’s heavy-handedness does not make much sense. The public had been relatively favorable toward him at the beginning, and what little opposition there was against him was disorganized and weak. Why did he squander the initial goodwill with such squabbles?

Many have dismissed Kabila’s hostility to domestic and foreign critics as evidence of his authoritarian nature. While it was clearly a factor, more was behind his reaction than just a despotic personality. As much as anything else, his allergic reaction to challenges to his regime stemmed from the profoundly weak position he was in. Pressed into a corner and feeling vulnerable, he reacted by lashing out.

Kabila came to power on the wings of a rebellion sponsored and, to a large degree, fought by other armies. He had tried to gain independence by surrounding himself with businessmen and intellectuals from the diaspora whom he barely knew. The people who surrounded him day and night—his personal assistant, the commander of his bodyguard, his secretary and protocol officer—were all Rwandan or Congolese Tutsi. His army was a jigsaw of foreign troops,
kadogo
(child soldiers), Katangan Tigers, and former Mobutu troops. Kabila felt like the majordomo in a house owned and lived in by others.

Some of Kabila’s former associates ascribe this lack of political cohesion to the unexpectedly quick success of the rebellion. Colonel Patrick Karegeya, who had helped manage the rebellion from Kigali, told me: “We reached Kinshasa in six months. Even basic training for a soldier takes nine months! We were not prepared.” Ugandans, in particular, were dismayed at the speed of their advance. Museveni drew on his own experience fighting a guerrilla war. His insurrection lasted five years, from 1981 to 1986, and received little help from other countries. This helped eliminate opportunists who were there to make a quick fortune and fostered cohesion and self-reliance among the remaining officers. The AFDL’s brushfire advance across the country, coupled with the foreign domination of the rebellion, produced a weak and fractured government.

From this position of weakness, Kabila saw critics as threats. After all, most newspapers were not able to sell enough advertising or copies to cover even their overhead and sought funding from politicians. The only way entrepreneurs in Kinshasa could get ahead under Mobutu was to seek political patronage; most businesses had links to the system Kabila had just toppled. And all the main civil society groups received funding from Europe or the United States, countries that were deeply critical of him because of the massacres of Rwandan refugees.

If Kabila had given way to demands for multiparty democracy and elections immediately, he would have most likely lost power. Indeed, an independent opinion poll in June 1997 indicated that 62 percent of the capital’s population supported opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, while only 14 percent favored Kabila.
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Moreover, the new leaders were mostly inexperienced. Following Mobutu’s demise, hundreds of top officials in government agencies and ministries were sacked or fled into exile. “It was like what the Americans did with the Baath Party in Iraq,” one official in the Ministry of Mines told me. “From one day to the next, everybody was gone.”
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The government did not have the time or the means to conduct a serious job search for all the new officials it needed. This led to ad hoc, hasty decisions. When Jean-Claude Masangu, the director of Citibank in Kinshasa, visited the new minister of finance to introduce himself, the minister sized him up: “Aren’t you Congolese? Are you looking for a job? We need people like you!” Several weeks later, Masangu was appointed governor of the Central Bank (it didn’t hurt that his father had been a childhood friend of Kabila’s).
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To Kabila’s credit, the first ministerial cabinet included several respected members of the opposition: Justine Kasavubu, a former Tshisekedi activist and daughter of the country’s first president, became the head of civil service. Two prominent doctors and Mobutu opponents, Jean Kinkela and Jean-Baptiste Sondji, were named as ministers of telecommunications and health, respectively.

The most important portfolios, however, went to unseasoned members of the diaspora. Mwenze Kongolo, a bail officer from Philadelphia, became interior minister, and Mawapanga Mwana Nanga, an agronomist from the University of Kentucky, was named minister of finance. A few appointees didn’t even know Kinshasa and had to hire drivers or guides to show them around the capital, as they had just returned from decades of exile.

Two of the new ministers had had run-ins with the law abroad. Thomas Kanza, who was in charge of regional cooperation and aid, was unable to deal with the U.S. government because he was wanted in Tennessee for fleeing a $300,000 fine for fraud. Celestin Lwangy’s nomination for justice minister elicited some chuckles in the Belgian press, as he had served eight months in prison in Belgium for illegally hooking up his electricity supply to the power grid.

It was no surprise that this motley group had trouble carrying out the necessary reforms. Nonetheless, with the arrival of the AFDL, the Congolese did get their first taste of democracy. In towns across the country, mayors and governors were initially elected by popular vote. Kabila, never one for lengthy proceedings, made short shrift of ballots and simply told people to gather together in the town square or marketplace. He would then parade a number of candidates in front of the crowd and ask them to raise their hands if they were in favor. The man—almost no women stood for election—for whom the highest number of hands were raised was immediately proclaimed winner. Despite its improvised nature, this process produced some decent results. Several well-respected university lecturers were elected by popular acclamation. This experiment, however, was brought to a hasty end when Kabila realized that many of the leaders that the population wanted to elect, especially in the center and the west of the country, belonged to Tshisekedi’s party.

Other initiatives were also aborted when Kabila feared that opponents of the regime could hijack them. Soon after the AFDL took power, the new minister for reconstruction announced that national and provincial conferences on reconstruction would be held so local leaders could propose development priorities. The participants, however, saw this as an opportunity to talk about much more than just development. They began condemning their new government for “misguided behavior” and “cooperation agreements with foreign armies,” and they demanded the opening of political space.
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Kabila soon suspended the whole initiative and adopted a more top-down approach toward development.

“During that first year we started a dozen projects and finished almost none,” Didier Mumengi, the former information minister, told me. “Kabila was surrounded by people with no experience. We didn’t have any money. And the Rwandans were still there, looking over his shoulder.” Mumengi shook his head. “Kabila was a man who needed to be helped. But he wasn’t.” On one occasion, the president decided he wanted to create a “canteen for the people,” where the poor could come and eat. Mumengi said he tried to dissuade him, saying that it would not be feasible, but the president insisted. “The people are hungry! They have a right to eat,” he told them.
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“The amount of money we wasted on bags of corn and beans!” Mumengi remembered. “That was misguided socialism.”