Displaced

By Jeremiah Fastin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Jeremiah A. Fastin

All rights reserved by the author

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the
reporting of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the
reports of which were referenced in the production of this
book.

It hadn’t rained in several days and the road
was cracked with rivulets and channels cut from the last downpour,
a dried wash of rocks and clay that created a fine cloud of silt as
the land rover drove over top. The road led to a home and Jonas
Negusse sat up as he heard the first sounds of the vehicle approach
and then got up from his chair and stood at the door peering out.
An unannounced visitor was always some cause for concern and this
surprise visit caused him a particular sense of unease. As the
truck crested the rise and came out of the shadow of the gulley of
the road, his fear was realized. He counted four to five men in the
white land rover dressed in green military fatigues. It was already
too late to tell his wife and daughter to run and he would stand at
the door and play it straight. What could they know, he asked
himself and convinced himself of the answer, nothing.

The vehicle stopped in front of the house and
Jonas went onto the front porch to meet it. A smallish man with
dark skin and an officer’s insignia exited the passenger side of
the truck while the soldiers in irregular uniforms filed out of the
back and reunited with their leader and stood slouching against the
truck with their guns at their side or held by the barrel with the
stock on the ground waiting. Jonas took the initiative and spoke
first doing his best to sound natural, he introduced himself.
“Hello,” he said, “I’m Jonas Negusse, what can I do for you
gentlemen?”

He received no response from the four
soldiers that had gotten down from the truck and looked at him
narrowly. The officer approached him as if to make his acquaintance
and then struck him in the jaw with his closed fist. This was the
sign the others were waiting for and they filed past the man
pushing Jonas forward into the house and onto the couch in the main
room.

“Jonas Negusse?” the man who had hit him
asked.

“Yes, I just said as much.” He said now
sitting on the sofa, holding his jaw. “Please,” he said, “take
whatever you want, just leave my family.”

“We’ll search your home,” the soldier
said.

His daughter, Nicole, had been watching
seated in a chair as her father was pushed through the door not
knowing what to think or do, and one of the soldiers grabbed her by
the arm and raised her from her seat. She protested and was slapped
and then the soldier removed his bayonet and cut her blouse. Jonas
shouted, “No!” and he was punched and kicked, and brutalized with a
rifle butt. “Watch,” the soldier with Jonas’ arm in his hand and
his foot on his head said as he twisted the arm backwards nearly
out of the socket. But he did not watch, he closed his eyes shut
and through his shock, such was the intensity of his feeling, he
experienced a profound sense of regret. He did not blame the
soldiers, at least not directly, they were part of the environment,
but he blamed himself as all that he loved was being destroyed
around him.

The soldier ripped Nicole’s sarong and forced
himself on her. At the same time, her mother came in from the
kitchen and entered the maelstrom, like a blind woman in a storm,
and one of the soldiers hit her in the face knocking her into a
wall. He threw her to the ground and rolled her dress up over her
midsection. When he couldn’t get an erection, he beat her to death
with the butt of his rifle causing the insides of her head to spill
out on the floor.

Nicole flailed in panic and was struck again
by the soldier. When he was done she remained sobbing on the floor
and the others had their way in turn. Jonas could do nothing and
lay on the floor asking his daughter for forgiveness.

“We’ve come for you Mr. Negusse, where do you
keep your records?” the small dark man asked him.

Jonas, having been hit repeatedly and
bleeding from his head, found some voice and sobbed for mercy.
“Please take whatever you want.”

“We’ll take what we want. We like your
daughter, she is very pretty. What we really want are your records,
financial accounts, those things from the previous government.”

He gestured and they took him to the other
room. They rifled through cabinets and desk drawers, and they came
back out with several binders and loose papers.

“You’ve got what you want now please
leave.”

“Sorry Negusse but you are too much trouble
for us.”

Jonas felt certain that he would be killed
and summoned his last bit of composure to make a bargain. “But
leave the child, she doesn’t know anything, she’s not a threat to
anyone. Take me and I’ll tell you everything.”

They were all together in the main room, all
of them standing but Nicole. One of them was on either side of her
father.

The soldier standing closest to Nicole pulled
a pistol. “What of it?” he said and gestured to the leader.

“Go ahead leave her,” the man said. “She is
ruined. Good for nobody- not to worry about.”

They marched Jonas holding his head out the
door. Nicole heard the tin sound of the doors of the Rover Defender
slam shut. The engine started and drove off, but she did not remove
herself from the floor. Afraid to let go as her world spun out of
control, she pressed her face into the cool tile. She could feel
blood from between her legs. Her mother lay dead a short distance
away, her head and face pulverized. She was lost. She had no
family. She was ruined, spoiled, damaged goods. She began sobbing
unable to move.

****

Omar had seen the soldiers heading out past
the roundabout. A group of them armed, in a white Rover Defender
passed as he worked at his aunt’s kiosk on the edge of town, on the
road connecting the town of Bunia with the eastern suburb of Uhuru.
The kiosk was one of three stalls in a low brick building with a
sloped tin roof and front doors of iron for each of the three
shops. A formica counter and metal gate to one side separated the
front and rear of the store. Sandwiched between Harriet’s Hair
Salon and a furniture business, the store was secure and the
interior could only be accessed through the metal gate at the
front. Omar passed his time at the front counter selling to the
workers who commuted back and forth between their homes in the
Bunia slums and Uhuru. Maids, cooks, gardeners and gate men all
bought from him. Soda pop, matoki, chapattis, toothpaste and the
occasional tube of skin lightener. His aunt did a brisk business
catering to the daily commuters.

Omar had just begun closing up shop when he
first saw the soldiers. Later, walking along the Windsor crescent,
to take the cut through across the narrow stretch of vacant
property separating Uhuru from the slum and other less affluent
neighborhoods, he saw them again in the distance. The white truck
came onto the roadway going the other direction from a drive
connecting four houses to the main road, among them the Negusse’s
home. Jonas Negusse was his other employer and Omar walked up the
long drive to the home to begin his evening duties working on the
grounds and watching the gate.

When he arrived at the home, Nicole was still
on the floor. Omar came to the threshold of the house and hesitated
in disbelief. “Oh God, Oh God,” he murmured. His first instinct was
to flee and he went back and forth across the front porch undecided
about whether to get help or assist those inside. Finally he went
in and knelt down by Nicole, “I’ll be right back, I’ll get your
Uncle, he’ll know what to do,” he told her. Omar had known the
family for a little over a year. He liked the Negusses, Mr. Negusse
treated him well and gave him books to read. Now he ran to get Mr.
Negusse’s brother.

****

Jonas Negusse’s brother, Tshindundu Mukadi,
or Uncle Mukadi as he was known by his extended family, had fallen
out of favor in Congolese politics in 1996 when Mobutu fell from
power. Accused as a loyalist, he was stripped of his government
post. His position went to a minister loyal to Kinshasa, who was
later killed while trying to enforce his writ. Mukadi managed to
hold onto his seat in the Parliament for some time, but eventually
that too was taken away.

Then in the wake of the assassination of the
first president Kabila, he was rounded up with the usual suspects
after security services visited his home. He spent four fitful
nights in a camp outside of Bunia. Separated from the outside world
by two rows of metal fencing and a wind of concertina wire, he
tried to speak to his wife, Beatrice, some ten feet away in a
manner not to draw attention. He spoke in proper French, hoping to
elude the guards who spoke either pidgin or the local dialect. Cash
is what he needed, he told her, and much of it, and give it to the
commander in charge. Dutifully she had pressed the relatives and
upon raising a sufficient amount, she visited the camp commander, a
large dark man with a creased face that resembled a closed fist.
“Please sir, here are the necessary fines for my husband,” she
said. The commander accepted payment with a salutary grope of her
buttocks.

It turned out that Mukadi was not the man
they were looking for after all. Before his release, he had only to
spend four days sleeping on the ground and defecating in a bucket.
There was the obligatory interrogation, consisting of statements in
the form of questions. “When did you join the opposition?” he was
asked. “Who did you conspire with to oppose the new government?” If
there was any conspiring to be done, it would be done by them. To
make the point clear, he was spread on his stomach across a table
top, and two guards took turns hitting the soles of his feet with a
baton and alternately cinching the rope that held his head down to
the hardwood table. This went on for an hour or so while being
questioned and then taunted about his support for the previous
government under Mobutu. When it was over, he could only crawl and
had to be carried from the room only too grateful that his rectum
had been spared. Later, when he was released, the commander sent
him off with a stern warning against the danger of opposition party
politics.

He had been detained another time, after
Mukadi had apparently ignored the commander’s warning and taken up
with another political party in Ituri. But Beatrice had had enough.
Another relative would have to raise bail. She knew it was only a
matter of time before they came for her, and she was raped or
worse. A woman from a well to do family, she preferred France or
Belgium, or some other European country of which he had lost track,
to Bunia. So she left. She secured transport overland and then by
river to Kinshasa and from there to France, Belgium, Europe. He
didn’t blame her.

Mukadi was a Mobutuist and had come of age
politically during President Mobutu’s regime, shortly after
independence. He still clung to his belief that the movement under
Mobutu was the right and necessary course for holding the country
together. Even if his countrymen did not appreciate it now, he was
convinced that his generation had assured the legacy of a free
Congo. He compared that legacy with the current state of the
country overrun by Ugandans and Rwandans. The Congolese had lost
control of their own franchise, which had reverted to shifting
acronyms of groups of Tutsis, Hutus, Hemas, and Lendus. Mukadi
nurtured a particular contempt for the Rwandans, and his spite was
ironic considering that he was often told, if not accused, that his
features, tall, thin, and with a thin nose, resembled those of a
Tutsi. Nevertheless, he considered the Rwandans rapacious in their
quest for resources and resented the way they used the Congo as
their personal fief for settling political scores. The Rwandans had
thrown the Mobutuists out and it was the Rwandans now that raped
the land. What kleptocracy? he thought. Now only Kigali and Kampala
saw the profits from the Congo.

He had resolved himself to a fate of
political obscurity and was making the best of his forced
retirement, not ungrateful for having survived. He lived on a ridge
overlooking a grove of banana trees that had been neglected and
were slowly being overtaken by the bush. His house was a simple one
story block house that retained its ceramic shingles. From his
porch on the side of the house, he could make out the expanse of
Lake Albert in the distance. The government and the political
forces that controlled Ituri pretty much left him alone. He had
been mostly forgotten and was no longer of other use or a threat to
anyone. He sat on the porch on the side of his house sipping beer
and reading a ten day old copy of the East African News.