Chris McGreal reports from Goma on the looting of the hated president’s lakeside holiday home, a monument to extravagance in a land of poverty
MOBUTU SESE SEKO has paid only one visit to his palatial holiday home on Lake Kivu. That was six years ago and he will not be going back.
As Zaire’s president recuperates in his villa on the French Riviera from a cancer operation, looters pick away at the bones of his sprawling mansion on the edge of Goma.
Rwandan-backed rebels took the provincial capital in eastern Zaire at the weekend. By then, hundreds of bodies littered the streets. Red Cross workers said they had already buried more than 400, most of them civilians, in mass graves.
Many of the city’s residents fled with the army. Some of those who remained said government soldiers gave civilians their weapons, told them to carry on fighting and ran.
Few people were so stupid. Some hid. Others went looting. President Mobutu’s holiday home was an early target, perhaps as much out of spite as for its pickings. Few people are so hated in the region as Zaire’s leader. Perhaps that is why he has only ever been once.
The front of the main house – badly modelled on a French chateau – offers spectacular lake views. At the back and around the corner the views are of dozens of families crammed into half-finished buildings and living in grinding poverty.
The car park is home to the only two ambulances in the province, spotlessly awaiting the president who never comes. Goma’s main hospital less than a mile down the road has no anaesthetics. Beside the ambulances are five gleaming black Mercedes. Behind them is a Land Rover with carpeted steps up the back to carry the president grandly through Goma. It has the number plate “P”.
The looters did not touch the cars. They concentrated on the practical by cleaning out the wine collection – which took up an entire room – the bedding, the televisions and the light fittings.
They turned their noses up at the plastic Romanesque plinths, the giant fake Ming vases and the imitation marble tables which cluttered the living and dining rooms.
Mobutu might not have been there in six years but his holiday home was kept ready should the fancy take him.
Despite the looters’ best efforts elsewhere in the house, the his and hers bathrooms remain immaculate. His is done out in sky blue with stereo speakers built into the ceiling. The centrepiece is a large whirlpool bath decorated around the edges with big bottles of aftershave and bath salts. Hers is fitted in pink and burgundy, with giant bottles of Chanel perfume and a gold-coloured pillow.
Mobutu and his wife have separate bedrooms. Beside her bed is an album with photos of herself.
The palace guards obviously did not defend it for very long, if at all. A machine gun stands abandoned by the entrance. Unopened boxes of ammunition are stored in back rooms.
In place of the absent guards are young men who the Rwandans say are nothing to do with them. But many of the rebels on the streets of Goma this week were speaking Rwanda’s native tongue, and some who grew up as Tutsi exiles in Uganda even shouted in English.
A couple of the rebels wandered around the house. They touched nothing, perhaps as astonished as the looters at Mobutu’s taste. But it seems doubtful the Mercedes will sit unused for long.
The rebels had done their own plundering in other parts of the city; expropriated United Nations vehicles are the most common means of transport.
Mobutu was not the only target of the rampage. The centre of Goma, never an alluring town, was ripped apart. Shops along the main street had been plundered of their pathetic contents. Outside a clinic, packets of condoms were strewn everywhere. Apparently no one in Goma has any use for them. Money was discarded in the streets, so devalued that no one bothered to pick it up.
Even this week, with rebels everywhere, the temptation to loot was not resisted. Two Zaireans pulled a fridge past Mobutu’s palace on a wheelbarrow. They got away. Others were not so lucky.
Five young men sat on the ground with their heads bowed between their knees. A rebel soldier walked by and beat each across the back with a piece of metal. Then they were piled into a commandeered United Nations car and driven off.
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