found it a little more difficult
John Matshikiza tracks South African Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s attempts to make sense of the various factions of the Congolese rebel movement in war-ravaged Kisangani
Kisangani, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Wed-nesday August 11. I have arrived from the eastern Congolese town of Goma, seat of the new leaders of the Rally for a Democratic Congo (RCD.)
The RCD is the rebel force bent on overthrowing President Laurent Kabila. There has been a recent split in their ranks, and the issue now is which of the factions is in control of the strategic mining town of Kisangani.
Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, South Africa’s new foreign minister, is also in Kisangani. She has a few hours head start on me, having arrived in an official aircraft, direct from Kigali in neighbouring Rwanda to Kisangani’s Bangoka airport.
I have come, with some of the RCD officials from Goma, in an unmarked Boeing 707, an aging beauty that plies the unregulated skies of Congo, ferrying passengers and freight. In the midst of war, life goes on.
Today the payload from Goma has been made up mostly of a large detachment of RCD military police in camouflage, carrying their disarmed rifles and packs on board with them, destined to reinforce the RCD’s presence in Kisangani. There has been a flare-up of hostilities between soldiers of the RCD, Rwanda and Uganda. Who can understand the nature of these impenetrable intrigues among former friends?
The sudden arrival of the soldiers has displaced several dozen Congolese civilians trying to return to Kisangani with precious supplies. A young man who tried to force his way on board is bodily hurled off. A frantic woman throws herself on the ground and screams.
We leave without them.
For some reason we land, not at Bangoka, but at Simi-Simi, the military airport a few kilometres away. The two pilots, an Englishman who has been flying these skies for 40 years and a tightly coiled young Belgian, stretch out on the tarmac under the plane’s nose, basking in the sun before their next take-off.
We head into town.
It is early afternoon. We are sitting in the house occupied by General Jean-Pierre Ondekane, chief of staff of the military forces of the RCD, and second vice- president of the dominant Goma faction of the movement.
Ondekane’s wife has assembled a very tasty meal as we watch the general and Mose Nyarugabo, the first vice-president in the RCD, count out piles of old notes that bear the head of Joseph-Desiree-Mobutu-Sese- Seko, the former president of now defunct Zaire.
The money is to be distributed, Azdak- fashion, to the tired citizens, peasants, really, who populate the outskirts of diamond-rich Kisangani. They have been obliged to wait half the day in the sun outside the shabby, two-storey offices of the provincial governor, while Dlamini-Zuma and her colleagues confer with the Goma-based RCD leaders inside.
It has been another African political circus, the peasants sullen as they wait in the town square, the battered instruments of the melancholy brass band burning in the sun, the gaudily improvised saddles of scores of bicycle taxis, and the women with babies slung on their backs and baskets of wilting bananas balancing on their heads.
In the general’s house, the high-ceilinged dining-cum-living room is cool after long hours without refreshment. We are as confused and hungry as the peasants, and are grateful to be able to attack the pots that have been placed on the table. Nyarugabo and five or six of his friends seat themselves close to the fragrant pots – first in and last out for the midday meal.
As he serves himself, the first vice- president regales us with another anti- Mobutu joke: “When Mobutu was visiting Shaba one time,” he says, “he was received by the wife of the local governor, an uneducated woman who didn’t have much French. She graciously showed him to the laden table and proudly began to explain the various dishes she had prepared for him. The only trouble was she had difficulty in distinguishing between the French words for `you have’ and `you are’. So as she led him round the table, she indicated the different dishes, saying, `Here, your excellency, you are a cow. Here you are a monkey, here you are a pig, and here you are a goat.'”
Nyarugabo is an expert at the politics of derision. But how is the rest of his politics? It’s hard to say. So we all laugh with him, at the expense of the late president of the late Zaire, and proceed to dig in.
Dlamini-Zuma, the RCD’s guest of honour in Kisangani, is not eating with us. She has gone directly to her next appointment, to meet Professor Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, former president of the RCD, and now rival to the Goma group.
I am wondering whether Dlamini-Zuma, new in the job and already exhausted with trying to unravel the Alexandrian knot of Congo, is being given any refreshment where she is.
>From the time she landed at Bangoka, she had been literally tugged from all sides, each faction in the war against Kabila demanding her undivided attention. She had shown great restraint and dignity in this scrum that awaited her on the runway.
But by the time I caught up with her, this Babel of the impenetrable Congo was clearly getting to her. Worse, her delegation had omitted to bring along a French interpreter. The whole morning she has been struggling to understand the elaborate explanations of her hosts, conducted in passionate but fractured English. The leaders from Goma had equally failed to bring along an English interpreter.
After the Goma group, she had to sit in on an equally perplexing harangue from yet another splinter group, individuals who had originally stuck with Wamba when the Goma grouped ousted him, but who had now broken away from Wamba as well. They were not yet prepared to fall back in with the people from Goma, however, whom they accused of being undemocratic. They were neutral, but insisted that their voice should also be heard.
While we are eating, she is sitting through a long afternoon of intricate justifications from the Wamba group, anxious not to let her leave Kisangani until she has understood their claims, and, more importantly, conveyed them to President Thabo Mbeki. There is too much talking to do, and too little time.
The RCD is confident of victory over Kabila, which is why they are nimbly avoiding signing the Lusaka Peace Accord which Dlamini-Zuma has come to promote.
The day is finally growing cooler as we leave the general’s house and climb back into our convoy of battered Mercedes and Nissan sedans. We are heading to the airport, so that the RCD leaders can bid farewell to the South African and Zambian delegations. An armoured troop carrier with anti-aircraft rocket launchers and bazookas rearing from its back like so many porcupine quills is in the lead.
We crash through the rutted outskirts of Kisangani, and then into the centre of town, where the asphalt is still in relatively good condition.
It is now dusk, what should be the close of a bustling day in this diamond-rush town, the third metropolis of Congo, after Kinshasa and Lubumbashi. Yet it feels like a Saturday afternoon.
In Kisangani nowadays, it’s always Saturday afternoon. Most of the shops are barred shut. Listless citizens are standing around, a few bicycle taxis without passengers whirring through the heat. Cars are rare. The main street, that used to think it looked like Las Vegas, with its rows of diamond dealers’ shops lining both sides of the main drag, is dead. A few Indian and Lebanese traders, left over from the boom days, hang hopefully in the limbo of the dusk, looking down from the hollow silence of their first-floor balconies, watching our armed convoy fly by.
We are later than we had planned to be, but the organisers have calculated that Dlamini-Zuma’s team will be even later, held back by the Wamba group’s earnest protestations of their strength in Kisangani.
The senior politicians of the Goma RCD, in their purple Pajero with its darkened windows and diplomatic number plates registered to some European power that has long given up hope of reclaiming it, are confident that Wamba doesn’t stand a chance. What strength, where? Wamba’s only strength is the Ugandans who are propping him up. This is where the problem lies.
The lead armoured vehicle takes off down a side road at the edge of the business district, then suddenly stops, backing up the rest of the convoy across an intersection. The driver has lost his way.
We inch backwards, one car after another, confusedly trying to re-orient. The commander of the Rwandan forces, who has been bringing up the rear, angrily overtakes the whole line of vehicles and takes the lead in his 4×4, motioning the driver of the troop carrier to get his head organised and follow.
We continue out of town, past the majestic green and white mosque with its four oriental turrets poised above the wide green waters of the Congo River to our right. The sacred building has now been turned into an impromptu barracks for soldiers from one or other of the rebel or invading forces. God has left Kisangani.
No one spares the violated mosque a glance as we speed on into the village world of outer Kisangani.
Four or five times, before we reach the airport area, the commander stops the convoy and deploys his men on either side of the road, in among the muddy houses whose occupants are beyond stupefaction. They stare in silence as the soldiers plunge through their yards and into the fields behind, to scan for invisible agents of Kabila, or for the ever- present but unquantifiable menace of the interahamwe – the sinister force of Rwandan Hutus who are the real cause of the war in Congo.
The commander and his men climb back on board, and we continue through the throngs of dwellings that are slung haphazardly against the sides of the narrow road.
Kisangani’s once-proud international airport is desolate. Two or three neon lights dangling from poles outside the main building give some relief from the gathering gloom. Soldiers are dug in at 2m intervals all around the perimeter, sprouting like rabbits out of their grassy trenches.
Most of the windows in the airport terminal are shattered and the arrivals hall deserted, as is the control tower that stares out blindly over the runway.
There are three planes sitting on the cracked tar of the airport apron, lit by the red of the setting sun. One is a Russian-built Antonov, squatting awkwardly on its low undercarriage while the Bulgarian crew and their Congolese assistants finish offloading a cargo of dry rations, destined for the stomachs of the Ugandan soldiers who are dug in at the far end of the airport perimeter, watching the arrival of our convoy with twitchy eyes.
The Antonov is already preparing to take off again, its turbine engines whining as they start to spin the powerful propellers on its wings.
The other two aircraft are sleek executive jets. They are waiting to take the South African and Zambian ministerial delegations out of Kisangani, away from this terrifying zone of war. But the ministers have still not arrived, and night, with its myriad lethal possibilities, is falling over Kisangani.
A four-strong air crew is standing round the nose of each jet. The South African crew is white. The Zambian crew is black. Each crew chats among themselves, aloof from the other.
Separately, they all turn to watch as the Antonov lumbers on to the runway. Conversation stops. The Antonov pauses to gather strength as the propellers roar and the aircraft rocks, locked on its squat wheels. Then it lurches forward, gathers speed, and finally, incredibly, lifts off above the jungle at the end of the runway, starts to climb away from Kisangani, curving slowly away towards the south-east, and the distant safety of Goma and Kigali.
The pilots on the ground give an unspoken salute for the successful take-off, an acknowledgment of the skills of one of their own kind – the masters of the skies. They turn back to their own concerns.
They are still stranded on this unreliable element of solid ground, with night and uncertainty creeping in on them from all sides.
The ministers, with their obscure mission of peace, still haven’t shown up.
I leave the RCD people, chatting confidently among themselves about the war in the shelter of the stark airport buildings, and walk over to the South African crew and their elegant jet. There are three men – two pilots and a flight engineer – and a female flight attendant, all Afrikaners. They look at me stiffly as I greet them, but relax a little as I smile and say that I am a homeboy.
How do they feel, I ask, out here in the Congo?
“We should have been out of here three hours ago,” says the captain, tapping his watch. “If there’s no runway lights, how are we going to take off?”
I say, looking around at the ghostly airport, and the burnt-out Boeing 707 that is lying on its belly off to one side, and has probably been lying there for a decade or more, that it seems unlikely that there could be such a luxury as runway lights at this place. What then?
“Then we just won’t be able to go. But how can we stay?” is the anxious and angry reply, on the edge of frustration. How have he and his patriotic crew come to be hostage to this ridiculous game of African politics, is the unspoken subtext.
I leave them and go over to the crew of the Zambian jet. They are more relaxed with me, but are just as concerned about getting out of Kisangani. To try to take off without runway lights, without air traffic control, under the potentially fatal possibility of a sudden attack from unidentifiable mortars and rockets along the jungle perimeter, or even from the contradicting armies dug in all around them, ostensibly protecting this unprotectable remnant of an airport – this was not part of the deal. They, too, are pilots, not politicians.
So what will you do? I ask.
The Zambian flight captain laughs it off, with a fatalistic shrug.
“I suppose we’ll toss a coin, when his excellency finally arrives,” he says.”To stay in this terrible place for another night, or to take our chances down an unlit runway. Both sides of the coin are equally bad!”
The ministers and their delegations finally arrive, exhausted and no nearer to a resolution of the conflict. The two jets come to life and follow each other out on to the black runway, each taking off successfully, in spite of the orange glow of artillery fire that sporadically lights up the sky to the south-west, where the battle for Mbuji-Mayi continues, many hundreds of kilometres away.
We get back in convoy, somewhat less flamboyantly than when we arrived, back into the night of Kisangani. Wondering when, and how, we too are going to be able to get out of this uncertain hell – a hell where only the combatants of a myriad unstable African states are at ease with the chaos they are wreaking on Congo.
John Matshikiza has just returned from an extensive trip to Congo. This is the first in his three-part series on the war. Next week: the Rwandan origins of the war