There is a long, narrow bridge in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that women cross before climbing down to wash on the pale rocks below. Beneath its slatted deck, the sweep of the Ulindi, a tributary of the Congo itself, starts a slide into rapids. Here, not so long ago, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were murdered.
”Over on those rocks,” a man who was crossing the bridge said, fiddling with the cross around his neck. ”That was where they killed. They threw the bodies into the water.” Another said: ”The refugees reached the bridge and they couldn’t cross and they were driven into the water.” In their war-weary minds, it was not the bloodletting that upset the most, but the numbers who drowned.
”So many,” a man who had been employed to count refugees explained. ”There were 84 000 in one camp and 38 000 in the other and they all tried to get across the bridge. There were missing sections then and many fell through, or they were driven down the banks and tried to swim.” It happened just where the river, already wide and powerful, picks up speed. This massacre, a response to genocide, has never been written of before.
I first came to Shabunda, a pretty town of wattle houses, destroyed Belgian avenues and gold-bearing dirt when the DRC was still Zaire. Mobutu Sese Seko, despot for 30 years, had returned to Kinshasa, the capital, to announce that he — ”Le pere de la nation” — would repel the invaders who had cut into the distant eastern borders. It was Christmas 1996 and Shabunda was on the front line. Refugee camps had formed and the International Committee of the Red Cross was flying in food, attempting to see off famine.
The reasons for the conflagration in west-central Africa, a war that would suck in eight countries and cost between three and four million lives, are as convoluted as they are tragic — but they come down to Rwanda’s genocide, the clash between the Tutsis, once promoted by the Belgians and now determined to protect themselves, and the Hutus — the downtrodden who had had enough.
The refugees were, for the most part, Hutus, many of whom had been responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994. Mixed in among the distressed and innocent were members of the infamous Interahamwe, those who had slaughtered their neighbours as ”cockroaches”. Despite killing just short of one million people, they failed in their attempts to annihilate a whole group of people, and in 1994 were driven out of Rwanda by the brilliant Tutsi general Paul Kagame. The Hutus established camps just beyond the Rwandan border and for a while were relatively secure. Then, in 1996, Kagame decided to act, backing an invasion of the area by the Zairean rebel Laurent Kabila.
‘Nothing to fear’
As the vast camps of Hutus emptied under the assault, Kagame told the refugees they had nothing to fear in coming home to Rwanda and many complied, forming great columns on the volcanic landscape of Goma and the green hills of Bukavu that are still the enduring image of that time.
Some refugees, who didn’t believe they would be safe in Rwanda, headed in the opposite direction, further into Zaire. Some were undoubtedly members of the Interahamwe, but many were innocent, scared and did not know which way to go to remain safe. ”I just followed,” one woman said. ”Everybody was running and I just followed.”
In Shabunda, a group of 212 unaccompanied children established itself in three rooms of the old Belgian hospital. They had walked for days from Bukavu and Goma and, as one of their guardians said, many were too tired even to eat. One of them was Habrahams Nduharungua, a grubby, 12-year-old orphaned son of a taxi driver with a rubber tube as a necklace. On Christmas Day, he struggled over a lunch of beans.
With Kabila’s troops approaching from the east, the Red Cross head of mission in the town had to make an appalling decision. Her team was being threatened by the small contingent of Zairean troops Mobutu’s forces had left behind to form a rearguard, men who knew they would stand no chance against Rwanda’s well-drilled soldiers.
The troops were determined to get on the Red Cross’s 54-year-old Dakota plane and escape. They seemed increasingly likely to use violence. So the Red Cross left, and me with them, abandoning anything that could not be carried while running for that Dakota. The refugees, including the 212 children, were left by the Ulindi. For the past 10 years I have wanted to know what happened next.
Day of killing
Muzungu Kimanzenze, a farmer and woodsman, lives in the forest next to where the largest of the refugee camps had been and remembered the day the Rwandan troops came.
”[They] arrived at 10 in the morning. The refugees who were strong left the camp and ran to the bridge but it was in a poor state and it was difficult to cross. The Rwandans followed and began to kill people there. Then they turned back and began to burn the camp. All the refugees who remained — the old, women, children and the feeble — were killed and burnt. If you go into the bush, you find bones. Some of the bodies were dropped in the latrines.”
He led me to a patch of forest at the other end of the camp, right next to the village cemetery and, growing increasingly angry, said that he and other Congolese had been forced by the Rwandans to dig a mass grave there. He didn’t know how many bodies were thrown in.
Further along the track, just beyond the metal bridge that spans the Ulindi 11km north of the Shabunda, is Constantin Kiliki, a fisherman and farmer. The bridge, built by the Belgian colonists in 1956, is narrow, with a slatted deck and two runners for traffic that rarely comes.
”There are two types of death,” Kiliki said. ”One is a public one and the other is hidden away. Kabila didn’t want people to know how many were killed, but there were so many corpses they could not hide them all. Some were just left, others were eaten by birds and that caused an epidemic because of the flies on the bodies.”
Beyond Kiliki’s house the road splits, with one branch leading to Shabunda and the other heading west. The surviving refugees turned west, where the scenery grows beautiful, the road bordered by mahogany, ironwood and palm, dipping into swamp and rising to provide a view across the treetops. Each kilometre is marked by new murder stories. The refugees were hunted down. In Mpakisi, the elders said the Tutsis caught nine refugees: ”There was a doctor among them. They were led through the village and killed in the swamp with rifle butts. The Hutus went quietly — they were calm now, once they were caught.”
Twenty kilometres further is the Kingangala bridge at Matila. Zaina Mangene, with the tiny feet of a small baby sticking from either side of her waist, is from the village and told of a communal grave of 30. ”It was an ambassador, six of his family, and their friends. They were killed with knives.” She said she would show me the grave.
And it would go on, all the way west to the Congo River. Kabila’s men wouldn’t let organisations such as the Red Cross into the east at the time. They needed, they said, to ”secure” the area. What this meant in Shabunda was a man called ”Jackson”, a Tutsi commander who led a modern version of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, searching house to house for Hutus.
Prosper Kigulube was, in more prosperous times, an accountant. He is in his seventies now and has seen three wars, in 1964 and 1967, but the latest, he said, was the cruellest. ”Jackson used to keep people locked up here and then he would take them down to the river and execute them.”
Long tail
That was 1997 but genocide has a long tail, one that will last longer than many lifetimes. The persecution of the Jews shapes the world to this day and the consequence of Rwanda are proving similar in Africa. The understandable instinct to ensure ”never again” drives a violence that continues to overrun the innocent.
Deposing Mobutu, Kabila installed himself as president in Kinshasa only to fall out with his Rwandan backers. He was shot in 2001 by one of his bodyguards and his son Joseph took over. A second war had begun, with Kagame invading once more, taking Shabunda without a fight.
But in the forests the Congolese had had enough of these invaders. There was already a group called the Mayi Mayi, populated by murderous oddities who believed that, if they were covered with a powerful medicine, bullets would melt in front of them. The Mayi Mayi reformed itself into a nationalist militia, and forged an alliance with the surviving refugees, those genocidaires who had avoided the death squads in the thick jungle.
The Mayi Mayi leader was General Joseph Padiri, ”The Priest”. He forced men and boys into service. Bulelo Kingombe, who lives three days’ walk from Shabunda, saw his brother taken off to fight. ”I have been very sad since because I have been alone,” he said. Shabunda became a town under siege but it was the outlying villagers who suffered most. ”It was very sad,” said Muzungu Kimanzenze, the woodsman who lived beside the refugee camp. ”The Hutu refugees who we had taken in were Interahamwe and began to kill us and destroy our villages.” But it was rape that, for five years, became the prime weapon of war.
Rape horror
Helene Bampa is elegant, genteel and dignified. In a British village, she might have been keeping up appearances by running a local garden society. In Shabunda, she has formed an association to fight against sexual violence. ”So many women were raped, we tried to make a census,” she said. ”In the town itself there were at least 500. Outside, I don’t know, it was so many.
”There were no exceptions. Children, young women, old women, even the pregnant. Some died afterwards. They were raped by as many as 10 soldiers. Some were raped in front of their neighbours and the soldiers would make the people clap.”
No military group held back. When the soldiers grew tired, they raped with sticks. There are reports of women being forced to kill their children, and of violations with guns during which the trigger was pulled. ”Some of the women were ashamed to tell they were raped,” said Bampa. ”Some men divorced their wives afterwards. I wanted to improve the dignity of the women. Sometimes, when you’ve been raped, no one wants to sit next to you because of the bad smell of the urine. I wanted to get help.”
Bampa herself was raped on the road to the bridge by Rwandan soldiers. The Red Cross worker she had taken along as protection was killed. She was pregnant and lost her baby. Nyalya, the wife of Kiliki the fisherman, was so badly injured she had to be taken to Bukavu for treatment for a fistula, an injury found here only when girls fall pregnant when very young.
At the former refugee camp, Kimanzenze’s wife was taken and used as ”entertainment” for a year, returning pregnant. ”The boy is alive and living with me,” Kimanzenze said. ”At the beginning I wasn’t happy with him, but others convinced me he is innocent. That is why I try to love him.”
Now, six years later, I asked Bampa when the rapes stopped. ”It is still going on,” she said. ”We’ve sent two men to the court in Bukavu for raping children. But there are still reports of such violence.”
In Europe, the context of the Rwandan genocide has long been settled. Films such as Hotel Rwanda and books such as Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families have laid out the story. The reprisals at the bridge and subsequent rape of Shabunda are epilogues.
Yet the genocide keeps on. It poisoned the nations around Rwanda, and led to a continental war — about resources, about revenge — but always about Rwanda’s desire to be secure, to avoid a repeat of 1994. That is the reason, not a hangover of imperialism, nor the greed of western corporations, that the women of the eastern DRC were raped.
Peace
Peace of a sort has finally come to Shabunda. Elections were held last year in the DRC, which the 36-year-old Joseph Kabila won. A process of brassage (brewing) has been put in place in the army, where the varied factions are integrated and soldiers are sent far from their homes. The Mayi Mayi general Padiri is now a senior commander in the southern town of Lubumbashi.
In Shabunda, brassage takes the form of the resident 11th Division, commanded by Colonel Aaron Nymushebwa. His newly integrated soldiers lounge outside his headquarters with their rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.
Nymushebwa is tall and slight, a Banyamulenge (or Congolese Tutsi), who can’t understand the graffiti, presumably written by an English-speaking Rwandan, on his office wall: ”It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” He wants people to trust him. ”Brassage is working. We have been through a period of training. The difficulties are general ones, say transportation. We share common difficulties with the people of Shabunda.”
Despite the colonel’s optimism, history can be inconvenient. Two of his soldiers are posted in the village where I was shown the mass grave and I was warned that digging there might provoke an unpleasant response. ”It’s not unusual to find a Tutsi commander where there have been atrocities,” was the explanation.
Of Habraham and the other orphans I had met 10 years ago, there was no sign. Leon Kekwa, an assistant at the hospital, was there when I visited last. ”When the Rwandan troops arrived, the children heard about it and the next day the three rooms were empty. They had fled in the night.” Nobody knows their fate.
Coping
The residents of Shabunda and its surrounding villages are coping with the past 10 years in their own ways. Helene Bamba continues the fight against those who use violence against women; Kimanzenze rages, furious that help had failed to reach his community, appalled that it took a decade for a visitor to come looking for the mass grave; in the hospital, Leon Kekwa’s boss, Dr Hubert Kashama, wonders how he will afford to treat people now that the relative peace means that Mçdecins sans Frontières is pulling out.
Still, there has been good news for the child soldiers taken by the factions that once laid siege to Shabunda. Bulelo Kingombe, brother of the boy taken by General Padiri, is happy. Last weekend the Red Cross’s beautiful old Dakota, now nearly 65 years old, flew low over the grass strip, turning in the sunlight and coming in to land.
Instead of running towards it as I had 10 years ago, I waited and watched nine former child soldiers jump down, Bulelo’s brother Nzela among them. They formed a line under the aircraft’s tail, fresh in fashionable denims provided by the Red Cross, with mock prison numbers sewn in, as is fashionable at the moment. They looked good and they knew it.
As they headed down the airstrip towards the huddle that waited for them — Helene Bamba, Dr Kashama and Colonel Nymushebwa among the reception — they hugged and laughed. Their families rose from their seats and rushed to grab at them, carrying them about. Nzela, now 16, killed for the first time when he was 10. ”I had to,” he said. ”I was told that if I didn’t beat and kill, I would be beaten and killed.” And now? ”I am happy to be home. If I don’t study, I am happy to cultivate crops now.”
There are those who would like to dismiss all this horror as part of Africa’s morbidity, its self-destruction, but the murder in the DRC is the same as that which scarred eastern Europe in 1942, the rape the same as that seen in Nanking in 1937 or Berlin in 1945. This is just war, if not a just war.
Back at the bridge where the women wash in the river that drew away the slaughtered, Constantin Kiliki said goodbye and I asked him if he was optimistic for the future. ”There is a French proverb that says the greatest of fortunes is freedom,” he replied. ”So by that measure, yes. But here the people have suffered so much loss, they are far from having recovered.”
Thirteen years of conflict
6 April 1994: Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda’s Hutu president, is killed when his plane is shot down over Kigali airport.
April-June 1994: Following decades of hatred and sporadic massacres, the Hutu population tries to destroy the Tutsi hold over Rwanda, killing at least 800 000 people, mostly Tutsis.
July 1994: Forces commanded by Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, take the capital, Kigali. A ceasefire is declared and two million Hutus flee into Zaire, then stagnating under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.
1996: Forces commanded by Zairean rebel Laurent Kabila cross the border to attack Mobutu’s army. His troops are backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
1997: Kabila takes Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, and Mobutu falls. His exile in Portugal ends shortly afterwards when he dies of prostate cancer. Zaire is renamed the DRC.
1998: Kabila falls out with his backers in Rwanda and Uganda, who attack again, but he retains control of the country with the aid of Angola, Chad, Namibia, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
July 2002: The Pretoria Accord paves the way for a transitional government in Kinshasa.
July 2006 to present: Multiparty elections are held and Kabila wins the presidency with 58% of the vote. There is still fighting between forces of the new ”integrated” Congolese army and Rwandan Hutu rebel groups hiding in the forests of the east. The United Nations is trying to keep the peace.
— Guardian Unlimited Â