Lansana Gberie
4 June 2009
opinion
Returning to DRC for the first time since 1996, Lansana Gberie finds that a little cash comes in handy for dealing with bureaucracy and that it is impossible to get anything done without a 'fixer'. Considering the conflicts in the country's history, Gberie notes that in Congo 'money is always at the centre of the bigger drama of suffering' and that justice - or the interests of victims of mass atrocities - has had to be subordinated to wider geopolitical interests. Leaving Kinshasa after just over a week, Gberie finds himself feeling that he is 'in a place whose future has come and gone'.
As soon as I saw the very exact note directing me from the plane through immigration and to the parking lot outside, I knew that even among the awkward spots in troubled Africa, the Congo still remained a special place. Because there was no Congolese mission in Monrovia where I could obtain a visa, my colleagues in Kinshasa had to get me first a 'Visa Volant' (or 'Flying Visa'), a neat, carefully designed and apparently tamper-proof document that looks as official as national paper currencies. It was of course money - US$100 - and I would have to pay another US$60 for the actual visa when I got to the airport in Kinshasa.
My colleague Mirna Adjami, an old Congo hand, had sent me the following note via email a few days before I boarded a Kenya Airways flight to Kinshasa: 'As you can see from the amount of stamps and signatures needed [on the 'Visa Volant'], Congo is still in that stage of bureaucracy sadly,' she wrote matter-of-factly. 'We'll send a facilitator, Mr. David, who will try to find you as you are making your way to the immigration line... You will exit the airplane onto the tarmac, walk on the yellow striped line to the building, [and] you will have to first present your yellow fever vaccination card, and then you are in the immigration waiting room. Mr. David should find you there and will have the originals with him to give to the agent. From there, he'll bring you to the lounge and he will then take care of getting your baggage - please be sure to keep your baggage tag receipts for him to get your baggage... and then the parking lot [where a car would be waiting.]'
For this occasion, Mr. David had an official title - protocol officer, a grand contrivance meaning only 'fixer'. He must be superbly experienced, for Mr. David - a young man probably in his late twenties, of medium height and carefully-dressed, with a well-barbered head of hair - picked me out among more than two dozen arrivals in the great Congo heat on the tarmac and, with a smile (as though he had met me before), shuffled me into a cluttered room where several officials sat, busily fidgeting with passports. I am familiar with this scene - Monrovia airport is not much different. But the presence of all those ubiquitous fixers, I told myself, is somewhat new: It must be a purely Congo thing. And there was that seriousness, borne as much out of avarice as of ignorance, that the officials asked for yellow fever vaccination card. I didn't have it: One doesn't really get seriously bothered about it in West Africa, except if one looks like a complete stranger. An enlarged visage of the very rotund former President - and the father of the current one - the bovine former gold smuggler and career pseudo-revolutionary Laurent Kabila, is the first to greet the passenger upon arrival, the prominence of the gleaming and unreliable face a reminder, if any were needed, that not much has changed since Kabila's assassination in 2003.
The airport was not at all a busy place, and the officials seem to have plenty of time on their hands to deal with the two dozen or so passengers from the small Kenya Airways flight. The eyes of the man questioning me glittered when I told him that I did not have the yellow fever vaccination card. He lost control of his smile, which quickly, almost instinctively, became a grimace. He finally told me that this would have to cost me US$60. I protested, told him I had no money, and that in any case asking for the card is pointless because it is of no use whatsoever. We finally settled on US$20 when I insisted that anything more than that would require a receipt. My passport was stamped, and Mr David took me outside to the car in the parking lot. He went back to get my luggage.
I was last in the Congo in late 1996. It was not long after the horrors of Rwanda. The Congo wasn't really my brief, but while in the region in October that year, the Governor of South Kivu - perhaps on the orders of the ailing, decrepit Mobutu; perhaps not - announced the expulsion of an ethnic group the name of which, once barely known beyond eastern Congo, now had great resonance: Banyamulenge. The Banyamulenge are ethnic Tutsi, and they are a numerically insignificant minority in eastern Congo, their position somewhat analogous to the Mandingo in Liberia. Two years before, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been massacred in Rwanda, but the country was now ruled by the minority Tutsi. Meanwhile, thousands of former soldiers of Rwanda (FAR) and the Interhamwe - spearheads of the Rwandan genocide - had moved into vast Congo, reorganised and rearmed with support from Mobutu, and were launching increasingly deadly attacks on Congolese Tutsis (the Banyamulenge) and Rwanda itself. Was another genocide in the making? The region had moved back to the centre of global news interest.
The lines of anxiety ran very deep, touching very powerful nerves across the region and beyond. Rwandan and Ugandan forces intervened with massive force, carefully choreographing their invasion as an internal rebellion led by Kabila, which in quick order overthrew Mobutu and installed Kabila as President of the Congo. A second 'rebellion' was soon to happen after the opportunistic Kabila fell out with his Rwandan and Ugandan allies, triggering intervention by several African states and what came to be known as Africa's first world war. Twelve years on, with more than three million Congolese killed as a result of these conflicts, the Banyamulenge were once again at the centre of events in the Congo.
A few days before I arrived, the powerful Rwandan army had entered eastern Congo and very quickly arrested Laurent Nkunda, a Banyamulenge and leader of the ethnically-based and until then seemingly invincible Congrès National pour le Défense du Peuple (CNDP). Rwanda had been the key backer of Nkunda's CNDP, which since August last year had renewed attacks against Congolese forces in the Kivu province, routing the rabble of Congolese army contingents, and embarrassing the 7,000 strong UN force in the province. An estimated 250,000 people fled their homes as a result of Ndunda's attacks, which were characterised by appalling atrocities, including mass rape and widespread looting and massacres. This wave of refugees joined an estimated one million others who had fled the instability in the Kivus.
Nkunda - a swashbuckling former Congolese army officer with the distinctive sharp features of Rwanda's Tutsi - claimed that the conflict is about defending the Tutsi community from the threat of Rwandan Hutu rebels operating in eastern Congo (reputedly numbering about 6,000), remnants of the Interhamwe and the FAR mentioned above who had come to form the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda FDLR), a claim which carries some justice. But the continuing atrocities had become an embarrassment for Rwanda's President Paul Kagame; very credible recent reports, in particular one by a UN panel of experts, had detailed extensive links between the renegade Nkunda and Kagame. Britain - Rwanda's most generous bilateral donor - threatened to cut aid. This made the stubborn Kagame open to mediation efforts by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, and an unexpected (and secret) agreement between the Rwandan and Congolese governments was signed.
The agreement gave Rwanda free pass to deal with the Interhamwe within the Congo itself, with the condition that it helps disarm the CNDP. Suddenly, it seems, the Congolese government had awakened to a stunning fact: The insignificant Hutu minority in the Congo is entirely expendable, and Banyamulenge minority, because of the existence of a Tutsi government in neighbouring Rwanda, is not. That the conflict was also fuelled by the attempts to control the Kivus' rich minerals - Cassiterite (tin ore), gold, coltan (an essential component of mobile phones) and wolframite (from which tungsten is derived) - is a matter that, in the Congo, is always taken for granted. So once again in the Congo new problems are about the old, and money is always at the centre of the bigger drama of suffering.
Whatever may happen to Nkunda is another matter altogether. Although there was much talk when I was in the Congo that he may be handed over to the Congolese government to be tried, no one I spoke to seriously believed this will happen, and no-one - certainly not the Congolese authorities - was seriously calling for it. Perhaps President Kabila would relish a show trial of Nkunda but he doubtless will cringe at the implication - it would open up demands for more trials.
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This article is quite an eye opener for a westerner like myself. Little was written about he current President, Joseph Kabila, but my interest lies with both the President of the Congo-Kinshasha and his neighbor, Denis Sassou Nguesso, President of Congo-Brazzaville. Which of these two Presidents would most likely have taken delivery of a Corporate Jet for his personal use, say in late May, 2009. I ask for strictly personal reasons as I am trying to track down a Pilot job with that aircraft but haven't been able to trace to which country the Dassault Falcon has been flown… [Read Full Text]