BUNIA OBSESSES ME. It’s just a little town, a hole, a crossroads I never set foot in. No one knows the place in the eastern Congo. But the way an archeology student knows the Acropolis by heart, or the pyramids of Cheops without having visited them, I know this town. It’s my world. I’ve been studying and analysing the history of Bunia for the last three years: the murders committed there, the alliances, the armed factions, the criminals who dominated the place, the ethnic divisions, the economic activities, the major landowners, the smuggling networks.
I am one of the world’s few Bunia specialists. I know the composition of the soil, the flora and fauna, the anarchic occupation of the land. I could give a seminar about Bunia. I know the trails as if I’d travelled them myself, the ones that lead to the diamonds and gold and coltan. I know the price of the staples from last week’s market. I’ve read the menu at the restaurant at the Hotel Bunia where the cheese comes from Vietnam—a strange and intriguing touch, since the owner is a Kurdish refugee. I even know the first names of the handful of prostitutes who hang out at the bar. According to one blog, Madeleine will do absolutely anything. Another blog written by an American evangelical missionary suggests the reader avoid the place entirely. That’s where we are going to live for several days. What can Vietnamese cheese taste like?
I’ll be getting there Tuesday, via Nairobi and Entebbe, with Pascal and Claus. I’m anxious and a little overwrought, like before a first date or a final exam, and I try in vain to relax at the bar at the hotel I’m living in, where I’m watching the Euro 2008 match between Holland and France. A few Dutchmen have started hollering, and the game hasn’t even started.
I imagine Bunia, I’m inventing it, but I’m sure I won’t be surprised. One hundred thousand people, three hotels, a Lebanese restaurant, one that’s more or less Italian, and a Greek one. I know the history of the town better than the people who live there. I know everything without ever having been there. All that’s missing now is to walk the streets, smell the smells, eat, and talk with the people I’ve been analyzing for the last three years. I’ve never felt the need because my files are complete and exhaustive, my information channels myriad, and here, at the Court, we don’t work with impressions and feelings, we use tools of scientific analysis. That’s my job, and I love it. It satisfies me completely. Until now, I always preferred discovering the world through books, reports, and studies. This approach allows for an independence of mind and objectivity necessary to the jurists we are.
A magnificent goal by van Nistelrooy, 1-0 for Holland. An extraordinary header after a corner kick. The French don’t give into desperation and that encourages me. They attack intelligently and, though it’s not exactly their trademark, with some intensity. I forget all about Bunia for a few minutes. A Dutchman falls off his stool and curses out the furniture. I think of Bunia after all.
Bunia is a city that fell off its stool one day, whipped up by nationalist and ethnic intoxication, or so it says in the NGO reports. The Dutchman quarrels with his stool and loses the battle when the Orangemen make it 2-0. His friends are shouting even louder, and one of them pours a pint of Heineken on his head. Uglier than ugliness itself, he is choking, lying on the floor like a drunk pig, and with animal grunts, he begins vomiting. The customers burst out laughing except for me, the staff, and two or three respectable Dutchmen who head for their rooms. Sometimes Dutch behaviour shocks their more puritanical compatriots.
I decided to go up to my room. I think of Bunia as Holland humiliates France. When the assistant prosecutor announced I was leaving for Bunia, I asked why. Weren’t my analyses satisfactory? They were perfect and had established the bases of the accusations brought against Thomas Kabanga, the leader of the Congolese Patriotic Union. This Bunia militiaman in Ituri, a province of the Congo, will be the first to be judged by the International Criminal Court. The trial will write a new page of international justice and judge a new crime, the forced enrollment of child soldiers. Kabanga is not an elected official; he is more like a loading dock. He is involved wherever diamonds, gold, and coltan are trafficked. Coltan fascinates me. It’s a mineral that can be harvested like potatoes, by scratching the surface of the earth, and it is used to make iPods, BlackBerrys, and Smartphones. The hills of Ituri help us live less and communicate more.
Kabanga takes his share off the customs checkpoints, and deals with the Lebanese mafia. He’s a sort of facilitator, a go-between, a bridge. He’s the link with the Rwanda of President Kagamé who manipulates everything. Child soldiers work for him. You have to understand what it was like back then: six foreign armies were carving up the Congo at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In Ituri, the Ugandans were running the show. Kabanga made contact with them. He became the supplier of beans for Kampala’s troops, and they encouraged him to develop the nationalism of the Hema, his ethnic group, against the Lendu.
The Court thought I was in the best position to gauge the reaction of Bunia’s population to the trial. “Don’t you want to see if what you’ve been writing is true, true in concrete terms?” I had never asked myself that question. “Don’t you think that touching and smelling and seeing might help you?” The Court assistant was right. He’d eaten grilled goat in Africa, caught malaria at age twenty-seven, and drunk more Primus in three years than the number of beers I’d had in my entire life. He was right, but we were different. I was running from life, like a pupil who understands nothing of the mysterious mutations of biology. I preferred mathematics and statistics. The realm of the measurable was comforting, but the idea of testing my three years of reflection with a reality check did seem logical.
I knew very little of Africa from personal experience. A mission for an NGO in the Ivory Coast when I was a neophyte. I never saw a man from the Ivory Coast pour a glass of beer on a friend’s head. I never saw a man from the Ivory Coast vomit in a bar and laugh about it.
But I did know Africa very well. I could talk about the place for hours, for days. When we sit down to a meal that is supposed to be convivial, my few friends often suggest I keep my opinions to myself. I write reports, sophisticated analyses, mostly about the region of the Great Lakes and the Darfur. I don’t have a naïve, complacent view of Africa. I compile lists of murders and massacres, study accusations of cannibalism, explore the trafficking in diamonds, and wide-scale rape. I produce documents concerning the secret finances of heads of state and leaders of various militias, their ties to international mafias and mining companies listed on the stock exchanges in New York and Toronto. Memos about the contraband in gold and coltan. I compile detailed reports from Doctors Without Borders that describe sexual violence and rape in the territories that concern me. I live my life in the midst of violence that is written, documented, and often photographed, but the most violent act I have witnessed was the Dutchman vomiting at the bar I’ve been going to for the last three years.
My name is Claude Tremblay, and for the last three years, I’ve been a political analyst for the office of the Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
All my colleagues rent apartments in The Hague and Amsterdam. I chose a hotel in the dreary suburb of Voorburg, a few minutes from The Hague. Sometimes I wonder if a normal life, with love, children, and time off can be reconciled with such extraordinary work. When your responsibility is to unmask and issue documents to arrest and bring to trial war criminals, true monsters, men who defy every international law and convention, do you have the right to a normal life and to take time off from the task at hand? I don’t believe so, even if I respect and sometimes envy those people who prefer a woman, or man, and children, and switch off their mobile phones when they leave the horrible white tower in which the Court is housed. I don’t consider myself any purer than they are, since my solitude agrees with me and suits me. To do my work, I have decided to live differently than my colleagues. I am at peace with my solitude; it lets me immerse myself completely in the lives of the victims of the crimes I describe so minutely that sometimes the prosecutor is horrified.
“I don’t need those terrible details.”
“Yes, sir, but they are the most important ones.”
“I don’t need to know about the lit cigar in the anus.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I suppose you have a photo?"
“Yes. I can show it to you.”
I live in the Hotel Mövenpick, a Swiss Holiday Inn, patronized by business travellers, accountants, and sometimes Court consultants. The staff is uninterested in me, and the heavy, impassive waitresses sometimes give me a half-smile. Since I’ve been in Holland, I have neglected the culinary refinement my parents taught me. The Swiss-Dutch approximation of gastronomy doesn’t bother me, and neither does the pasta at Il Pomodoro, a pizzeria whose Italian owners display a more kindly approach to me than the Dutch. We agree on this on those evenings when I allow myself a glass of wine after a pizza di Parma, the best I’ve eaten in my entire life. My ex-wife, Nathalie, laughed at me when I sent her a rare e-mail containing the recipe. She wasn’t making fun of the pizza; she was mocking my enthusiasm. “There’s nothing more exciting in your life than a Dutch pizza?”
Nathalie never understood my passion for justice, and that led to our separation. I didn’t feel the need to answer, and return to what had made her so unhappy and me so alone, a prisoner in a room for the last three years, in a mediocre suburb of a mediocre city.
Four to one for Holland. I feel a twinge of regret. I like France well enough, especially Brittany, where once every three months I allow myself time off from my work as an analyst of horror. During those weekends I do nothing. I don’t visit the museums. I eat what I used to in my parents’ house: kidneys, hanger steak, and sweetbreads. Those things bring back good memories, untouched by nostalgia. I drink a small amount of good wine, I envy people’s apparently carefree nature, but I don’t forget my work. When I return to Voorburg, I do so with guilty feelings: I have neglected my passion, as if I had betrayed a woman I more than loved—I idolized.
I rarely try to explain my passion for justice. That passion seems irrational and naïve, like a teenager who believes in a better world even as he watches scenes of violence on TV instead of looking at music videos. I love music, almost all kinds. Music transports me, it makes me greater than I am. I don’t have a very high opinion of myself. I’m neither handsome nor ugly, and no more intelligent than the average. Once I had some success with a girl who briefly became my wife until my work took up too much room. I’m alone, but no more so than my friends who are part of a couple. That suits me and, I believe, helps me in my work, since nothing interferes and takes my mind off the violence and inhumanity that I chronicle for the Court. If I apply myself, if I build an exemplary and detailed case, my work can lead to a field investigation that will bring a war criminal to justice. And that’s no mean feat for a thirty-five-year-old Montreal man who, when he was eleven, knew nothing of the world outside of the postcards his parents sent from their Paris vacations, and a globe won in a geography contest, the strange names of a few countries, and an immigrant and his two children who went to school with him. I knew they came from Africa (all Blacks come from Africa), but we never talked much. It wasn’t racism, just indifference mixed in with the need to be wary of others.
I was a little shy, more than I am now, and I didn’t like talking much, afraid I might say something silly and be laughed at. I know now that I feared rejection and criticism. The comfort of the standards and rules handed down by my parents protected me, and I was particularly uneasy when a teacher who subscribed to liberation pedagogy, a bearded, slovenly man who dressed the way students weren’t allowed to, asked us to improvise on the theme of our “daily life.”
“Claude, let’s say your mother slaps you for the wrong reason. You’re not guilty of the mistake she says you made. I’ll play your mother and you react.”
“My mother never slaps me.”
“But let’s imagine something impossible. Your mother slaps you and calls you a liar.”
“Sir, that’s too impossible for me to imagine.”
With an angry look, my mother asked me why I got a bad grade in oral expression since, according to her, I expressed myself better than most students. I told her about the improvisation exercise and she kissed me on the forehead, a kiss longer and warmer than usual. It proved I was right to respect the rules and codes that the people I loved and respected had set down for me, for my future.
I was eleven years old when the world’s disorder entered my mind and took up position next to the moral and family codes I had been given and respected without feeling constrained.
My parents chose to protect me from the world’s evil. They avoided all discussions of politics when I was around and turned off the television when the news came on. I knew only fragments about the mafia, war, conflicts, and natural disasters. I vaguely sensed that such things existed, but they stayed far from my peaceful universe, and I was sheltered from them forever—or until the teachers went on strike and picketed in front of the main door of the school to make sure no one got in.
It’s not easy to explain to a child the meaning of “End Exploitation” and “No More Wage Slavery.” My mother said that it was all very complicated and I’d understand when I was older, but that the teachers were good people who should be respected. My father, a civil servant, agreed without bothering to tell me that once he had taken part in a long illegal strike. After a few days, it felt like I was on vacation, going to bed late and getting up later.
On the evening of December 6, 1984, I was alone in the living room reading Robinson Crusoe while my parents were busy outside, protecting the ornamental plants and bushes that beautified the front of the house against the coming winter. I turned on the television.
I heard outraged shouting, crying and barking, death rattles and sounds I had never heard before. A round hut like the ones I had seen in geography books. All around were hundreds of fragile shelters made of stakes set in triangular fashion, covered with canvas or animal skins, I couldn’t tell which. In each tent that opened onto a burning sun, Black people were prostrate as if in prayer. They were holding small children in their arms. The camera entered the hut and circled the interior. A dozen naked children were lying on the ground. I didn’t hear what the journalist was saying, I stared astonished at the bodies as thin as sticks, their ribs like the skeleton of a picked over fish, their cheeks hollow like holes bored in their faces, and black eyes that stared into a distance I could not imagine. I thought it was the sun. Hands that hung at the end of long skinny arms took hold of a child and set him in a hollowed out tree trunk filled with water. Hands washed the child who stared at the sun, painfully thin hands placed the child on a blanket on a bed of leaves and branches. I closed my eyes and my ears opened: “This is the fifty-fourth death in Bati and it’s not even noon.” Those children weren’t sleeping, they were dead. How, why? And where was Bati? I turned off the television and ran into my room. I had just seen children dying of hunger in an African country. That was all I understood, but for my modest knowledge of the world, it was too much. I wasn’t on the same planet anymore. My parents had described a world with codes and laws and rules founded on respect and civility. In that world, no child died of hunger. In the one I’d just wandered into, it seemed that death, for children, was a normal event. The journalist had spoken of Ismail who was eleven years old, my age, an eleven-year-old version of me who died of hunger. As I tried to fall asleep, I searched for the words and the way to let my parents know they should have told me about this other planet. All I could think of was, “Ismail was eleven like me and he died of hunger.” In that depth of insomnia, I found this question: “Where is Bati?” And when I awoke, still tormented: “Do you know what’s happening in the world away from here?” It was my apprenticeship of insomnia. Adolescence was over before it began.
The next morning, I remembered, “Ismail was eleven like me and he died of hunger.” I arrived at the breakfast table in a terrible state, with those words on my lips.
Father put his newspaper on the table, and Mother, who was fixing eggs, came and sat down. From their questioning silence, and their eyes that fell upon me like teachers ready to reprimand, I felt they understood that an important event had occurred in my life. They waited patiently for me to tell them. I spat it out in no particular order: the fifty children, the bodies washed and set out on eucalyptrus branches. “Eucalyptus,” my father corrected me, waiting for what would come next. Nothing came next. Mother served the eggs. Father returned to his paper.
After ten days of questions about Africa and the teachers’ strike, I learned that a famine was raging in Ethiopia, that probably one or two million people had starved to death, that no one knew why, that it was no doubt due to a drought, that yes, we were rich, but the teachers thought they were poorly paid, and that we couldn’t do anything for the people of Ethiopia, or the teachers. “We”—that was my parents and me. After ten days of persistent questions, and my parents having exhausted all their answers that didn’t really answer anything, they let me watch the TV news, probably hoping to get free of my full-time, obsessive inquisition. “Why is Africa so poor and why are we so rich?” No answer. “Why don’t we jail the rich who could save the poor but don’t?”
The first day back at school after the strike ended, I asked my teacher if he was poor. No, of course not, he said, but poverty is relative. “Then why did you go on strike?” It was for the quality of education, he told me. Mr. Nantel continued droning on in his nasal voice and he bought a new car the next month. For the rest of the year, he managed to turn me off mathematics. I forgot the sciences too. I’d do something more human. What would that be? No idea. Before I could choose, I’d need to know the world better.