LIFE AT THE HOTEL LAKE VICTORIA, The Lake Vic, is placid. I take morning coffee on the veranda with the BBC news on the radio. I’ve been here for three months reporting in support of the international military task force that has assembled in Entebbe. Each day I drive over to the new airport and talk to task force staff officers about what’s going on in Eastern Zaire, then go talk with pilots, missionaries, humanitarian aid workers—anyone who has recently been in the area—in an effort to try to get a better, clearer picture of what is happening across the border.
The basic facts are that there is a war and a few hundred thousand people are missing. Rwandan authorities say two hundred thousand people crossed the border into Rwanda on one day in October alone. In the following days another two hundred thousand returned from Zaire. Rebel troops ostensibly led by Laurent Kabila cleared the plain at Mugunga, driving the other six or seven hundred thousand refugees north and west, fleeing into the Ndoki forest. Many moved along the Walekale road, a dirt track that winds five hundred kilometers to Kisangani, the center of the country, and indeed the center of the continent. It is very far and there is very little in between. The Banyamulenge are pursuing the Interahamwe, and we’re trying to find them.
The international military task force was sent here in case the refugees needed protection. A few dozen soldiers were the advance party for what might have been a few thousand American and European troops sent to protect the refugees from the advancing rebels. One of the staff planners is a former classmate of mine. He will be the only one of us to become a general. He tells me the commander doesn’t want to bring his force down from Germany and Italy.
“The politics are complex,” he says. Zaire is part of the French sphere of influence, but the French won’t act because they were criticized for helping the Hutus escape Rwanda in 1994.
I think it’s more about Washington than Paris. “Clinton won’t intervene to save the Hutus,” I counter. “He didn’t stop the genocide in 1994, why would he intervene now?” He shrugs.
The Canadians are technically in the lead, there is a Canadian lieutenant general here. But everyone knows the deal: if the U.S. won’t go in, no one will.
Every other day or so, I go to the embassy in Kampala to write reports back to Washington. The embassy is a small, quiet outpost occupying space in the back of the British High Commission building. I meet the ambassador and his deputy, the defense attaché and chief of station. They are harried and are more interested in the internal situation in Uganda than the war across the border. Let the UN sort it out.
We’re keen to move closer to the fighting, but my partner and I are told to shuttle between Entebbe and Kampala. The UN is evacuating its personnel from Goma and moving operations to Gisenyi, just across the Rwandan border. The American ambassador in Kigali doesn’t want us there. So we stay at The Lake Vic.
The shelling at Goma and the break-up of the camps change everything. It seems to me we’ve now passed the point where a small task force could come in and protect the refugees. It’s not clear what Washington will do with the task force. The advance party is based in the new airport terminal at Entebbe. Their offices are up on the second floor, near the World Food Program (WFP) logistics office. The new terminal is nice. It’s well appointed and clean—orderly. The old airport is just across the tarmac, though. You can walk over there and still see the pockmarked walls from the Israeli commando raid that freed the hostages from Air France 139 in 1976. The Ugandan Air Force MIGs that had been crippled by the Israelis are still rusting nearby and will soon be covered in vines.
A couple of big U.S. and British military surveillance aircraft rest on the tarmac, their combat grey a striking contrast among the white UN cargo planes and the few incongruously small Twin Otters and Caravans that the missionary groups use to fly around Eastern Zaire.
It’s hot during the day; Entebbe isn’t far from the Equator. The task force is under what the military calls General Order Number One, which means they are not allowed to drink alcohol, have sex or even look at porn. It sucks to be them.
A message from Washington tells us to try to determine where the refugees are and where they are going. “That should be easy,” my partner Jack says, rolling his eyes. We order beers and try to think of a plan. We order a few more before the night is done. The plan turns out to be pretty simple: continue doing what we’re doing. We can’t go anywhere else, so we’ve got no other way of gathering information.
I interview a pilot who flies for one of the missionary groups. He’s an old guy who flew for the U.S Air Force in Korea and Vietnam. He tells me about seeing an Antonov land at a remote strip in North Kivu where men offloaded boxes of weapons and ammunition. The landing was north of the line where we think the Banyamulenge have reached, so these must be re-supply missions for the FAZ and the Interahamwe. He has a mission the following day to pick up some Catholic workers who were attacked by the retreating FAZ. I want to talk with them. He says he’ll try.
The next day I interview the nun who worked at the parish that the FAZ had attacked and looted. She hobbles off the plane wearing a sheet of panya cloth wrapped around her waist and a man’s shirt that is a couple sizes too large. She is limping off her left leg. When I get closer to her, I see she has a swollen cheek and lip. She tells me in French that she was cleaning the rectory when she heard noises. She went outside and saw two soldiers beating the priest. They wanted to know what money he had. Every time they would ask him about the money, he would ask them to pray for forgiveness. And each time they knocked him down, he would get back up. Finally one of them hit him in the face with a fist, and then again. When the priest finally broke down and told them about the cash box, one of the soldiers hit the priest in the side of the head with his rifle butt. The priest didn’t get up. Then they turned to her.
One of the soldiers put a knife—a bayonet probably—up to her face, and forced her to the ground. She couldn’t bring herself to tell me what happened next, but the MSF nurse said that three soldiers raped her, and one beat her before they left. The Banyamulenge arrived the following day. They took her and the priest—he survived—to the Médecins Sans Frontières physicians, who then got her out to Uganda.
One of the MSF team tells me that the people are severely traumatized by the fighting. “There is a great deal of fear,” she says. The Interahamwe are telling their people the Americans are helping the Banyamulenge and will kill any of the Hutu they capture. They are driving the refugees ahead of them, away from the truth.
We spend a couple of days in Kampala at the embassy writing up what we’ve learned. We wander down the street past the National Museum, and I buy some soapstone coasters and other tchotchkes for gifts at the crafts market. Our favorite restaurant downtown is the Masala Chaat House. Whenever we can, we go there for lunch and eat the daily curry special, washed down with a glass of passion fruit juice. Afterwards, when I go for a run I can smell the curry coming out in my sweat.
We send our messages back to Washington and get feedback from our bosses. They like what we’re reporting, but they want more and better. Demoralized, we drive back to The Lake Vic.
We have an idea where the front lines are. We still aren’t sure about the refugees, although they can’t be too far apart. The two US Navy P-3 surveillance aircraft, originally designed to hunt submarines in the open ocean, fly over the Walekale road and the forests to the north and west of Goma to take photographs. The pilots fly the plane at nineteen thousand feet above the treetops.
One of the pilots observes, “The top of the forest looks like broccoli.” Their cameras can’t see through it. “We should be able to see smoke from their cooking fires or something. Maybe they just aren’t out there.”
“They are,” I tell him. They don’t want to be found, and they don’t have anything to cook until we can get food to them. So they don’t make too many fires. They are living off the forest.
I speak by radio to a Catholic priest whose station is along the Walekale road. He says hundreds of thousands of people are moving west, pursued by the rebels and by Rwandan troops who have joined them. The people are in bad shape, he says. They are living off whatever they carried or can scrounge along the road. There isn’t much water, only what they find in the forest or at wells near the small stations along the way. When the rebels catch up with groups of stragglers or a group of Interahamwe who stop and fight, there is no mercy.
We begin to hear whispered stories of mass graves in Kibumbo and Katale. I write more reports.
I’m invited to Thanksgiving dinner at the residence of one of the embassy staff. It’s a nice house with bougainvillea and citrus trees; kids play in the grassy yard. There is turkey from South Africa and ham from Italy. There is good red wine from France and California. It’s a typical Thanksgiving dinner except that it’s about 85 degrees outside and there is no football on TV yet, because we’re eight hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time.
A military colleague tells me the Canadian general is in Goma on an assessment mission. A friend on the UN staff tells me over a drink that there are forty thousand Hutus walking northwards along the edge of the lake in South Kivu. Today, the WFP is moving truckloads of BP-5s, high protein biscuits used for emergency food relief, down to the lake. I imagine eating compressed sawdust, and look over at the turkey dinner being assembled.
There is no clarity. Every day I try to find pilots or aid workers or journalists who actually have access to the east and who can help me find hundreds of thousands of people.
I interview another Congolese woman who is brought to Entebbe from North Kivu. She was from Lobutu, a town near the Ugandan border. She tells me that her husband had passed information to the Banyamulenge about the disposition of the FAZ and Interahamwe in their town. The FAZ intelligence service found out and came to their house. The FAZ officer ordered her husband bound, and began beating him and cutting him with a knife. Then he shot their son and killed him after the boy tried to help his father. The officer left after a couple hours, but the two soldiers stayed. They were eating the family’s food and drinking all of the beer and liquor in the house while they tortured her husband. It took all night for them to grow weary of this, and he suffered a great deal, she said. The soldiers raped her in front of her husband as he sat tied to a chair, beaten and bleeding from dozens of cuts. The building next door housed a mechanic’s shop and the soldiers eventually brought her husband over there and turned an acetylene torch on him. He died quickly. She escaped early in the morning when the soldiers were sleeping off their drunk. I send this information back to Washington in a report. The analysts ask, “But where are the refugees?”
In early December, two young missionary pilots tell me a large population of refugees is forming near a town called Tingi-Tingi. The World Food Program and High Commission for Refugees planners are organizing relief supplies.
I tell my classmate on the task force staff. “The general doesn’t believe the reports,” he says.
“It doesn’t matter does it?” I ask. “Washington has decided not to do anything.”
He shrugs. “Leave it for the UN; the boys are going home for Christmas.”
I give the pilots a video camera and ask them to show me what they find in Tingi-Tingi. Two days later we have the proof. The video the pilots bring back shows crowds of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, eight or ten deep along the edge of the road for eight hundred meters. We can see thousands more in the surrounding forest, and the pilots say the leaders told them there were twice as many hiding just out of sight. They are gaunt and haggard,their clothing mostly rags; some are naked or covering themselves with leaves. Some of the men are holding pangas and I cannot help but wonder if these are the same they had used during the genocide.
We do some basic math, then ask the World Food Program staff to run the numbers, too. We estimate that there are probably one hundred thousand people around Tingi-Tingi. I bring the video to the headquarters. But, the general isn’t all that interested in watching it.
“What’s on it?” he asks.
“Proof that these people exist, and the exact location where you can find them,” I say.
“How many are there?” I notice that now at least he looks up from his other papers.
“We’ve counted about twenty-five thousand, and there are easily that number again in the forests that we can’t see on the film. People on the ground told the pilots there were twice as many in the surrounding area. We think there are about a hundred thousand in the area.”
“Hmphh.”
“We feel good about the number. And the fact that there are so many there already, we think there will be more coming.” I think I’m winning.
Then the bombshell drops. “Well, it’s too late for us to do anything now. We’re going home.”
“General, we’re talking about a hundred thousand people.” I’m losing big. “They need help, and you have the power to help them.”
“Hmphh…” Then, after a pause, “What’s your methodology for counting?” he growls.
I’ve already lost, so I figure I might as well go out big. “We count the feet and divide by two.”
There is dead silence for about two beats. Then sniggering from his staff. Then broad laughter erupts from everyone except for the general. He leaves the room.
As the general leaves, his chief of staff says, “It’s a UN problem now. You’ve found them; we can all go home. Nice job.”
Ten minutes later, Jack and I are standing atop the roof watching the sunset and raging against the folly of spending weeks looking for hundreds of thousands of people, finding them, and then taking no action. Our frustration and anger are sour. My government has failed to do the right thing.
I carry the tape to the UN. They already know about Tingi-Tingi. They already know the Task Force is leaving. I go to The Lake Vic and drink gin and tonics.
We’ve found over a hundred thousand people, but hundreds of thousands are still missing. Where are they? Dead along the way? Hiding deeper in the forest, convinced that the U.S. and UK surveillance aircraft are looking for them so we can kill them?The UN organizes a camp in Tingi-Tingi that eventually supports one hundred-sixty thousand people, but by February the rebels arrive, and the refugees and the Interahamwe are again forced to flee.
In the next week the team disbands. The task force goes back to Italy for Christmas. The defense attaché goes to Zimbabwe or Mozambique, somewhere in the south. Jack goes home to his family in Germany. I am asked to stay through the New Year to help finish up some reporting and shut down the office.
I still don’t know what happened. I can’t make the logic or the numbers work. Too many people are missing, too much remains unexplained. I learn I can catch a ride on a UN flight to Goma. I have a couple of days to kill and no one to tell me not to go. I pack a small bag and jump on the Antonov.