After crossing the Lualaba, my brother Athanase decided to travel on with a group of young people who were more mobile and could cover more ground than we could with our children (he eventually made it to Congo-Brazzaville and was repatriated to Rwanda by the HCR, where he still lives today). As for us, we walked with Thérèse and her family to the small village of Obilo, located not far from Ubundu. In Obilo there is a railway and a road that goes to Kisangani, about eighty kilometers to the north, providing a way around the unnavigable section of the river at Boyoma (Stanley) Falls. The local police ordered us to stop, refusing to let us continue on our journey to Kisangani, once again under the pretext of preventing us from bringing disorder into the city. They directed us to a site next to the road where we could build our huts. Our security teams once again ordered us to get organized according to our original administrative districts in Rwanda to help guard against enemy infiltration.
We hoped we would be more or less safe in Obilo due to its proximity to Kisangani. It seemed unthinkable that the RPA soldiers and rebels could seize the third largest city in the country, capital of the eastern province, and home to the FAZ high command.
However, on March 15, our hopes were shattered by a surprising development. Kisangani fell to the AFDLC without a fight. That meant we were now truly surrounded. Several crisis meetings were held in the camp to find a solution to the situation, as unexpected as it was alarming. For the first time, serious divisions appeared among the refugees. Two strongly opposed groups emerged: on the one side, the Interahamwe, men who had been soldiers in the FAR, and officials of the deposed government, on the other, the ordinary people, who did not feel that they shared responsibility for the 1994 genocide. Members of the latter group believed that the RPA would spare their lives once they were separated from the others. The proponents of this naive theory went so far as to recommend to those who wanted to join them to wear a white headband as a sign of surrender! They asked the first group to leave the camp quickly so that the great majority could be clearly viewed as “non-combatants,” hoping in this way to establish the camp as a “peace camp,” as they themselves had begun calling it. They then proposed to go and negotiate with the RPA and the rebels in Kisangani because according to them, the presence of NGOs and the media would discourage the enemy from killing them in plain sight of everyone. Two of the major proponents of this solution were André Kagimbangabo and Frédéric Karangwa, the former prefects of Cyangugu and Butare. Unfortunately, they were among the first to be brutally massacred at Kisangani a few days later.
The alternative was to flee to the west. Apart from the road and the railway that linked Obilo and Kisangani, there was no other way out, except for a narrow path through the forest used by hunters and gold miners, which the local people told us would eventually cross the road to Opala after many days of hiking, bypassing Kisangani. The prospect of walking through the jungle at the mercy of snakes, crocodiles, tsetse flies, mosquitoes and wild animals, without food or medicine, could hardly have been more enticing! Our choice was basically between two equally suicidal options.
Most of the refugees decided to go to Kisangani and put themselves at the mercy of the RPA. They had no inkling of their fate, but overwhelmed by fatigue, hunger and disease, they simply did not have the strength to continue. A minority, composed mainly of young people in good physical condition and without family responsibilities, chose to risk dying in the forest rather than surrender.
This was my preference as well, and I explained to my wife that even if the forest was dangerous, especially for our young children, at least we kept alive the possibility of eventually being saved, whereas if we decided to go to Kisangani, death was certain. Exhausted and overcome by the events, Françoise rejected my proposal, choosing to go to Kisangani. Throughout the evening, I tried to convince her, but in vain. The next morning, my decision was made. I told my wife that I would walk down the path into the jungle, whatever the consequences.
A few miles from Obilo on the road heading north, the refugee column split in two. Some continued towards Kisangani, while others turned off into the dark forest on a trail covered with dew in that morning in March. I left the road and walked into the woods with my daughter Claudine following behind me, crying. After about twenty meters I heard the voice of our son Ange-Claude. His face covered with tears, he begged me to stop and wait a few minutes, to give him one last chance of convincing his mother, who had stayed behind with Emmérence, to join us. The minutes spent sitting with Claudine on the grass by the roadside were extremely difficult for me. I wondered how I could allow my family to separate as tears streamed down my cheeks. Moments later, Ange-Claude came back to tell us that he had succeeded in persuading his mother to come with us. Thank God, we continued the journey together, even if Françoise, at the end of her rope, could no longer bring herself to walk at a brisk pace. Under the circumstances, however, I held back from asking her to make an extra effort! Despite the risks, we adopted her pace.
Even on the path we had taken to evade our killers in Kisangani, we still risked being ambushed by them. It was therefore recommended to walk quietly and speak French or Swahili to impersonate Zaireans. People tore up whatever documents they had that could identify them as Rwandans, such as identity cards and diplomas. However, these precautions were largely ineffective, since our odour is identifiable and we have a distinct body profile. People like me who had young children susceptible to crying were forced to walk at the back of the group to avoid revealing the presence of the group.
After three days of walking in the dark and muddy forest, we reached the dusty Kisangani-Opala road where we encountered the FAZ, in total disarray after the fall of their stronghold.
The refugees who had chosen to go to Kisangani hoped to make it to the town before the RPA and the rebels caught up with them in the forest, out of sight of any witnesses. Unfortunately, they were not so lucky. Overcome by exhaustion, some could not go any further than the village of Biaro, about forty kilometers from Kisangani, where they settled in a makeshift camp, waiting to know the fate reserved for them. The others were stopped just seven kilometers from their destination at a checkpoint manned by the Rwandan Patriotic Army, who had set up a military base in the town of Lula. They spent a few days there until finally the RPA, who had been speaking in reassuring tones in order to calm the desperate refugees, ordered them to turn back around and head south, again citing security reasons. After walking twenty kilometers, the refugees struck camp at Kasese, and like the first group, began waiting for the outcome of events.
The mortality rate skyrocketed in the two camps, with some succumbing to disease and others to exhaustion. But the worst was yet to come. After closing the Kisangani-Ubundu access road to NGOs and journalists, on April 22 the RPA soldiers and rebels began to systematically massacre the refugees in the area, indiscriminately slaughtering men, women and children under conditions of extreme cruelty before burning their bodies.
The few survivors who were able to join us on the road to the west told us that the RPA and the rebels had sorted the refugees into groups and taken some of them to unknown locations never to be seen again! They invited others to a meeting, and once there, fired on them with automatic weapons and threw grenades into the crowd. Some people managed to escape by fleeing into the very forest they had been reluctant to enter a few weeks earlier. But their luck ended there. Many were caught by their assailants, others died a slow and painful death, and still others, after wandering several days in the woods, regained the road in search of assistance and food, only to fall into the hands of the killers.
It is estimated that tens of thousands of people died in the area around Kisangani, killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army and the rebels or by hunger, fatigue and illness.
The luckiest among the survivors, mostly women and children in a lamentable state, were repatriated to Rwanda by air, but once there, death or imprisonment was often their fate.
After the fall of Kisangani, it became clear that there was little hope we would soon be returning to our country, Rwanda, and that the end of our journey would probably be Kinshasa, about 1500 kilometers southwest of Opala. The road would carry us through Mbandaka, halfway to our final destination. It is often said that history repeats itself. According to research on African migration paths, the path our Hutu ancestors would have taken to populate Rwanda from their home areas around Lake Chad was very close to the path we were taking, only in the opposite direction. The only difference being that they took nearly five centuries to go a distance that we covered in seven months!
Between Opala and Ikela, the retreat of the FAZ towards Kinshasa created opportunities for us to find supplies of food. As we had seen elsewhere, the Zairean soldiers terrorized the villages along our route, forcing residents to flee into the woods and abandon their fields and houses, where we could then stock up on provisions without encountering any resistance. One person’s misfortune is another man’s gain!
With control of Kisangani, the RPA and the AFDLC could now make use of a navigable river network and much faster means of transport to pursue the extermination of the refugees and the conquest of Zaire. The immensity of the territory required them to divide their forces into small groups, with the preferred tactic being the ambush, especially on the banks of the many rivers where refugees were gathered in groups trying to figure out how to get across. And often, the only option they had was to make a raft out of pieces of wood or bamboo bound together with vines and wrapped in a tarp to reduce the risk of sinking.
Knowing how to build rafts was probably what enabled me to save my family and to avoid being ambushed. It was a technique I had mastered in my childhood. We built them back then so we could play out on the rivers that, in any case, were nothing like the ones in Zaire.
Being responsible for a woman and three children, I knew that I had to rely solely on my own efforts. So when we would arrive at a new river that had to be crossed, I didn’t hesitate. Instead of waiting for some kind of miracle to get us across, I would immediately begin constructing a raft and was consequently always among the first to reach the opposite bank. Our strategy of not camping for more than one night in the same place or before crossing a body of water also enabled my family and I to stay ahead of the danger and to escape the massacres that decimated thousands of refugees at Opala, at Ikela, at Boende on the Tshuapa River and at Ingende on the Ruki River.
Located on the road between Kisangani and Kinshasa in Equator province, Ikela is a town built along the Tshuapa River, with a port and an airport. The routed FAZ were waiting in Ikela for a boat to pick them up and take them to Kinshasa via Mbandaka. With only Kalashnikovs as possessions, they set up a checkpoint where they engaged in systematically fleecing the refugees who were pouring into the city. The searches were carried out carefully and methodically: men searched men, women searched women, and they weren’t shy to poke into people’s genitals and anuses to find hidden dollars. They took everything: from pieces of cassava to clothes in good shape to shoes and other valuables such as watches and jewellery from those who still had them. They didn’t hesitate to shoot at the refugees’ feet to force them to reveal their hidden money. In doing so, they condemned them to death, because in our desperate flight, our feet remained our most precious possessions.
We still had about six hundred dollars. To avoid having it taken, we put all our eggs in one basket and entrusted it to Emmérence, then five years old. I divided the money into two stashes: one hidden in the cast she still wore on the arm she had fractured in Tingi-Tingi, the other in a piece of raw cassava that I had opened, cleaned out and then re-covered with its own skin after hiding the carefully folded money inside. To get past the checkpoints without being searched, we asked her to walk through, crying and calling for her mom, simulating a lost child separated from her parents. Emmérence played her role to perfection and was able to get past the checkpoints without a hitch! Once she had made it, we’d go through ourselves. One of the Zairean soldiers gave me a kick in the ass after seeing that I had nothing of value that he could steal! We would then join our daughter waiting for us a little further down the road to continue our journey.
One day after our visit to Ikela, the boat the FAZ had been waiting for pulled up and took on all the soldiers who, while waiting, had transformed themselves into big-time bandits! Afraid of being ripped off, some refugees had chosen not to enter the city and decided instead to set up camp a few miles away and wait for the departure of the thieves in uniform. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize that also waiting were the RPA and the rebels, who then surprised and massacred most of them, leaving hundreds of bodies rotting in the open air or floating in the Tshuapa.
Once through Ikela, we continued on our journey to Boende, some three hundred kilometers away, which we reached after two weeks of walking. We passed through a number of villages, among them Businga and Ekuku. We then reached the town of Ingende after travelling about the same distance.
Since the FAZ had not entered this region, the people had not fled the villages. Some villages were inhabited by people who were still living in a primitive state, men and women both dressed only in loincloths. Even though our numbers had dwindled, our arrival panicked the local people who looked on helplessly as we plundered their crops. When someone spied the ripe fruit of a papaya or orange tree, they’d cut down the whole tree—a tree the villagers had taken years to grow— rather than taking the time to climb up and pick the fruit.
On the road, the days followed one after the other, each day the same as the one before it, punctuated only by periods of walking and of rest. We took advantage of the lunch break to try to get rid of the lice—which had multiplied exponentially—infesting our heads and clothes. The most effective method was to place your clothes on top of an anthill and let its occupants do the work, which only took a few minutes! As had become our custom, we made sure never to spend more than one night in the same place, because we knew our survival depended on it.
Refugees who passed through Boende and Ingende after us told of the large-scale massacres that were committed by the RPA and the rebels. People were shot or killed with traditional weapons and their bodies thrown into the Tshuapa. In other cases, especially at Ingende, the soldiers and rebels tied refugees together with ropes in groups of twenty to thirty people, forced them to lie face down on the road and crushed them to death under the wheels of a Tata truck. Others were thrown alive into the river where they drowned. The massacres at Boende and Ingende are among the most notorious committed against Hutu refugees in the Congo.
Wendji Secli is located on the Congo River, twenty kilometers south of Mbandaka. We arrived in the village on May 7. All of the refugees were in a state of exhaustion and sick; the children showed signs of malnutrition and almost everyone had swollen feet from the long walk. As had happened before in other places, we landed in Wendji Secli completely by chance, simply continuing our journey westward, guided by the instinct of survival. We were hoping to reach Mbandaka, capital of Equator province and Mobutu’s hometown, where we thought we would be safe, because it seemed unlikely that anyone would dare to attack us there, even though we knew the RPA and the rebels were following close behind us. The local police and Red Cross, however, would not allow the refugees to continue on to Mbandaka. They had constructed a makeshift camp in the village of Wendji Secli, on the site of what had once been a factory of the Société équatoriale congolaise Lulonga-Ikelemba (SECLI), on the east bank of the river. They told us that a boat would be coming to take us to Kinshasa.
The Congo was so wide at this point you could barely see the other side, which was not surprising since the river’s rate of flow is one of the largest in the world, second only to the Amazon. Strategies that we had previously employed to cross other rivers would not be successful in crossing this vast expanse. Despite the sound of boots approaching, we sat and waited. The wait became all the more difficult when we learned that Wendji Secli is a peninsula surrounded by the river to the west and impassable marshes to the south, and that the only exits were either to cross the Congo or to go back ten kilometers and take the road going south, since the way north was blocked by the police. If the camp came under attack, the only solution would be the river!
With the arrival of the first refugees, the local police set up a checkpoint, where they confiscated weapons and military equipment in the hands of the former Rwandan Armed Forces combatants and the former militia. Some of them were executed, but others refused to be disarmed. They felt that it would be a big mistake to hand over their weapons while the enemy was so close and the war was still raging. They chose instead to go back and take the dirt road to the main road leading south, towards the town of Lukolela. Some refugees who still had some strength joined them, but most remained at Wendji, trapped between the river, the swamps and the RPA and the rebels.
Three days after our arrival in Wendji, on a sunny afternoon, the long-awaited boat finally appeared. As there was no suitable place for it to land, the captain simply approached the shore, so that for people to board, they had to walk out into the water. The refugees rushed into the river and chaos ensued, which quickly degenerated into a full-fledged battle to determine who would be successful at grabbing this last chance to save himself or his family. The ship’s crew tried in vain to calm things down to enable a more-organized boarding. The bodies of people drowned in the crush began to float twenty meters down the river, but it didn’t change the behaviour of the refugees, who were determined to flee Wendji at any cost. Standing back from the riverbank, surrounded by my family, I was content to observe the scene. Had I been alone, I would have probably thrown myself into the fierce battle. But, with my wife and children, it was too risky. Noting that the situation was becoming more and more dangerous, the captain decided to terminate the operation and the boat parted with only thirty refugees on board. A chance to escape had just evaporated into thin air!
During this same afternoon, my brother-in-law Joseph and I went for a walk in the village in search of food. He still had some local money in his pocket. When we arrived in front of a bar that sold alcohol made from corn (lotoko), he suggested we go inside and have a drink, something we hadn’t done for several months. We started talking with a man and told him we were hoping to get across the river and head for Congo-Brazzaville, which now seemed like an easier destination to reach than Kinshasa. He told us that the local police had banned such crossings. We offered him money, but there was a problem: he wasn’t familiar with U.S. dollars. We explained that with a one hundred dollar bill he could buy a fat pig like the one that was tied to a stake in the courtyard in back of the bar. After a long discussion, he finally agreed to take us across the river in his canoe, cash in advance. We went a few hundred meters south of the bar and he showed us a well-concealed place in the bush near the river where we could wait at one in the morning and not be noticed by the police.
Around midnight, in total darkness and silence, the family crept along the river through the thorny mangroves to the rendezvous. After having placed our trust in a total stranger by paying him cash without knowing a thing about him, not even his name, we were rewarded when the man showed up around 2 a.m. He was accompanied by his wife who had a baby strapped to her chest. Still trying to maintain absolute silence, the boatman asked us to get into the boat, which was just big enough for all of us: myself, my wife, my three children, my sister Thérèse, her husband and their adopted child. With the boatman in the stern and his wife in the bow, we pushed discreetly into the current, heading in the direction of Congo-Brazzaville. When we got a few meters out, the man gave my brother and me each a paddle, so we could help make the canoe go faster. He had to show us how since it was the first time that we had ever paddled a canoe.
About six o’clock in the morning, with the sun rising and no idea how far we had come, we saw ahead in the distance a village perched on one of the dozens of islands that dot this marshy area at the confluence of the Congo and Oubangui Rivers. Our “captain” told us that the village was in Congo-Brazzaville and that he could not take us all the way there for fear of being accused of smuggling foreigners into the country. After leaving us off on a small uninhabited island, lighting a fire for us and giving us a supply of green plantain bananas, the couple wished us good luck and headed back. We kept the fire going, deliberately creating a lot of smoke to signal our presence, and the trick worked. Close to 8 a.m., two very tall and tough-looking men appeared in their canoe, armed with a shotgun, asking us who we were, what we were doing and how we had arrived. We were informed, to our surprise, that the boatman had fleeced us and that we weren’t actually in Congo-Brazzaville, in fact, we hadn’t even gone one tenth of the way! They were very nice people who really took pity on us. They took us to their fishing village that was inhabited by about thirty people, prepared a delicious meal of fresh fish and cassava, and set us up in a palm leaf covered space where we could rest.
Shortly after our boatman had left us on the island, we heard a barrage of powerful explosions from where we had just been a few hours earlier. The sound was too loud to be confused with the sporadic gunshots we were used to hearing every day. The RPA and the rebels had attacked the camp at Wendji Secli on the morning of Tuesday, May 13, 1997.
At eleven o’clock, while we were eating our meal, the first survivors of the attack appeared, crammed into canoes, most of them wounded and covered in blood. They told us that around eight o’clock in the morning refugees streaming down the road from Ingende arrived at Wendji in a state of panic, crying out that the RPA was coming. Some refugees immediately jumped into the same canoes they had previously been denied access to, and crossed the river, paddling by hand or with pieces of wood. Others decided to head north towards Mbandaka. But the majority remained in place, either too sick and tired to flee or convinced it was only rumours, something that happened often in our distressing situation.
It was these people who were surprised by the sudden arrival of a number of Kinyarwanda-speaking soldiers who stormed into Wendji aboard Tata trucks. They attacked the camp by firing on anything that moved and by tossing grenades at groups of refugees and into any possible hiding place. Having nowhere to run, the poor refugees rushed into the river, where they were shot to death and drowned. After a few hours, the dead numbered in the hundreds. Local people, who watched helplessly as the carnage unfolded, were ordered late in the afternoon to clean up the encampment by throwing the dead into the river and covering the pools of blood with dirt. For the next six months these indigenous people would abstain from eating fish from the Congo that had fed on human flesh, even though fish is normally part of their basic diet!
While one group of soldiers searched throughout the village of Wendji, another boarded two trucks towards Mbandaka. On the way, they fired their machine guns at refugees who were fleeing north in response to the warnings of the refugees from Ingende.
In Mbandaka, refugees arriving in the city after May 9 were sent by the police to facilities of the Zairean Office national des transports (ONATRA – national mass transit company), to wait for a boat that could take them either to Kinshasa or Congo-Brazzaville. Unfortunately, they were surprised by the arrival of the RPA who slaughtered them down at the docks. They conducted search campaigns throughout the town, hunting down and killing the refugees and locals who had offered them refuge.
With the help of HCR and other NGOs, a transit center was later set up for the survivors. Mostly dying women and children, they were sheltered in this camp of misery before being repatriated to Rwanda by air.
Meanwhile, canoes crammed with refugees who had escaped the Wendji massacre continued to arrive in the small village where we were staying, sheltered by the local population, We were afraid that they were being followed by the killers, and whenever we saw a boat in the distance, we’d hide in the forest until the identity of its occupants could be verified. Some boats pulled ashore on the island, but others passed by without stopping to put more distance between them and the danger.
Through the means of another hundred-dollar bill, we convinced two young men to take us on to the market at Mayita, where merchants from Congo-Brazzaville could, they told us, arrange to take us back with them. In order to avoid problems with the other islanders, the boatmen preferred to organize the voyage at night, to the delight of many mosquito species that inhabited the marshy environment and whose bite felt the same as getting an IV injection at the clinic.
Once we arrived at the Mayita market, on another island, local villagers told us that we had once again been fleeced; that the Congolese merchants did not come to this market, but rather the one at Mobenzano, which was a half-day canoe trip to the west. We had to pay another hundred dollars for the trip to Mobenzano. We arrived there in the morning, four days after our departure from Wendji.
Unfortunately, the market was only held one day a week and had just taken place the day before! The islanders refused to take us to Congo-Brazzaville, claiming that their neighbours on the other side of the river were enemies who thought they were even more disgusting than snakes, as in the famous Lingala adage “Boma Zairian nyoka tika” which means “kill the Zairean and leave the snake!” Later we learned that it was true that this hatred towards Zairean Congolese existed and was based on the habit the Zaireans had of stealing fish and game caught in their neighbours’ traps!
Since we couldn’t afford to wait for the market to be held the following week, we negotiated with the locals to at least take us to the border, for a fee, of course. This was not without difficulty, as the inhabitants of this deep jungle had themselves never heard of the dollar. Having nothing smaller, we had no choice but to pay in hundred-dollar bills!
As people were always transported under cover of darkness, it wasn’t until dawn on May 17, 1997, that we were discretely left off in a village called Bruxelles, located on the east bank of the Oubangui River, across the river from the village of Ndjoundou in Congo-Brazzaville. A crowd of over a hundred other refugees were already waiting there, having spent the night after being denied permission to cross the river by the Congolese border guard on duty. He claimed to be waiting for a decision from his superiors whether to allow the Rwandan refugees, most of whom didn’t have any identification, to enter the Congo.
Finally, on that memorable afternoon of May 17, permission was granted and we were able to reach Congo-Brazzaville, where we would finally be out of our tormentors’ reach. We were ferried across at no charge, thanks to the local authorities and the population of the village of Ndjoundou. We finally said goodbye to Zaire, after a long and difficult seven and a half months’ journey through the jungle. All told, we had walked nearly three thousand kilometers.
