On some nights Dave and I would sit aroundover beers and discuss the depression, how livingalone on this river, in this steaming mess of acity, made you forget you had the power to leave.The crumbled roads out of town only led to oth-er choking cities with little to offer, or simplyturned wild andmelted back intothe bush. The red-eye to Europe lift-ed off every nightbut never trulytook you away.The key to main-taining your sani-ty in this place wasto get out whenev-er possible, andmost of the munde-les did. Congo’splentitude of hor-ror and paranoiawas the burden we chose to drag behind us, forthat was our job. But when you stayed too long,you left yourself open, allowing the ghosts, rumors,and scary sounds that inhabit the rainy nightsto climb up your neck.
As wire-agency reporters based in Kinshasa,Dave and I agreed that busy weeks saved us fromthis unhappy end. You get one or two stories in themorning and ride the wave through the afternoon,just in time for sundowners or a hearty dinner to
put you off to bed. Slow weeks lifted the shield andleft you suddenly vulnerable, pacing your bedroomwith all the murders, disease, and gross mutilationof the past weeks stirring around in the air-condi-tioning, struggling to make sense of themselves.
The depression made you paranoid and suspi-cious, made youmore susceptible tothe fevers and myr-iad pestilence thatcrawled out of theearth. It kept youout at degeneratenightclubs untilthe sun rose overthe palms, and itwas on one of thesenights that wefound ourselves inthe VIP Saloon.
The bar was justoff Kinshasa’s main
boulevard, and it was usually filled by midnightwith shifty Lebanese diamond dealers, Frenchand Belgian mercenaries, and the few Congolesewho could afford the $5 beers and sodas.
We ordered two bottles of local Skol at thelong, lamp-lit bar and stared out onto the floor,where long-legged Congolese prostitutes inminiskirts and flame-red boots watched them-selves dance in the wall of mirrors. The Euro popon the speakers was loud and monotonous but
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F O L I O
Bryan Mealer’s previous article on Congo, “In the Valley of the Gun,” appeared in the May 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
punchy enough to lift us from our doldrums. We’d suffered four days with no stories, and
neither of us had really left our apartment. We’denjoyed a nice run before hitting the currentslump. In mid-March, United Nations humani-tarian chief Jan Egeland had announced thatCongo had become “the world’s worst humani-tarian crisis,” a disaster that was being virtually ig-nored by the rest of the world.
Dave and I took this as fantastic news, becauseit meant we’d somehow edged out the tsunami inAsia and the genocide in Sudan in terms of ab-solute misery. The announcement did wonders forgetting my stories printed in American papers. Ifthe story had a heady lead of cannibalism, en-dangered gorillas, or little girls being raped withmachetes, then it might have big enough wingsto survive its journey across the Atlantic. Every-thing else was like punting in a hailstorm. Storiesleft the desk and crashed straight into a waterygrave, where a half-century of dispatches of both-ersome African despair boils at the bottom.
But now our moment had passed once again,and we were left restless and manic.
Across the bar at VIP, a group of Belgian busi-nessmen sipped J&B while bar girls sat like smil-ing mannequins in their laps. Two Germans stoodin the far corner, twitchy and bug-eyed, takingturns doing bumps of cocaine in the bathroom.
Dave had just returned from an assignmentacross the river in Congo-Brazzaville, where no-torious Ninja rebels had ambushed his convoy.No one had been hurt, but a dope-crazed Ninjahad jumped into Dave’s truck, held two grenadesto his head, and stolen his cherished jungle boots.
“Two grenades in one hand, and a bloody jointbetween his fingers,” he howled, demonstratingwith a cigarette. We laughed about it now overbeers. Sometimes even the most rotten assign-ments seemed like holidays once we got back to Kinshasa.
“The U.N.’s saying the Mai Mai are sporting fe-tuses around their necks,” he said.
“Oh, lovely. I hear the Lendu wear human kid-neys on their bandoliers. I think I saw it once.”
“I say we round up a few for Fashion Week,mate. Do they allow Kalashnikovs on the runway?”
It was our usual banter, tasteless and maybe alittle too loud. But something about it must’ve
struck a nerve in Dave, who went quiet for aminute, then said: “I haven’t written one storyin six months where someone didn’t die.”
“Same here,” I answered. “I’m thinking of counting all the dead people in mine. I wonder how many I’ll get.”You could never count all of Congo’s dead, the
way they kept piling up. The country is slowlyemerging from a five-year war that has killed 4 mil-lion people, mostly from war-induced sicknessand hunger, and aid groups estimate 1,200 peoplestill die every day. The war drew in seven Africanarmies at its peak, and helped create and maintaintens of thousands of militiamen who still live bythe gun, killing and maiming at will. The militiashave all but commandeered the eastern half of thecountry—rich in timber, gold, diamonds, andcoltan—which they’ve divided into personal fief-doms at the expense of the population.
Near the eastern border with Rwanda, packs ofHutu rebels survive in the forests only by looting.These rebels, who fled into Congo after partici-pating in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, control hugeswaths of jungle too dangerous for U.N. and Con-golese soldiers to police. They carry out regularmassacres and are known for rounding up a vil-lage’s women and gang-raping them while fami-ly members are forced to watch. Farther north,near the Ugandan border, other militias simply ex-terminate everything alive, then loot and burnwhat’s left. Often these militias butcher the deadon the battle floor and feast on hearts and livers,both as ceremony and as a tactic of cold intimi-dation. Its effectiveness is superb.
Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert knew all of thistoo well, and more. He sat in the posh, flower-decked bar of a hotel in Bukavu, the eastern cityon the Rwandan border that had become theU.N.’s command post in dealing with the Huturebels. The Dutch general was in charge of morethan 14,000 peacekeepers in eastern Congo,stretching from the Ugandan border to the south-ern province of Katanga, and there was never amoment when his command wasn’t hot.
It was early June, and Cammaert had just re-turned from the dense forests of the South Kivuterritory, where Hutu rebels had just sliced upthe village of Nindja, hacking off the hands andfeet of their victims and removing their kidneys.The Hutu had been assisted by Rasta gunmen, aneven more macabre band of killers consisting ofMai Mai militia, Hutu, and renegade Congolesesoldiers. During the raid, Rastas had kidnappedfifty young girls, who were most likely taken tomountain camps and raped day after day beforebeing left for dead. Panicked villagers had fledinto the mountains, where many were likely to diefrom exposure and disease. The general was try-ing to decide whether to send troops into the
If the story had a heady lead of cannibalism or endangered gorillas,
then it might survive its journeyacross the ocean
jungles to protect the population and how tokeep his men from being ambushed.
The general removed his blue beret and rubbedhis temples. He’d toured the scene of the killings.“The brutality, it’s beyond comprehension,” hesaid, the words trailing off. “Innocent kids, twoyears old, just beaten to pulp.”
No one at the U.N. had any idea how deep theevil ran in the jungles. The tiny U.N. mission thatbegan in 1999 with 90 staffers observing a rebelcease-fire had since grown by sheer necessity toencompass much of the country’s infrastructure.Congo is now the U.N.’s largest, most expensivemission, with 16,700 peacekeepers and a com-bined annual budget of nearly $2 billion. Congo’speacekeepers, along with U.N. agencies, havebeen saddled with trying to eradicate some 20,000militiamen in the east, while at the same time try-ing to assist more than 2 million people displacedas a result of war and the ongoing raids. More re-cently, they’ve attempted to midwife a democra-cy by arranging elections in a country three timesthe size of Texas, a country lacking roads, elec-tricity, telephones, and local governments. Bat-tling the various militias while planning elec-tions in Congo has unexpectedly become thesingle most ambitious project the world body hasundertaken in its sixty-one-year history.
What was heavy on the general’s mind thatnight in Bukavu was how to purge 10,000 Hutuand Rasta fighters from the east, a mandatoryassignment before elections could take place.Cammaert had already lost twelve peacekeepers
in combat in the northeastern hills this year,and there the terrain was wide open and ideal foropen-ended assaults. The mountains and jun-gles near Rwanda were an altogether different warzone, where the probability for ambush was ex-tremely high. But the general had just pulled abrilliant maneuver, convincing the U.N. brass tobring in units of Guatemalan special forces,American-trained jungle fighters who could creepthrough the dense terrain to stage surgical strikeson unsuspecting Hutu. Once the rebels wereflushed into open territory, MI-25 attack heli-copters could dispatch them.*
It was certainly one of the most ingeniousmoves the U.N. had managed, but it also waspossibly one of its worst mistakes. The decorat-ed general, who’d just served as Kofi Annan’s topmilitary adviser in New York, now found himselfin a lead role in Congo’s confusing nightmare.And Cammaert had his own bad dream, the onein which he’s the U.N. commander in the world’snext Mogadishu. “I’m losing sleep,” he said, star-
ing off into nothing. “I can’t stop thinking about those forests.” Nowhere has the mettle of U.N. peacekeep-
ers been tested more than in northeast Ituri
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* On January 23, 2006, eight of the Guatemalan specialforces peacekeepers were killed in an ambush near thenortheastern border with Sudan. The attack was carriedout by rebels from Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Armywho’d recently crossed into Congo.
province, where raids and fighting between ethnicHema and Lendu militias have killed more than60,000 people since 1999. Trained and armed byboth Uganda and Rwanda during Congo’s war,the two militias routinely battle for control over lu-crative trade routes across Lake Albert and forconcessions on area gold mines. Over the years,Ituri, like the rest of eastern Congo, has become thegun dump of the world, with foreign businessmenfunneling Cold War–era weapons and heavy ar-tillery to militia leaders through Uganda.
On February 25, 2005, near a tiny village calledKafe, a gang of Lendu militiamen ambushed afoot patrol of Bangladeshi peacekeepers and killednine. During the well-coordinated attack, theother peacekeepers fled the scene, and the Lendustripped the dead U.N. soldiers’ uniforms andequipment. The peacekeepers had been sent toKafe—part of a vast, hill-swept territory calledDjugu—in late January to protect more than100,000 people who’d fled battles between Hemaand Lendu fighters over taxation rights to thenearby lake. The Lendu staged a series of lootingraids on Hema villages, punctuating their attacksby burning down homes and even eating some ofthe dead. The villagers, who’d managed harrow-ing escapes from these attacks, walked dozens ofmiles to four separate camps in the remote hills,and once there started dying by the hundredsfrom cholera, dysentery, and measles.
In late March, I boarded a U.N. flight for Bunia,the capital of the Ituri province and headquartersfor the 5,000-strong U.N. Ituri Brigade. One weekafter the ambush, peacekeepers gunned downsome sixty Lendu fighters using armored vehiclesand MI-25 attack helicopters. The assault was ledby Pakistani ground troops, hardened from battlingAl Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan, and as-
sisted by Indian helicopter pilots. Locked in ayears-long face-off on their own borders, the twoarmies now combined to create a rolling killingmachine along the bloody hills of eastern Congo.
A rush of cold nostalgia settled in my chestwhen I stepped off the plane at the Bunia airport.I’d come here for the first time in April 2003, asa freelancer, to cover a massacre by Lendu mili-tia in the distant hills, only to be caught in an-other killing spree right here in town. I’d stayedin Bunia close to a month while the Ugandan
army prepared to withdraw afterfive years of fighting their war.During those weeks, the Lenduand Hema battled the army dailywith mortars and heavy machineguns, waiting to ravage the townonce the troops had gone. I’d beencaught in some fierce gunfightson these dusty streets and experi-enced mortal fear for the first timein my life. During that time,only a few hundred U.N. peace-keepers were in Bunia, and theirmandate forbade them from pro-tecting civilians. Just when it wasalmost too late, I’d managed toevacuate myself on the last Ugan-dan plane out of Congo, and thatnight the town fell. I returnednine days later to find the town inruins and controlled by drunkenchild soldiers. Mangled bodies lit-
tered the streets and rotted in the equatorial sun,and every morning I watched as they were tornapart by wild dogs. Friends and contacts had dis-appeared or been killed. Nothing was the same inBunia, and since then nothing has really been thesame for me.
I left Africa several months later. Five hun-dred people had been slaughtered that week, andthe U.N. had done nothing. Bunia had been a blipon the news radar, and back in New York no oneseemed to know anything about it. For a year I satwith those faces, the bloated bodies, the dogs,and the smell, and never gave them a good rea-son for dying. All the gangsterism and hatred be-came tangled into a question I couldn’t resolve.So when I was offered a job as Congo corre-spondent for the Associated Press, I took it, hop-ing that maybe I’d come to understand what I’dmissed before. I wasn’t out to change anything,I wasn’t that pompous. But it had been my story,it was now part of me, and I had to bring the
terrible tale to a conclusion that atleast made some kind of sense. Bunia had been drastically transformed since
I’d seen it last. The U.N. mission had tripled insize, and there were no longer any teenage soldiers,
in wigs and painted fingernails, prowling thestreets with rocket launchers. Several new restau-rants and hotels had opened, including an en-terprising Indian joint at the Hotel Ituri thatcatered to Indian and Bangladeshi troops, plus themassive influx of international press and foreignaid workers. There was a lopsided pool table in thebar of the Indian restaurant, and every night adozen Italian aid workers would line up to playtwo hefty Congolese girls who’d established them-selves as local sharks. The two girls played forbottles of beer, knocking back one after another,yet they never weaved or staggered, and I neversaw them lose. The Italian men wore their hairlong and kept it clean and bouncy, even in Bunia’sthick dust and heat. They wore tight designerjeans and pointy leather shoes and thunderedthrough town on silver Ducatis, which they hadshipped in from Italy. The Italian women wereyoung and loud, and would fall down drunk infront of tables of staring Congolese.
I was having a beer in the restaurant one nightwith an old friend, a hardened U.N. logistics of-ficer who’d been through the war, seen enoughgore to fuel a lifetime of nightmares, and had evenseen arrows shot through his truck during thesiege. We watched the aid workers spilling theirdrinks and running into tables. “Look what’s hap-pened to this town,” the officer said, his face twist-ed in disgust. “These kids don’t have a fucking cluewhat happened here.” Bunia had also become abackwater feeding ground for cowboy journalistslooking for serious action.You’d see them at dinner, out-fitted with elaborate GPS de-vices and dressed in the latestColumbia rip-away pants,talking about cannibals, gun-fights, and maximum cover-age. The ones who rolled inhot from New York were thebest, like a photographerwhose business cards wereshaped like dog tags, metaland all. One day he sat on thesteps of his hotel smoking cig-arettes, cursing a press officerat the U.N. because shewouldn’t let him embed withpeacekeepers like he’d donein Iraq. He’d just come backfrom one of the displacedcamps in Djugu, where he’dphotographed kids dying from cholera and measles.“The light,” he said, “was just fantastic.”
A few days later I landed a seat on a U.N.chopper that was taking Ross Mountain, theU.N. deputy in charge of Congo, on a tour ofthree of Djugu’s camps, where more than 75,000people now stayed. Mountain had served as Kofi
Annan’s special representative in Iraq throughOctober 2004, before arriving in Kinshasa inDecember. He was a straight-talking Kiwi whonever tried to sugarcoat the U.N.’s mistakes orbad judgment calls, and there’d been many. Everyweek Mountain would take trips into the thickof Congo’s misery to get a look for himself, andthis week he’d asked to see the great catastropheof Ituri.
Staring down from a chopper over eastern Con-go was like glimpsing a prototype of Earth duringthe first days of creation. Where are all the people?I always wondered from my high seat, usually enroute to some backwater camp where war and sick-ness had already claimed them before they ever had
a chance to live. The camp in Tche was locatedforty miles north of Bunia amid a panorama ofsweeping, green hills. About 25,000 people hadcongregated in the crook of a narrow valley, whichquickly became an ideal container for disease. Atleast twenty kids were dropping every day frommeasles and drinking dirty water, and groups like
Médecins Sans Frontièreswere working without sleepjust to slow down the deathrate. About 350 Pakistanipeacekeepers were dug intothe valley and had broughttons of steel and firepower, butit wasn’t enough to stop kidswasting away from diarrhea.
The helicopter landingzone was on a ridgeline over-looking the camp, and as weapproached I could see thatthe Pakistanis had arrangedsome sort of welcoming cer-emony nearby for the guests.The camp had also spread uponto the ridge, and hundredsof its ragged and desperateresidents stood below eager-ly watching the helicopter
land. But as we touched down, the rotor washfrom the chopper blades blew the thatched roofsoff several huts and sent a wall of red, stingingsand into the crowd. Children screamed andscattered in all directions. The plastic tablesand chairs meant for our ceremony sailedthrough the air and slammed into people’s backs,
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Mangled bodies littered the streetsand rotted in the equatorial sun,and every morning I watched as theywere torn apart by wild dogs
knocking them over. As the wheels bouncedand settled, someone from Mountain’s entourageshook his head and yelled, “Jesus Christ, whathave we done?”
The people had returned when I stepped outof the chopper. Some now stood pressedtogether behind a high wall of razor wire, whileothers perched in trees, watching and waiting.The eyes stopped us dead, even after the bladesstopped spinning. We stood frozen in the awk-ward silence. But Mountain broke the ice forall of us. “My God,” he gasped, walking for-ward, “look at all these kids who aren’t inschool.” A Pakistani colonel ferried offMountain and his staff, so I headed down intothe camp to get my story. Amid the haze ofcooking fires and strange morning shadows, Isaw Johnny Ngure, my old translator fromBunia, who’d lived through the war and wasnow a U.N. interpreter. I ran over and tackledhim with a giant bear hug. He had saved myskin several times during those bad weeks in
Bunia, and I hadn’t seen him since. I immedi-ately enlisted him to translate Swahili for me,and we made our way through the camp, speak-ing to people who’d escaped the village raidswith little but their lives. One man who stillstands out in my mind was named AliMohammed. He’d walked outside his hut inLoga just in time to watch Lendu teenagersbutcher his mother and two children withmachetes. He’d escaped by throwing himselfdown a mountain and tumbling to the bottom.He was still dressed in the long, torn night-gown he’d been wearing during the first shotsof the raid, now his only material possession. Ididn’t have time for many interviews. Thechopper stayed no longer than thirty minutesin each camp, long enough for Mountain andhis staff to speak with aid workers and militarypersonnel, get off some snapshots, and declarethat, yes, this was indeed the world’s worsthumanitarian crisis. We then climbed backinto the bird, fired up the blades, and sailed offagain like a white ghost over the hills.
A week later, U.N. peacekeepers pulled out ofthe camps at Tche, Gina, Tchomia, and Kafe,leaving more than 100,000 people in the handsof poorly paid, ill-equipped Congolese soldiers,who promptly began looting the tents as soon as
the blue helmets were out of sight. A choleraepidemic had already descended on two camps,so when hundreds of people fled the marauding
troops, many also carried their deathswith them into the tall grass. The March operation in Loga—when
peacekeepers killed around sixty fighters—hadalso resulted in a number of civilian deaths,according to villagers. Peacekeepers had takensmall-arms fire as they’d approached a crowdedmarket and responded by pounding the marketwith mortars, while gunships hovered overheadand emptied their cannons. The militia hadused the market vendors as human shields, theU.N. said, and women and children were alsoseen firing guns. As with most peacekeepingoperations, there was no way to confirm theU.N.’s information. In fact, most of our dayswere spent trying to decipher the official sludgethat slid from under the door of the U.N. head-quarters and still remain credible. To sell theworld body’s new method of peace enforcing tothe world press, the U.N. relied on Kemal Saiki,a short, chain-smoking Algerian with a hard-onfor war. Saiki was a tough talker who routinelyissued threats and ultimatums to the militiasfrom his air-conditioned office 900 miles away,a real Sgt. Slaughter for the struggling blue hel-mets. A former spokesman for OPEC, Saiki wasbetter than past public information officers theU.N. had employed. But still, when it camedown to numbers and hard facts, you often filedat your own risk.
One Friday night I’d called Saiki to follow upon a raid that had begun that morning south ofBunia. The blue helmets were tearing downanother Lendu camp, and we knew they’dmade contact.
“How many dead?” I asked. “Eighteen casualties,” he said. “No, I mean dead. How many militia killed?” “Yeah, eighteen,” he said. “Eighteen fatalities.” I ran with the story. Hours later, Dave called
and said he got thirty-eight dead, and RadioFrance International was reporting ten, all fromdifferent sources within the U.N. At the weeklypress conference days later, Dave and I corneredSaiki to get an explanation.
“Look, we’re all getting different numbers,” Isaid. “Which is it: eighteen, thirty-eight, or ten?”
“It’s eighteen,” he said. He then leaned in andwhispered, “Look, what really happened was thehelicopter fired eighteen shots, and it got mistakenfor eighteen shot. Get me? We don’t really know.”
“But you told me eighteen,” I said. “Yeah, or it was eighteen militia standing on
the roof of a house when the helicopter releasedits rockets. The roof collapsed, the people disap-peared. Boom. Eighteen.”
Ali Mohammed walked outside hishut in Loga just in time to watch
Lendu teenagers butcher his motherand two children with machetes
He pulled out a cigarette and made his way tothe door.
“Why are you so obsessed with death counts?” he said. “This isn’t Vietnam.”News of the dead came in several ways, and
sometimes when you wanted it least—two beersinto the night after filing all day, or just when youreached a restaurant and put in your order. IfDave was there, and it was something small likea plane crash (Soviet-era Antonovs fell out of thesky in Congo nearly weekly), we’d exchange ahaggard look and start making deals. “If you wait,I’ll wait,” we’d say, just to finish our food likenormal people. We never waited long; the deskand telephone controlled us like tin men. Butwhile we sat there with a mouthful of food, thedead now among us to sort out, one of us wouldshoot a glance and repeat our sacred news-gruntmantra: “If we don’t file, it doesn’t exist.”
Many reports of attacks, rapes, and massacrescame through confidential sources within theU.N., and to them from humanitarian officers, lo-cal government officials, or residents—often thosewho’d escaped attacks and then walked severaldays with children and festering wounds to a mil-itary post. I had a contact within the U.N. whoshuttled information to me through instant mes-saging, usually blood-soaked with raunch when itflashed my screen: Hear about the attack near Tcho-mia? Eighteen Hema lost their livers. Most oftenthe jokes came out of boredom or those dark re-cesses where coping mechanisms had terriblymalfunctioned after years of being in the badbush: Have you thought much about the Ituri cook-
book? I have an addition: stewed hearts of Hema inmother’s milk. Or perhaps kidney brochettes withpeacekeeper pie?
We all lived our jobs, and the jokes were agood way to keep cocktail parties from becomingmired in gossip or humanitarian jargon. If someU.N. brass was nearby, not part of our clique,we’d take off our shoes and start measuring the sizeof our toes, or launch into make-believe Ramboodysseys of Ross Mountain (whom some hadnicknamed “Mohammed”) that usually beganwith the deputy U.N. chief losing his mind onvoodoo cocaine and disappearing into the junglelike Kurtz, naked and smeared in mud, whisper-ing to his knife, “To kill a Rasta, one must becomea Rasta.” With my contact in the U.N., thingswere never serious, even on those rare occasionswhen I desperately wanted them to be. During oneof those unrelenting weeks of sitting in Kinshasawhile filing daily blood from the east, hardly everleaving the house, I’d said something that prob-ably came off as naive, about never having timeto write positive, hopeful stories. The reply wasquick and barbed: “There aren’t any happy sto-ries here, pal,” the message read. “This place is
a Viking holiday, all blood, rape,and gore.”Gradually the cocktail and dinner parties,
and later our lives in general, became weighteddown by one encompassing subject: June 30,2005, the day many predicted Kinshasa wouldcrumble in a wave of blood and terror. The datemarked the end of the country’s transitional gov-ernment, which had been agreed upon in 2003,
at the end of the war, by government and rebels.The agreement also made clear that June 30 mustalso be the date of the presidential election—the first in Congo since the country gained in-dependence from Belgium in 1960.
Anyone expecting real elections in June wasliving a fantasy. The government was in con-stant disorder, gutted by corruption and alle-giances that fell alongside Congo’s four vice pres-idents, two of whom were former rebel leaderswho’d been integrated into the postwar, power-sharing government. President Joseph Kabila hadcome to power after his father (who’d overthrownthe pink-champagne-sipping dictator MobutuSese Seko) was assassinated by his own body-guard in 2001, and he immediately made stridesin ending the war, gaining respect from Westernleaders. But the president remained surrounded
by men with agendas, lawmakers with too muchmoney and power to lose in a transparent, corruption-free state. As one American diplo-mat once told me, “Kabila is alone in a lake of pi-ranhas. He knows the second he puts the firsttoe in, his whole body will follow.”
Decades of corruption and dirty politics, mili-tia attacks in the east, no infrastructure, and twoyears of foot-dragging by the administration hadsucked dry any hope of democracy. So as ex-pected, in late April of 2005, the governmentextended the transitional government and de-layed elections until the spring of 2006.
The first hint of an election postponement
back in January had sparked massive rioting in thecapital that ended when police opened fire intothe crowds. I’d only been in town a couple ofweeks and didn’t venture out into the mobs alone,knowing how easy it would have been for one kidto smash a rock in my face and for me to be lostforever underfoot. But after the official April de-claration, rumors quickly spread that June 30would be much worse, that crazy mobs would runthrough the streets, and soldiers would be lead-ing the parade of rape and pillage. It was billed as“Congo’s apocalypse,” a Y2K in the heart of dark-ness that would terminate in a rain of bullets andmachete blades, and I knew I’d be right at the corewith no place to hide.
The June 30 fear slowly crept its way into theexpat community. Aside from U.N. and hu-manitarian staff, Kinshasa had many Belgians
who’d stuck around after independence, havinginvested everything in a falling star. There wereLebanese, who owned much of the city’s com-mercial center, and Indians, who were bootedout by Mobutu in the 1960s and returned afterhis fall.
The basis of the expats’ fear was rooted in lespillages of the ’90s, three instances when soldiersand residents had grown so tired of Mobutu’s ne-glect and lies that they looted for days, literallystealing the roads from underneath the city’s feet.The infrastructure that hadn’t withered awayfrom decay was stripped and sold. Government of-fices still bore the scars where appliances had
been ripped from their foundations and light fix-tures had been reduced to dangling wires andcrumbling plasterboard. Kinshasa’s main post of-fice hasn’t received mail in years, but dozens ofemployees still turn up for work every day, hop-ing to be paid. Most of the city remains withoutregular water or electricity, and jobs are a distantmemory, reserved mostly for those with familyconnections or a hand in the government pie.Most streets run with sewage that breeds themalaria that kills countless children in the city.
We’d sit around and listen to the old hands tellabout the old days, about watching the city dis-appear piece by piece in the gunfire and lootingwhile they bravely fought to maintain their smallstake. “There were two days between the timeMobutu fled in 1997 and Kabila’s rebels advancedonto Kinshasa,” my friend Moi would tell us. Hewas a Congolese businessman married to a beau-tiful Polish woman, and they’d lived in a largehouse on the outskirts of town. The city hadgone mad after Mobutu’s retreat, with ravenousmobs of residents and soldiers looting every quar-ter. For two days, Moi sat on his roof with a pumpshotgun and a case of shells, scattering the crowdsthat gathered at his gate. Government soldierswould cruise by and listen for the gun blast; theheavier the weapon, the better the chance thatthey’d keep going. Other security forces raceddown the block, gunning down looters and lin-ing up bodies on the roadside. While Moi blast-ed away on the roof, his wife, Nesh, kept theNBA playoffs on the television below, pokingher head out the window every half hour to an-nounce the score. “I was up there trying to saveour house,” he’d say, “and there was Nesh yelling,‘HEAT 67, KNICKS 55.’ BOOM! BOOM!”
Toward the end of April, Congo’s army chiefof staff appeared on state television to announcesomething that had alarmed him. Businessesthroughout the city were reporting mass buyoutsof machetes, and he suspected the surge in saleshad something to do with June 30 plans. AverageCongolese were buying the Tramontina bladesas fast as shop owners stocked them on theshelves, he said, and someone in power was be-hind their distribution. The main opposition par-ty was vowing to shut down the streets on June30 with thousands of supporters, but even they de-nied distributing weapons. I was never able toconfirm the chief of staff’s claim, but it was bone-chilling nonetheless.
The machete scare was made worse by a spateof grotesque murders throughout Kinshasa’s Ling-wala slum. People started turning up dead withtheir legs, heads, arms, and even lips missing.Residents started blaming the killings on themysterious “Kata-Kata,” which means “cut-cut”in local Lingala. Kata-Kata was one of severalthings, or many things all together: Angolan sol-
diers dressed in Congolese uniforms, Tanzanianand Zambian agents who’d come to overthrow thegovernment, or perhaps members of Kabila’s pres-idential guard, who were killing people to deterprotests on June 30. A few even speculated thatKata-Kata was some kind of mutant werewolfwho’d crawled out of the forest, an agent of thedevil who’d arrived as a harbinger of the end ofdays. In a country ravaged from a century of colo-nial depredation, followed by coups, assassina-tions, and two invasions by outside armies,Kata-Kata came to represent Congo’s deep psy-chological wound, and became the logic
behind everything bad that happened. Rush hoursuddenly started two hours earlier because resi-dents didn’t want to be caught out after dark.Gas stations and many other businesses also closedearlier, causing a backup of taxis that left hundredsof terrified people still stranded as the sun wentdown. Ask someone what was happening, andthey’d tell you: C’est Kata-Kata.
After a pregnant woman was found butcheredin the weeds, my housekeeper, Kasango, askedfor his entire month’s salary to buy a television.I refused again and again, hating the idea of hisfamily not eating for weeks because Kasangowanted to watch TV. I’d say something callouslike, “You can’t eat a television!” and he’d reply,“Patron, c’est Kata-Kata.” I finally gave him themoney, discovering only later that the TV wasn’t for him but for his daughter, who walkedtwo miles every night to watch television at afriend’s house. Buying the television was Kasan-go’s way of keeping her safe at home.
The fear began trickling down into every stra-tum of society, affecting both the rich and thepoor, those with everything and those with noth-ing to lose. The multitude of Kinshasa’s beggarssuddenly turned more violent in their panhan-dling, and friends began reporting mobs of streetkids (or shegue) jumping onto their cars and pound-ing the windshields until each kid was paid. I also noticed the change in Kinshasa’s roving bandsof cripples, who already formed one of the tough-est and meanest gangs in the city. Kinshasa was fullof cripples: you’d see them every day asking formoney in traffic—men with legs corkscrewed be-hind their backs from polio; war vets missingshoulders, legs, and arms; blind women being ledfrom car to car by ragtag shegue. They congregat-
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Businesses throughout the city werereporting mass buyouts of machetes,and it was suspected that the surge insales had to do with the election
62 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2006
ed on street corners and under shade trees withtheir wheelchairs and hand-pedaled carts, a massof shining steel like freaky Hells Angels. They’dgather in front of businesses, thirty and forty at atime, and demand money. If the owner refused, themob would hurl bricks through windows andsmash cars with steel pipes. Many business own-ers paid them off, which also gave their storesprotection from thieves and miscreants.
I was having breakfast at the Hotel Fontanawhen they staged a small uprising against two po-lice officers. One of the cops had stolen money froma young, legless man earlier in the day, so the beg-gar had collected his pals to get some payback.Within ten minutes, about forty people had gath-ered against a concrete wall across the street. Theywere screaming and jabbing their fingers toward thecops, really threatening trouble. Finally the leglessman took it alone. With powerful arms, he thrusthis torso forward across the dirt road and reachedthe cop in seconds. The cop saw him coming,threw his AK-47 behind his shoulder, and bracedhimself, terrified. The legless man lurched for-ward, wrapped his arms around the officer’s shins,and held on. The cop tumbled onto his back,reaching up to his buddy with pure animal fear.
Once the officer was down, ten more cripplespounced on him, pelting him with punches and fist-fuls of gravel. The Indian manager of the hotelran out and pulled the gate closed, fearing a riot,shouting “Oh God, not again.” The restaurantwas filled with gruff U.N. officers and Polish U.N.civilian cops, who stood with me at the windowand watched the poor guy try to save himself. Allhe had to do was start smashing skulls with his ri-fle butt or use his boots. But a dozen pairs of U.N.eyes were on him, and about twenty more wheel-chairs were rolling across the street to get a piece.
“Maybe someone should do something,” one ofthe men said.
“Nah,” said another, closing the drapes.“These assholes have it coming.”
hile the Congolese waited for some unknownevil to land on June 30, the U.N. was nailing downcontingency plans for an all-out collapse. Ware-houses and empty offices were being equipped withcots and a week’s supply of food to hold more than1,000 expats. Secret messages were being encod-
ed into popular U.N. Radio Okapi broadcasts, giv-ing U.N. officers instruction on riots and crowdgatherings. The U.N. also staged an ambitiousweekend evacuation drill for hundreds of its staff,only to realize a week later that they’d forgotten toinform fifty-five ranking officers. It was no secretto the Congolese that mundeles could leave whenthings got bad, and they hardly trusted the U.N.to save them from marauding soldiers. Many Con-golese thought the U.N. staffers only wanted to col-lect their big salaries and $1,000 per month in“hazard pay,” and to hell with the rest. And at theend of the day, weren’t we all U.N.? Why elsewould a mundele be in Congo other than to preachor to make a profit?
As June 30 approached, I began buying dozensof cans of tuna and sardines, 20-gallon jugs ofwater, and extra fuel for the generator, in theevent that I was trapped at home while the streetsburned outside. I also bought water jugs for Kasan-go and Eddy, my Congolese colleague, and gavethem money for emergencies, but it didn’t changethe realities of who would stay and who would getferried away in an armored vehicle. All the ex-pats were stocking up on supplies or finding waysout, but any Congolese on the streets would tellyou, “Yeah, I’d love to buy more bread, but who’sgot the money for that?”
The desperation could stay pure for only solong before it soured into panic and rage, whichwas the next logical step for this place. I’d lookat the people on the boulevard and wonder whenthat last straw would break. In the end, we won-dered, what would spark the madness? A soldiershooting someone? Some kind of announcementon the radio? A coup? And how bad would itget? I’d look at the people and wonder quietly, Willit be you? Or you? The desperation shined on thefaces of the street kids when they suddenly ap-peared in your open window, tugging at your armand moaning in that put-on devil voice, “Boss,boss, j’ai faim, boss, boss.” It was in the policemenwho guarded the restaurant when you stumbledout drunk, fumbling for your cigarettes. It was inthe eyes of the peanut sellers, the old mamaspainting stripes on the road, the countless menlined up under the shade without a job or a potto piss in, watching you, le blanc, walk down theboulevard with your notebook and pen, thinking
to themselves, “$5,000 a month. You fucking U.N. prick.”Iwas having a beer with Dave one night at the
Italian restaurant up the road from my house.He’d just returned from covering a soccer matchat the stadium, where the Simbas had given asound beating to the Uganda Cranes. Tens ofthousands had filled the stadium, already ampedby the matchup with one of Congo’s former in-vaders and the uncertainty of June 30. When
The desperation could stay pure foronly so long before it soured
into panic and rage, which was thenext logical step for this place
W
one of Congo’s vice presidents, Arthur ZahidiNgoma, entered to take his seat, the entire sta-dium bellowed, “Thief! Thief! Kill him! Killhim!” And as Dave later drove off in his car,crowds of teenagers pounded on his hood, slidingtheir fingers across their throats. “We have ourTramontinas waiting for you, le blanc,” they shout-ed. “June 30 will be your day!”
About then Nico and Nick, two Greek busi-nessmen we knew, stumbled into the bar, alreadydrunk. Nick wore a ponytail and was in the steelbusiness. He was a smooth character, in his earlythirties, who kept a loaded .45 in his truck. Inhis basement he’d already prepared several casesof Molotov cocktails, ready to ignite and hurl atthe natives when they climbed his gate. “And ifthat ain’t enough,” he said with a grin, “I got adozen gas grenades yesterday from the Belgians.”Nico, the other Greek, owned an Acropolis-themed nightclub in Victoire, an opposition neigh-borhood we all knew would be among the first topop. Nico had a crew of muscled bodyguards pro-tecting him at the club and always traveled witha hired Congolese soldier carrying a Kalashnikov.Days earlier he’d predicted nothing would happenJune 30, but tonight the fear had broken him.
“They’re saying the government will cut thepower and there won’t be water for weeks,” hesaid. “I listen to the staff at the club. They’re say-ing everyone has a machete hidden at home.They’re preparing for slaughter.”
“Who knows,” I said, pretending. “Never trustrumors.”
“I hired four more policemen for my apart-ment,” he said. “I can’t get enough policemen.”
The big Greek took his beer off the bar andwalked toward the pool tables. Halfway there, heturned around and pointed to Dave. “If you find
my body in the street,” he said, “please send it home to my mama.” As we waited in anticipation for the looting
mobs and street violence, I took a little comfortin knowing I’d had some preparation. The newswires never send their grunts into danger withoutplenty of heavy protection and training. Earlierin the year, the agency had sent me through aweek of “hostile environment training,” held ona grassy farm outside London, where Royal Ma-rine Commandos guided us through the dangersof our trade. The Commandos were top-rate spe-cial forces soldiers, steely country boys who quot-ed poetry and had served in both the Falklandsand Northern Ireland. They taught us how tododge bullets and incoming mortars, how to trainthe eyes to notice land mines, booby traps, andtrip wires rigged to grenades. How to hit a manin the neck and kill him. They showed me howto distinguish light-weapons fire from the burp ofautomatic long-range assault weapons. I learnedhow to prod the dirt for mines like bouncing bet-tys, child-killing butterfly mines, and how to spota Claymore anti-personnel mine, the worst. Ilearned how to use a compass and determine mybearings, then find my way home with the sun,moon, and stars, and tell north with rocks and
sticks and shadows. I learned that brick walls dis-integrate under one burst of .50-caliber fire, andwatched videos of protesters being shot point-blank with shotguns (this to demonstrate how notto challenge Third World riot cops).
Then they taught us how to patch ourselvesup in case any of the above weaponry did indeedget us: how to treat a sucking chest wound, pluga bullet hole with a tampon, and stanch the bloodspray from an arterial gash. I learned that whenyou’re being mortared at close range, you mustalways open your mouth and scream to balance theblast pressure in your body so your innards don’tturn to jelly. I learned the best way to dry wetsocks is to stick them under your armpits while yousleep, and the best way to treat food poisoning isto drink water laced with iodine.
Other days they sent us down lonely woodedpaths, opened fire on us from the trees, and det-onated large explosions, just so we could practicehitting the deck. I dove into thornbushes andsliced up my arms, crabwalked through the mudbehind trees and hills and anything that provid-ed cover. The exercises were exciting and terri-fying, because the moment you realized you’d
messed up (hid behind a thin pile of leaves insteadof the ditch three feet away), a great weightswelled in your stomach. I must’ve died twice,once after stepping on a land mine, and the sec-ond time after the guy next to me snapped a trip-wire rigged to a Claymore buried in the bushes.It was the best money anyone ever spent on me.
Back in Kinshasa, I’d put my driver through asimilar course in first aid and kept kits in the carstocked with pressure pads, shock blankets, and sy-ringes for makeshift field IVs. In my room I kepta Kevlar vest with porcelain plates at the front and
back, and a helmet to shield my brains from shrap-nel. I had all of this gear and training but doubt-ed it would ever save me from mobs with ma-chetes and nail-studded clubs, or soldiers kickingdown my bedroom door.
Over the past six years, my agency had losttwo staffers, who were killed in West Africa, andtwo others had been critically wounded. The re-gion was among the most dangerous in the world,aside from obvious places like Iraq andAfghanistan. The nerves of New York editorshad long been frayed over African wars, and somefelt it wasn’t even worth the risk. This point wasmade clear after I arrived in Dakar, the regionalbureau, before continuing to Congo. My boss im-mediately sat me down, put a gin and tonic in myhand, and told me flatly, “If you’re killed in
Congo, they’ll shut down thiswhole operation.”
e all dealt with the stress and boredom indifferent ways. Some of us played squash on themildewed courts of the Grand Hotel, while otherswent running along the river road, where brilliantsunsets turned the creeping water into glass and
gave the diseased city an almostwholesome glow. Many lost them-selves in the dark dreary bars ortook advantage of cheap dope soldby the bushel, dealt by nearly everykid who sold cigarettes on thestreets. There were extravagantcostume parties with James Bondthemes or where you came dressedas your favorite dictator. (One aidworker threw a party where Jell-O shots were served in hundreds ofsyringes that otherwise might havebeen used for vaccinating chil-dren.) But during the maximumparanoia of June, our methods ofescape began to reflect the vio-lence pressing in. Every Saturday,often after staying out all night,we’d gather in my friend Andy’sback yard, strap on gloves andheadgear, and fight until we col-lapsed from pain or exhaustion. It
became known as Fight Club Kinshasa.There were about ten of us, including Dave,
some aid workers, and a few guys from the Frenchembassy. Together we had five pairs of boxinggloves, headgear, and leg pads, and usually enoughpeople showed up so that you could fight some-one your own size or with the same level of skill.But before any fighting took place, we endured anhour of grueling warm-ups to break the sweatand get us loose, led by Moi and Nico, who’dalso been a professional kickboxer in Greece be-fore opening his nightclub in Kinshasa. Moi got
us started with two-minute drills of jump rope,push-ups, aerobics, and crunches, often comingby and whacking us in the gut with a foam bat,screaming, “You must feel the pain.” Nico helpedus develop our punches and maintain our guard,often in very punishing ways. He’d dance aroundus, his broad chest running with sweat, yelling,“Protect yourself!” The second we dropped ourguard he pounded us in the face. “What ah’ youdewing? I said protect yourself!” One week Davegot hit so hard in the forehead he went behind atree and vomited.
After warm-ups, Moi and Nico picked two peo-ple to fight while the others watched. The fightswere ragged and sloppy, all adrenaline and littleskill. Once you got hit in the face the first time,everything you’d just learned flew out of your head.Someone would shout, “Doucement, doucement!”Gently, gently. But everyone swung his hardest,even when fighting a good friend. We’d back oneanother into trees with stomach shots, or sweep thelegs and send our opponent tumbling down. Therewere few rules, and sometimes people had to bepulled away, those who’d momentarily lost theirheads in the violence. It was a fine rush, until allthe poison from the previous night raced to yourhead and turned you green. Each fight lastedonly two minutes but left us so exhausted wedidn’t speak for long periods afterward. We walkedaway with bruised ribs, busted lips, and bloodyfeet, since we fought without shoes or socks. Itwas something few of us would’ve done back home
in Europe or America, but for many reasons it made sense in Kinshasa. After months of rumors, paranoia, and energy
spent plotting our escape and survival, June 30 fi-nally arrived. I set out early that morning with Ed-dy and our driver. The main boulevard was heav-ily patrolled by U.N. armored vehicles and trucksof Congolese police, whom the government hadfinally paid a few days earlier in an attempt toavoid a mutiny. Businesses were shuttered through-out the city and few cars ventured on the roads,leaving the wide boulevards open for groups ofbarefoot children to play soccer. It was silent as thecity captively waited for something to happen.
The quiet was shattered once we hit the ram-shackle neighborhood of Victoire. Large crowdssurrounded our car, with young men poundingtheir fists on the roof and hood and stuffing thewindows with opposition flyers. They were wild-eyed and wound tight, but at least they were keep-ing their cool. They were saving their hatred forthe police. The crowd swelled into the thousandsand marched toward parliament, so we racedahead to meet them. By the time we arrived, therewere already hundreds of riot police lining up information, cutting off the boulevard in a tightphalanx. The police were new units trained by the
Europeans for crowd control. Each wore all-blackriot gear, including molded chest plates and hel-mets, and carried black gas-grenade launchers.They were sleek, disciplined killers filing ontothe boulevard like Darth Vader’s storm troopers.Several French policemen with European Unionbadges stood quietly behind the formation, film-ing their minions with handheld cameras.
We parked the car, and Eddy and I ran towardthe police, making sure to stay close to the French.I’d already been arrested a dozen times in Kinshasafor reporting on the streets, and today I expect-ed no less. I’d even been detained at the airportwhen I first landed in the country, accused of be-ing a spy for Rwanda. Each detainment endedwhen I passed along a few hundred francs orthreatened to call the minister of information. Itwas all part of working in this broken country, andyou couldn’t avoid it. You simply played the game
and hoped to leave each time with your boots stillon your feet.
Eddy and I found a safe place along the road justas thousands of demonstrators poured out of theneighborhoods and headed toward the policelines. The lead marchers held long white bannersof the opposition party, and hundreds waved gi-ant palm leaves as a gesture of peace. Theyreached the wall of police in minutes, and oncethere all raised their arms with palms to the sky.
The police began rapping batons against theirshields in a slow, steady rhythm that grew fasterand faster, until a blow from a whistle silenced themenacing beat. The police then took four stepsback and leveled their gas guns at the crowd. Thefirst round of grenades hit the closest demonstra-tors directly in the chest, while subsequent roundsbounced off bodies as they fled in panic. As thedemonstrators scattered in the haze of smoke, thepolice drew their Kalashnikovs and chased theminto the narrow streets of Victoire, spraying roundsinto the air. Police returned later, dragging pris-oners behind them, who were taken to the streetand beaten in the stomach with batons.
I’d been shooting photos between the lines,trying to work as my eyes and throat swelled fromthe gas. I suddenly noticed that the French po-licemen had left, and just then I heard Eddyscreaming from the roadside. Eddy was a smallman, barely weighing in at a buck ten. The policehad him by the arms and legs and were carrying
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Large crowds surrounded our car,with young men pounding their fistson the roof and hood and stuffingthe windows with opposition flyers
66 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2006
him into a vacant field of tall grass. I raced overand threw myself between the police, grabbingEddy’s legs to pull him free. “We’re Americanjournalists,” I shouted. “Let him go now!” As Istruggled with Eddy, I was swallowed in a swarmof police, who threw me to the ground and draggedme though the grass by my shirt. Hands dove into my pockets and ripped out my money and I.D.After we sat in the dirt for half an hour, a policecommander walked over and pulled the memorycards from both our cameras, tore the pages fromEddy’s notebooks, and told us to leave. I argued andscreamed, but when I noticed Eddy’s body shak-ing from fright, I shut my mouth and walked
to the car. Only I was an American, only I could argue without fear. Throughout the day, Kinshasa police opened
fire into large crowds and beat people with im-punity. Demonstrations in two other cities wereput down in similar ways, leading to ten deaths anddozens wounded. Aside from Eddy and myself,many journalists working that day were arrestedand jailed. But to the United Nations and everyforeign embassy in Congo, June 30 was a smash-ing success. Howling mobs didn’t kick down gatesto loot and rape white women, and the city—orthe area of the city that really mattered—hadbeen spared from degradation and violence.
“We live in a violent country where there areviolent clashes every day,” Ross Mountain told methe next day. “The situation ended much betterthan we’d feared.”
Days later, at a Fourth of July party at theAmerican ambassador’s residence, I spoke to anAmerican security officer who praised the pro-fessional conduct of the police, going on abouthow they did a “fine, fine job” at crushing thedemonstrations, and how he wished he couldhave been there “cracking skulls right with ’em.”Standing nearby was a Congolese priest fromMbuji-Mayi, the opposition stronghold in centralCongo, who’d been trapped at his church as po-lice fired into crowds outside.
“They fired tear gas into my church,” the priesttold the official. “I saw people drop from bullets.”
“Aw come on, father,” the American said witha shrug. “It wudn’t all that bad.”
The American was right, and so was Ross Moun-tain. Things could’ve been much worse, and liveswere spared by the heavy security presence, whichstopped crowds from getting too large and possiblygoing wild on their own people. What had alsohelped was a voter-registration drive the govern-ment kicked off June 20, which by June 30 had al-ready registered 100,000 people in Kinshasa tovote for the first time in their lives. The people fi-nally saw progress, and they spared the city as a re-sult. A rare bit of hope had touched the plaguedcountry. Kinshasa had been saved from impending
doom. But hope never lasts too long in Congo: aweek later, a militia raided a village in the eastand burned forty women and children alive, plung-
ing the whole stinking place back into the cellar of the world. By then I was already on a plane back to
New York for good. My reason for quitting wasmostly personal and had been planned for sometime. There was also a mix of uneasy emotions Iwas never able to resolve with that country, whichmade leaving a lot easier, and a lot harder justthe same.
Several months before, I’d received an emailfrom a friend who’d read some of my stories, want-ing to know if there was more to Congo than justpeople dying. He’d ended the note asking, “Whycan’t you write more stories we can all relate to?”It was an honest question and one I couldn’t an-swer. It was easy to kick yourself for not writingwhat you thought should be written. All we real-ly had time to do was react to the killing and dy-ing and hope to make some sense of it, tell it theright way. I’d been there maybe a year, covered awar, and followed it through. It wasn’t a long timeby any stretch, but it was long enough for me to un-derstand that total comprehension was impossible,no matter how long you stayed.
No one really understood how 25,000 peoplecould walk twenty miles, meet in the same remotevalley, and start dying there immediately. No onereally understood what drove someone to beheada five-year-old girl with a farm tool or wipe out anentire village for the sake of a few dollars in goldor loot. It’s all too abstract, even as I think of itnow. It’s much easier to pretend these thingsdidn’t exist, and maybe they really don’t. Maybewhen that white U.N. bird lifted off the LZ andout of sight, all the dying people simply meltedback into rocks and grass. Maybe if some of thempulled out People magazine or said that BritneySpears kept their hope alive, perhaps that wouldmake them human again, give their misery a songwe all know. Maybe then we could relate.
Dave and I had a joke we liked to tell the aidworkers and U.N. flacks after we’d had too muchbeer: that there wasn’t a single person in Congowho had any idea what was really going on. It wasn’t a joke anyone laughed at but it was one weboth could agree on, and it offered a little relief.No one had the slightest clue, top to bottom.
As my plane lifted off and over the river, Ilooked around at the people who were leaving: thepreachers and profiteers, the doom junkies andcowboys, all the people like me. I imagined wecould all use the break, put the death and dyingout of sight and out of mind. But I knew what weall knew, that somewhere in that plane the deadwere still with us, and no matter who we were itwas still up to us to sort them all out. n
