Newsday (New York)
November 19, 2000, Sunday
IN CONGO, A RAVAGING TERROR/ THOUSANDS DIE DAILY IN WAR
By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT
Mugeri, Democratic Republic of Congo-Terror is a way of life here, so common, so routine, that Salfata Nakachate describes the agonizing death of her baby boy casually, as if she were reciting a recipe.
"He died from the rain. He died from the cold. You know, when it rains a lot and you're living in the forest and you have no protection, no blankets," she explains with a slight shrug to a foreign visitor who, in truth, can't imagine such a predicament. The 20 or so people sitting near Nakachate understand, though, and they nod in agreement or cluck sympathetically while rocking slowly back and forth on hard wooden benches as they wait to tell their own tales.
Like Nakachate, most have reached this sparse village by foot after fleeing rebel attacks on their farming hamlets and hiding for weeks or months in the heavily forested mountains surrounding Lake Kivu. They have eaten wild grass, roots and bugs, gnawed on tree bark, given birth on sheets of rain-soaked leaves, watched their newborns shiver to death in the rain and fog, and lived like wild animals before coming to this struggling medical center.
About 380 homeless people, many of them pregnant women or children suffering from malaria or malnutrition, shelter at the Mugeri clinic, but tens of thousands of others remain hidden in the hills or live in terror on their farms, victims of a civil war that has turned this stunning slice of the world into a horror story of epic proportions.
When the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based humanitarian aid agency, decided to chart the impact of Congo's 2-year-old war on the rebel- held east of the country, it suspected the results would be grim, but even so, it was stunned by its findings. Using a variety of means, including going door-to-door in villages like those where these displaced people once lived, investigators calculated that more than 2.3 million people had died in five eastern provinces between August, 1998, and May, 2000, and that the war could be blamed for 1.7 million of those deaths,or roughly 2,600 deaths per day. In February, 1999, alone, 1,400 measles deaths were recorded in one district. The deaths were attributed to the war because of the insecurity that has led to a collapse of most rural health centers and stranded civilians in the bush without food, water, shelter or medicine.
"The loss of life in Congo has been staggering. It's as if the entire population of Houston was wiped off the face of the earth in a matter of months," Reynold Levy, the International Rescue Committee's president, said when the study's results were announced last June.
It doesn't require a scientific survey to get an idea of the immensity of the problem here in South Kivu province, where the war began in August, 1998, with an invasion by rebels backed by neighboring Rwanda. They quickly drove the Congolese leader, Laurent Desire Kabila, out of the region and established their own fiefdom in the east, but they remain at war with Kabila's army as well as with countless rival rebel factions and militia groups.
The dark and eerie Kahuzi Biega National Park that begins a few miles outside Bukavu and loops through the hills used to be home to rare gorillas and other apes, but today it is the hiding place for the murderous gangs and for innocent civilians who have been forced to abandon villages for miles around.
Salfata Nakachate lived in these woods for three months with her husband, Samuel Makanda, and their four children after attackers burned the homes in their village and hacked her aunt and uncle to death. More relatives are still in hiding in the bush, she says, but the rest of the family emerged and came to Mugeri after their 1=-year-old son died of exposure. The other children are being treated for malaria and malnutrition, but once they are better, the family has nowhere to go.
"All the houses were burned. We've no trees there even to rebuild houses," Makanda said. "I can't do anything with empty hands."
Of the 20 people sitting in the crowd, 18 say they have lost family members to violence or disease caused by the war. Most blame the violence on the Interahamwe, vestiges of the Rwandan Hutus responsible for that country's 1994 genocide of Tutsis. The Interahamwe oppose the Tutsi-backed Congolese for Rally, the group that drove Kabila out of eastern Congo and now holds power there. But villagers say many attacks are also staged by Tutsi soldiers from a group called the Movement, who arrive after Interahamwe ambushes and accuse surviving civilians of collaborating with the militias.
The results are the same, whoever attacks.
"They simply come. They don't say anything. The ones who resist, they kill them," said Nabuke Mburano, whose village in the district of Bunyakiri was attacked twice-first by Tutsis, then two months later by Interahamwe. In the first attack, her father-in-law and two brothers were killed. The second time, her 4-year-old daughter, Debora, died as the family ran through a hail of gunfire toward the safety of the bush.
"They come to demolish houses, and they take cows, goats, hens, clothes, and if you resist they kill you," said Buchaguzi Nabukanga, whose father was stabbed to death in September after venturing back to their recently ambushed village to forage for food. When Nabukanga went to search for him, he discovered his body in the remains of their charred house.
Those who survive are left with nothing,not even the small, furry guinea pigs that people raise for food.
Among the International Rescue Committee's most startling findings were that 34 percent of the deaths blamed on the war-including those from illnesses or hunger-were children under 5. "In eastern DRC, war means disease," said the report's author, Dr. Les Roberts, an epidemiologist who led the research. Of the deaths directly blamed on violent attacks, 47 percent were women and children.
The International Rescue Committee said the deaths had increased in 2000 over 1999, and as long as peace accords collapse and the fighting continues across Congo, it's doubtful the situation will improve. Aid agencies are unable to deliver food and medicine to about 60 percent of the region because of the danger of ambushes.
The governor of South Kivu, Norbert Basengezi-Katintima, who was appointed by the Rwandan-backed rebel Movement, denies his army is involved in any attacks and blames the violence on Interahamwe and other Hutu militias backed by Kabila. "They make trouble in different places. It's necessary to be everywhere at all times," he argues, insisting there's little the Movement can do to keep a lid on rebel factions operating outside main cities such as Bukavu.
Moreover, he says these marauding gangs are organized and paid by Kabila and that until Kabila is ousted from Congo, they will continue to operate. The people in Mugeri scoff at this and at the governor's claims that Kabila even pays people like them to accuse the Movement's Tutsi soldiers of atrocities.
"The Tutsis-they don't steal, they only come to kill," Nabukanga said. "They come in after an Interahamwe attack. The war will never end as long as the Hutus and Tutsis are still in Congo."
February 24, 1997; Monday
Crumbling provincial capital awaits rebel advance
By TINA SUSMAN
KISANGANI, Zaire _ The river oozes like thick chocolate syrup through the center of town, where wide, palm-fringed avenues and terraced apartments speak of a glamorous past.
At the Complex Sportif, Lebanese diamond dealers slam balls across a neglected tennis court that's more dirt than clay. ''War machine!'' one onlooker shouts in encouragement as Ali Nasser, one of the few remaining expatriates here, returns a serve.
You can't escape war talk in this northeastern city, which lies barely 250 kilometers (150 miles) from the front lines of a war that is moving this way as surely as the Zaire River flows through town.
''The enemy is pressing in on us. This is worrying us all,'' Gen. Mulimbi Mabilo, the commander in charge of the region, said in an interview. ''Personally, I'm optimistic the rebels won't come to Kisangani. But if they do, there will be very fierce fighting here.''
Once an outpost of exotic splendor, where foreigners made fortunes off the region's natural resources, Kisangani today is a skeleton of a city that looks more like the deserted movie set than the provincial capital it is.
The street are dusty and pot-holed, the storefronts boarded up and closed. The colonial era houses with their wide verandas and flowering trees sit trashed and empty, abandoned by owners fleeing soldiers rampages in 1991, 1993 and again in November.
The streets are empty by 6 p.m. as civilians rush, mostly on foot or rickety bicycles, to meet the 7 p.m. curfew. Most vehicles have either been requisitioned by soldiers or sent to Kinshasa by riverboat.
Each morning at the international airport, people dragging suitcases and carrying bundles on their heads line up in hopes of getting on a cargo flight to the capital Kinshasa, more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) southwest.
''It used to be we would play tennis every afternoon, or meet at the swimming pool in the evenings and then go out until two or three in the morning. There are good places here for vacations, but now look at it. It's dead,'' said Nasser, a 24-year-old from Beirut who like scores of other foreigners came here to buy and sell the diamonds found in eastern Zaire.
Nasser and his friend, Mohamed Bassam, another Lebanese diamond seller, are among a handful of foreign businessmen still remaining in Kisangani. The others began leaving shortly after Laurent Kabila's rebels attacked eastern cities in September, an offensive that has made swift progress and been accompanied by looting sprees by Zairian troops fleeing Kabila's men.
The foreigners and civilians leaving Kisangani now aren't afraid of the rebels, but of the Zairian troops who have turned on this town three times in six years in angry explosions over low wages and dismal living standards.
Discipline has been restored to some extent since President Mobutu Sese Seko named a new army chief in December. At least 10 soldiers convicted of looting civilians and desertion have been sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in Kisangani in the past two weeks, Mulimbi said.
''Their role isn't to pillage, it isn't to kill,'' said Mulimbi, admitting that such behavior has turned many Zairians against the national army. ''When the rebels arrive, they impose discipline, that's why the population goes with them.''
His assurances of strict discipline are unlikely to convince people who witnessed the army's past pillages and who today are regularly accosted by boozy soldiers, grenades clipped to their uniforms, demanding money, food and beer.
Bassam says he has lost one house to the military, which occupied it when he was on a recent trip to Kinshasa. He and Nasser now live a spartan existence, not keeping anything of value here except a television set. The uncut diamonds they buy from local diggers are sent out of the country quickly to be resold in Europe.
''In this business, you must see only the diamonds and nothing else,'' Bassam says, explaining why he stays in the face of encroaching danger.
Jerry Selenke, procurer for the Roman Catholic Church, stayed through the 1991 uprising and oversaw the evacuation by the French Foreign Legion of hundreds of foreigners who had sought refuge in his fortress-like procurer's building.
When soldiers rose up again in 1993 in Zaire's major cities, Selenke was in Kinshasa. Soldiers held a gun to his head and demanded his watch, then decided it wasn't worth much and threw it back in disgust.
''Up to now I always think it can't get any worse, but then it does,'' said Selenke, who has lived in Kisangani for 14 years.
Selenke, of Greenfield, Kansas, stays to support the church, the missionaries, and to continue feeding programs and other services they provide the local population.
But he holds no starry-eyed illusions about Zaire's future, saying decades of corrupt rule under Mobutu have created a system too rotten to fix any time soon.
As Bassam, sipping strong Lebanese coffee, said while staring out his apartment window at the sagging city below:
''A broken window can never be put back together again.''
February 19, 1997, Wednesday
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
KALIMA, Zaire _ The silver DC-3 took a nose dive toward the grass airstrip, scattering people like specks of sand before soaring skyward again and looping around to land on the now-cleared runway.
About 25,000 people live along a desolate stretch of rocky, sandy terrain hugging the runway, which most hope one day will produce a plane to take them away or, at least, deliver enough food to last until their next stop.
Caught halfway between the rebel-held town of Shabunda, 60 miles to the east, and government-held Kindu to the west, Kalima's refugees are some of the most pitiful of the estimated 200,000 winding their way through eastern Zaire's dense forests.
They fear the rebels too much to go back but are blocked from going forward by the Zairian government, which is so fed up that it refuses even to use the term "refugee camp" to describe places like Kalima.
Instead, in official jargon, this is a "site."
It is a thorny, inhospitable patch of desert-like terrain, where most of the leaves and roots have been devoured by crowds who began trickling in shortly after Shabunda was overrun by Laurent Kabila's rebel army Feb. 5. Before Shabunda, they had fled civil strife in their native Rwanda and Burundi and had been refugees in Goma.
"We're angry because we're stuck here without anything. It's not normal - we must move to another place, another country," said Cyprien Itamgishaka, 30, who fled Burundi's civil strife for Zaire last year.
"Perhaps one country could take 10,000, another 10,000 and so on so that Zaire wouldn't have to bear all the burden," suggested a Rwandan refugee, Emmanuel Habimana, 32.
"They can go on with their conquest. I don't care," he said of the rebels. "But someone should arrange an international agreement for other countries to take us."
Word that Kabila and an envoy of Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko might meet in South Africa has brought hopes of a cease-fire in the five-month war, but it is unlikely to change things here anytime soon. Most refugees are Hutus from Rwanda and Burundi who fled conflict between majority Hutus and minority Tutsis.
Now they're afraid of reprisals if they return, particularly for the 1994 Hutu-orchestrated slaughter of a half-million Rwandan Tutsis.
The Zairian government doesn't want them and is bitter over the Goma situation, in which nearly 2 million refugees fled to the eastern Zaire town in 1994 and refused to budge. When Zaire tried to force them out, it faced international condemnation and was forced to stop.
Many Goma refugees fled home on their own after Kabila began the war. But, to the Zairian government's dismay, those who didn't moved further into the country.
"They don't want to recognize the camps, but the fact is, when you have 25,000 people you have to deal with it," said Ariane Quentier of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The organization tried unsuccessfully to persuade Zairian authorities to let the Kalima crowd move to a more livable space.
Unlike Tingi Tingi about 95 miles to the north, where more than 150,000 refugees have a well-run compound of sorts and receive regular aid deliveries, Kalima is too disorganized for major food distribution or clinics.
The unloading of just a few sacks of flour and some empty pots from the back of a plane brought cheers Wednesday from the haggard thousands along the runway.
The appearance of real food probably would cause a stampede. Weakened adults stagger along the gullies and slopes, carrying malnourished children and displaying them plaintively to visitors.
A hospital sits a few miles away in the town, but the government has refused general access to the refugees. On Wednesday, though, it said the most desperate cases could be accepted.
At the refugee site, meanwhile, efforts to set up a soup kitchen stalled when refugees hired to do the work called a strike Wednesday, saying they hadn't been paid.
Habimana, the Rwandan refugee, scoffed at the idea the kitchen ever would be built. The rebels, he said, probably would run the refugees out of Kalima anyway.
"Who's going to build a kitchen that will just be left after a few weeks?" he said.
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
KINSHASA, Zaire _ Not even the dead can escape indignity in chaotic Kinshasa, where government corruption and neglect are evident everywhere. Cemeteries in the Zairian capital, like the crumbling highways, phone system, hospitals and army, are victims of official indifference.
The city's public graveyards have been built on, farmed on and turned into markets. In perhaps the most telling display of high-level disregard, the mammoth Chinese-built parliament building sits on a former burial ground.
"What is a country coming to when it has no respect for its dead?" said Jacques Kaluile, 39, looking out at the rolling hills of weeds, garbage and grazing goats that used to be the Kisenzo cemetery.
Kaluile buried a son there 10 years ago but doesn't even try to find the grave anymore, so covered in brush and livestock is the land.
The overgrowth didn't deter Marguerite Ndomba, 26, who was sure she could point out her grandmother's grave. But after a few minutes of searching along a narrow, overgrown footpath, she conceded defeat and made her way back, passing chunks of broken headstones, shattered crosses and exposed tombs.
Zaire's rich bury their dead in family plots. President Mobutu Sese Seko has bought a burial ground near his hometown, Gbadolite. But most Zairians have to make due with what the state provides.
People who live in the bush surrounding Kisenzo say some people tried to maintain the graves on their own, but couldn't keep up with the deterioration without government help.
The government is not cleaning up decaying burial grounds, and is building new ones further and further away from the city center. With a burgeoning population estimated at 6 million, a life expectancy of less than 50 years and traditions that mandate burial rather than cremation, Zaire's cemetery problem shows no sign of abating.
"Like most of the problems here, it'll just keep getting worse and worse until one day there won't be any room left to bury anyone. What will we do then - throw them in the river?" Kaluile said.
The decaying cemeteries are evidence of the damage wrought by Mobutu, who during 31 years in power is accused of stealing billions of dollars from state coffers.
Mobutu has ignored many institutions in Zaire, among them the army. Laurent Kabila's rebel advance in the east has been possible because poorly paid soldiers have fled or switched to his side rather than risk their lives for a leader who neglected them.
In 1995, the government's neglect of health care became horribly evident with the outbreak of the Ebola virus in the city of Kikwit. The city's hospital did not have basic supplies - such as gloves and masks to control the spread of the disease - and about 250 people died.
The decay of the cemeteries and the use of the land for other purposes is especially striking in Africa, where the spirits of the dead are treated with reverence not seen in the West. Major public events and family milestones often are preceded by ceremonies to keep the spirits happy and bring good fortune. If things go wrong, angry spirits are often to blame.
When a group of Teke-Humbu people, indigenous to the Kinshasa region, decided last year to build houses on the Kasa-Vuba cemetery, they held a ceremony to evict the spirits without angering them too much.
"For respect for the dead, they poured palm wine into the ground and brought them cola nuts. Then they asked the spirit of each dead person who was there to leave and go back to his home," said Simon Ngula Mubaka.
He was among about 100 farmers who had been raising crops at Kasa-Vuba and opposed the Teke-Humbu's move. The farmers won, and bulldozers were brought in to raze a house that had already been built for the Teke-Humbu chief.
Today the cemetery is far neater than Kisenzo, but equally hard to recognize as a graveyard.
Nearly every inch of its 500 square yards is carved into neat plots where Ngula Mubaka and others grow beans, corn and sweet potatoes.
January 5, 1997, Sunday
No relief for victims or accused in Zaire airport disaster
By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer
KINSHASA, Zaire _ Nicolai Kazarin remembers with vivid horror the moment a year ago when he realized his hulking Russian cargo plane was going to crash.
"It was shaking," he says in a thick Russian accent, sweat glistening on his pale forehead as he strains to find the words in English. "I clearly saw what is happening - the result - but I did not know about the big market at the end of the runway."
"There was collision," he continues, punching his fist into his palm for emphasis. "Plane broke, fire."
His first sight was that of his dead Ukrainian flight engineer, impaled on an iron bar. His next was of the remains of a once-bustling open-air market, bulldozed into fiery oblivion when Kazarin's Antonov 32 failed to lift off from Kinshasa's Ndolo Airport and thundered hundreds of feet through the vendors' stalls.
Nobody knows for sure how many people died in the crash last Jan. 8. Officially the figure was 255. Witnesses say the dead could number 1,000, given the midday crowd at the sprawling market. Most of the dead were women vendors who were the sole breadwinners for large families.
One year later, the crash remains an indelible piece of Kinshasa lore that has come to illustrate the brutality and despair of this slum city, where looters ripped jewels off the charred limbs of victims and scooped up the scattered market goods as flames whipped around them.
The government refuses to take responsibility for permitting a market to operate on a paved strip that was once part of the runway. The pilots accuse corrupt Zairians of overloading the plane. The Zairians accuse the pilots of being drunk.
Through it all, the victims' families are still fighting for compensation that probably will never come.
"It was these women who alone who were really taking care of the families - the kids - who paid for their education. Even though I was trying the best I could, she carried the weight of the family," says 61-year-old Leopold Samba, whose wife was among the victims.
At the center of the nightmare remain Kazarin and his co-pilot, Andrei Guskov, the Russians who escaped an enraged mob after the crash only to be convicted of involuntary homicide and sentenced to the maximum two years in prison. Their appeal is expected to be heard this month.
During the trial, prosecutors said the two failed to build up enough speed before attempting to lift off, then tried too late to abort the takeoff. The prosecutors blamed too much vodka, saying Kazarin and Guskov were probably hung over from celebrating Christmas, which is Jan. 7 on the Russian Orthodox calendar.
From their concrete cellblock in Kinshasa's Makala Prison, the pilots deny being drunk and blame a corrupt system, as well as each other. They are the only two Russian-speakers in Makala, occupying tiny cells a few feet apart, yet they have not spoken to each other in months.
Kazarin, his pale blue eyes weary and bloodshot, insists that it was Guskov's responsibility to check the cargo and that the co-pilot allowed 10 to 11 tons on board, far more than the Antonov could handle.
Guskov, a gum-chewing 23-year-old who bounces in his seat like a fidgety teen-ager, breezily admits there was too much cargo. But he blames a Zairian crewman, saying the man lied on the cargo declaration papers.
"In this country there's no control," he says dismissively in a combination of broken English and French. "He gave me the papers. It said two tons ... but really there was about 11."
Perhaps if Kazarin had been quicker to abort the takeoff, the crash would have been avoided, Guskov adds.
The Zairian survived and was never prosecuted. The state attorney general, Jean Mukenge Bisumbule, says that is because he did not do anything wrong. Mukenge accuses the pilots of lying about overloading to pin the blame on the Zairian. He faults Kazarin in particular, saying the pilot could have avoided catastrophe by veering away from the market when he saw the crash coming.
"The market should not have been there, that's evident, but it was not because of the market's location that the accident happened," Mukenge says in rejecting arguments that the government should pay compensation to the victims.
Such reasoning does not convince people like Samba, who calls it another example of the government ignoring the suffering of its people. Left with four children to raise, he has yet to give his wife a proper funeral and recalls the indignity of fighting his way through the crowded morgue to find her body.
"One of my wife's aunts was already there and asked me if I could recognize the feet of my wife," he says. "I said, yes, of course, after living with someone for so long. When she lifted the blanket I saw that it was her feet. That was all that was found of her."
In August, a court ordered African Air, the Zairian company that had chartered the Antonov, to pay a total of about $ 1.2 million to the thousands who were injured or lost relatives. Samba and hundreds of others are appealing, saying the amount is not enough to send their children to school and feed their families.
African Air is also appealing, saying it merely chartered the plane from Moscow Airways, which was never prosecuted.
