Out of Anarchy

KINSHASA, Congo — The Times dispatched Johannesburg bureau chief Bob Drogin and Berlin bureau chief Mary Williams Walsh to Zaire to cover the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko. This joint account of their adventure begins in Drogin’s voice; the italics are Walsh.

*

This city was wild in the best of times. And this was the eve of war.

Two days before, I had flown in a South African military cargo plane to Pointe-Noire to cover last-ditch peace talks between Zairian rulers and rebels. But when rebel leader Laurent Kabila refused to board the Outeniqua, the converted icebreaker where the talks were taking place, all hope of a cease-fire collapsed. CNN producer Robert Wiener had a charter plane waiting. We flew at midnight to Brazzaville, across the river from here.

Every hotel was packed with people who had fled or been evacuated from Kinshasa, the crumbling capital of Zaire (which since has been renamed Congo). I dictated a story to Los Angeles from the front desk of the Meridian Hotel at 3 a.m., then collapsed on a couch in the lobby.

Early the next day, Thursday, May 15, we were at the pier. A small “fee” persuaded an army captain to escort us to a speedboat we had hired. Soon we were roaring across the giant Zaire (now Congo) River to Kinshasa.

The wharf there was a madhouse, full of frantic families trying to flee. We were ordered into a sweltering room where three officials pored through Wiener’s bags, pockets and bulging Filofax.

Just as they were turning to me, I looked out the grimy window and spotted Mr. Effie, a Zairian army security officer who worked at the Inter-Continental Hotel. I had hired Effie in the past to get me through the airport without mishap. For the first time since I’d known him, Effie wore combat fatigues and held an AK-47. He barked something at the immigration officials, who cowered in fear.

“No problem, no problem,” he said, pushing me into a car. Soon I was at the hotel. I rushed to greet Mary Williams Walsh, The Times’ Berlin bureau chief. She had covered Kinshasa for two weeks. I met with the military attache from a Western embassy, who confirmed what I already knew: The rebel assault was imminent.

The only question was the fate of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. That news came Friday: The despot once dubbed the “toad king” had escaped on his jet. His motorcade hauled so much luggage, Walsh discovered, that bags were left on the runway. After 32 years, the self-described messiah was headed for exile.

*

WALSH:

Say this for melatonin: It works in Berlin, for getting back to sleep after attending to a child’s 2 a.m. coughing fit. But it doesn’t work in the embattled capital of a country about to change hands by force, for returning to sleep after a phone call like this one, Friday night, from an after-hours editor in Los Angeles:

“Mary, we just saw a story on the wires that soldiers are in your hotel, looking for people. We wanted to see if you’re all right.”

I’d been all right before. Now I never felt so awake in my life, lying in bed with my eyes frozen open, with just a deadbolt between me and . . . and what, exactly?

A peek through the curtains: An army half-track and a pair of jeeps were idling outside. The melatonin didn’t kick in. I lay in bed, thinking of my 5-year-old son, who had told me by cell phone earlier that he wished there were no such place as Zaire, no such things as newspapers.

*

DROGIN:

Dawn Saturday: The faces of Mobutu’s cronies and their families are etched with shock; their world is collapsing. Mobutu’s son, Kongolo--a barrel-chested man with a permanent scowl, so feared that he is known as “Saddam Hussein”--roars up in an armored personnel carrier to lead Zaire’s plundering class to the beach.

Late Friday night, Kabila’s troops had pounded Mobutu’s last organized defense outside the city and overrun the airport. Most of Mobutu’s men shed their uniforms and fled. But a few fanatics took their revenge. Shortly after midnight, a captain in the presidential guard screamed “traitor!” and shot and killed the defense minister, Gen. Marc Mahele Lieko Bokungu, who had wanted to surrender the city without a battle.

That Saturday morning, May 17, was tense. From my ninth-floor balcony, I could hear heavy gunfire and explosions. When the shooting eased at about 3 p.m., I jumped into a car with Alec Russell, correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, and nervously we drove through the deserted streets.

We pulled over every block or so to ask those hiding behind bushes and gates if it was safe, stopping once for an hour when a firefight erupted nearby. We picked up two deserters from Mobutu’s army as our guides. By dusk, we had seen the first elated crowds wearing white headbands, pouring into the streets to welcome the rebels-turned-liberators.

That night, Kabila appeared at his base in the southeastern city of Lubumbashi to proclaim himself president and rename Zaire the Democratic Republic of Congo.

*

WALSH:

Three weeks earlier, as my husband bathed our children, I switched on my laptop in Berlin. Ah, the deputy foreign editor has e-mailed me: “How would you feel about going to Zaire?”

I jumped. Why would a mother of two small children want to fly off to Kinshasa? Well, the chief occupational hazard of the Berlin posting is an occasional, overpowering attack of ennui. A change of scene would be just the thing.

It didn’t occur to me when I booked a room at the Inter-Continental to ask about the proprietor’s links to Mobutu--and whether the hotel guests might feel the consequences. As it turned out, the hotel was in deep with the regime, in a 50-50 ownership scheme. Mobutu himself had a cozy pied-a-terre on the top floor.

In those first hours of the rebels’ final push, the hotel was the place his loyalists came. Senior “traitors” were to be hunted down. When the search party that tramped through the hotel came up with no one worth killing, the soldiers left. The loyalists returned in a few hours to evacuate their friends. Bodyguards of the Mobutu elite came swirling through the brass-and-marble lobby, brushing up against liveried porters scurrying about with silver coffee pots.

Mobutu nieces, cousins and grandchildren tumbled out of the elevators, amid impressive mounds of Vuitton luggage, teddy bears and baby bottles. Right there in the lobby, government soldiers were peeling off their fatigues, shedding onto the marble floor the evidence of their poor political bet.

I joined a pair of Red Cross workers who wanted to drive around and take stock of the city: the young men running along with white welcome-the-rebels rags tied around their foreheads; the spooked, grinning peanut vendors trying to pretend it was just another day; the sprawled bodies oozing blood into the dust; eventually, the huge columns of gritty, poker-faced rebels in mismatched uniforms, taking up positions around the capital.

*

DROGIN:

Sunday dawned bright and steamy. As Russell and I left the hotel, Effie--back in civilian clothes--jumped into the back seat. He tensed visibly when we found four trucks packed with hundreds of guerrillas only a few blocks away. A foot patrol was searching for one of Mobutu’s generals. They settled for his housekeeper, leading a small man in tears past a jeering crowd.

“I’m not safe,” Effie whispered. We dropped him at a friend’s house and followed the rebels.

Cheering, chanting crowds flanked the convoy until we drove into Camp N’kokolo, bastion of Mobutu’s hated civil guard. The mood suddenly was hostile. I parked so we could do interviews.

It was a mistake. When the rebels drove off, the crowd turned on us. “It’s you white people who supported Mobutu,” one man screamed as he pounded the car. “Go home and leave us alone,” shouted another, his contorted face inches from mine. Our car had stalled; we managed to convince a few men to push and get us started.

We soon drove past a dozen or more bodies along the road. Red Cross teams in gauze face masks and rubber gloves tossed the corpses onto a pickup. We headed for Camp Tshatshi, home to Mobutu’s palace and headquarters of his presidential guard. It had fallen to the rebels earlier that morning, and looting had begun.

Officers’ homes were special targets. Men and boys swarmed over fences carrying chairs, beds and appliances. One man somehow perched a washing machine on his head. Another staggered under a car’s transmission.

“Why are you pillaging?” a rebel angrily asked a man beneath a huge white leather armchair. The man dropped the chair; it disappeared again in minutes.

Soon the guerrillas came in force. Thousands of boys and men hiked by in mismatched camouflage fatigues and with an array of weapons. Some were barefoot. A few smiled; most did not.

Over at Mobutu’s white concrete villa, a mob was in full fury. I smelled the strong stench of leaking gas so decided not to follow those who ran--many with lit cigarettes--to sack and trash the house. They smashed mirrors and carted air conditioners and clothes past two machine-gun bunkers, built like bookends in the yard.

Nearby, former Mobutu soldiers and sympathizers streamed to surrender at a rebel checkpoint. Most marched with heads down and hands held high. Everything from grenades to shotguns was dumped on a giant pile. The bearers were searched, then sent inside for questioning. The crowd cheered and laughed at each new arrival.

The war was over; old scores were being settled.

*

WALSH:

The rebels called a news conference in the hotel ballroom. I turned up at the appointed time, only to discover the venue had been changed. By 9:30 I was standing in burning sunshine in front of the government radio station, still waiting for the news conference to begin. There was just one shade tree to comfort a crowd of hundreds, and as the sun rose higher, the tree’s shadow shrank. With a vague idea of going to an outdoor market and buying a hat, I flopped into the back seat of my hired car.

But somewhere between the enraged mob that set upon my car, pounding the windows and the trunk (“Les blancs! [The whites!] It’s you who have done this to us!”) and the attempted visit to a Zairian acquaintance (the front of his house was shot up and he was nowhere to be found), I started to feel ill and decided to forget the hat: My two weeks were up.

But how to leave? The rebels had sealed the borders. The airport was closed. The ferries to Brazzaville had stopped.

I ran into an acquaintance from another paper who also was ready to leave. “I’ve just arranged a pirogue,” he said. “It’s a little dicey, but why don’t you come? There’s safety in numbers.”

His driver took us to the Club Nautica on the river. As we drove, I concealed small wads of money all over my person--$20 in a sock, $80 in my underwear--and my plane ticket and passport in my dirty laundry, in hopes that if I were searched, everything wouldn’t be found and confiscated. We carried our stuff down to the pier where a grubby fleet of dugout canoes bobbed. We negotiated with the owner of one: $100 to cross the river.

We were three-fourths of the way across when two speedboats appeared. They encircled the canoe, throwing up waves of brown surf that broke over our gunwales. One speedboat came directly alongside us. We were faced by six men of some military caste, cradling Kalashnikovs.

“Get on board,” the leader ordered. “We’re taking you in. You have done a very dangerous thing.” He went off on a jag about our wickedness in crossing the river, violating the closed border. He finished with an emphatic: “You have to pay the law!”

“How much?” asked my companion.

“One hundred and fifty dollars,” the leader said. Trying not to appear absurd in an absurd situation, I reached into my sweat-soaked bra for my share of the fine. This piece of river-tossed justice complete, we soon were in Brazzaville.

We submitted to further immigration formalities before proceeding to Brazzaville’s airport and the Sabena 747 that would return us to Europe. The next day, I was home.

*

DROGIN:

Walsh was lucky: Two Irish reporters who crossed the river were stripped naked and robbed at gunpoint of their money, computers and bags when they landed in Brazzaville. Other journalists were shot at, or locked up for hours.

Kabila flew to Kinshasa unannounced the following Tuesday, May 20. His troops had spent months in impenetrable jungles. They had routed a vicious army and deposed a corrupt dictator. So no one complained when their leaders turned our hotel into their command center, and men with machine guns and crossed bandoleers began competing for almond croissants at the breakfast buffet.

But it was unsettling when four soldiers with assault rifles guzzled beer by the buffet at 7:30 one morning. And it was unnerving when one carelessly dropped a grenade on the floor as he left. The breakfast crowd didn’t exhale until the guerrilla had stuffed it back into his pocket and sauntered on.

I left for my home in Johannesburg several days later--except I almost didn’t. Guerrillas had lined the hall when I left my room at 6 a.m.

Downstairs, hundreds more milled around the lobby. An officer politely but forcefully ordered me back to my room. When I protested, he had two soldiers with AK-47s escort me upstairs. They searched my luggage, peered in the closets, opened drawers, lifted the mattress and looked under the bed.

A colleague called from the lobby to say that no one was allowed to leave. I phoned Ann Simmons, The Times’ Nairobi bureau chief and my replacement in Kinshasa, and asked her to call the U.S. Embassy. After an hour, we were permitted to go. I never found out for whom or what the soldiers were searching.

The airport was still officially closed. But “Rebel Airlines,” as someone had nicknamed Air Zaire, realized a fortune could be made ferrying journalists. The first plane had been commandeered by a group of guerrillas.

After four hours, a jet appeared. It was barely noon, but we celebrated the takeoff with a bottle of fine cognac.

As we sped through the clouds, I read V.S. Naipaul’s classic novel about Zaire, “A Bend in the River.” One line seemed especially apt. “It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here,” he wrote. “There is no right.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The History of an Overthrow

Fighting in Congo was sparked eight months ago when the Mobutu government threatened to expel Tutsis from the eastern part of the country, where they had engaged in low-level clashes with government troops for years. Rebel leader Laurent Kabila merged the Tutsis with his own party and other groups to form a rebel alliance that largely has been welcomed in the cities it has seized.

Kabila had been trying for three decades to oust Mobutu, who took power in a military coup in 1965, with U.S. backing. Africa’s third-largest country (its area is equal to that of the United States west of the Mississippi), Congo has a population of 46 million and some of the world’s largest reserves of copper, cobalt, zinc and diamonds. But Mobutu’s corrupt, dictatorial rule has left it in poverty and its infrastructure in shambles. How Kabila rules, and addresses the problems left by Mobutu, is being watched closely. Kabila has promised national elections within two years. But as recently as last week, an official in the U.S.--which now supports Kabila--said he believes massacres are continuing and urged Kabila to get his troops under control.

Sources: the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post