The shock waves of Baghdad have come all the way to Kisangani.  Security has moved all the people away from around UN HQ here.  We had a nice little market on the bank of the Congo River where the pirogues would bring people from the West Bank with fruit and vegetables.  There was a lot of coming and going.  The students would sit there at night and read in the UN flood lights when electricity is in short supply in town.  Now we have a barbed wire fence on the other side of the road.

I have been told I am “a soft target” and that I should check my vehicle every time I leave it somewhere.  We are so spread out here I am not sure the measures will do anything to increase our security but they will make a lot of Boyamais (inhabitants of Kisangani) very angry.  In typically Congolese fashion, they already think we are not doing enough for them.  God help us, should they do something for themselves.  I am afraid the security measures will help the anti-UN people in the RCD-Goma whip up hostile feelings towards the “internationals”.

It was strange to watch African UN workers compete with each other to see who was the most devastated by the Baghdad bombing.  A sort of mourning game they had to go through as a sign of prestige, seriousness, commitment and belonging to the family: loud emotional speaking, high pitched voices feigning near crying, words from the Apocolypse, the same clichés over and over. They all claim to have known people who died in the explosion but, of course, the Special Representative for the Secretary General, Sergio Vieira de Mello, had to be the most regretted.  If they had seen him once at an Air Port, then they felt they could present themselves as intimate friends.  They reminded me of the professional wailers hired for funerals.

I regret Sergio Vieira de Mello’s death.  He was one of the better ones who knew how to leave diplomatic language aside and address man’s horror in blunt terms.  He would have been much better than Kofi Annan at the head of the UN.  But I am afraid I understand why the UN had become a target in the eyes of many Iraqis and my first reaction is that the Arab street probably identifies with the bombers more than the press and the diplomats care to admit.  It also points out why sometimes UN salaries are astronomical.

Painful Rebirth

Kisangani has metamorphosed since the arrival of the barges on August 3. Buildings are being repaired and repainted at an astonishing rate, mostly in the colors of the new companies setting up businesses, especially the cell phone operators who have converted the streets into chatter-boxes: orange and dark blue for CellTel and light blue and white for SuperCel, which has made the small Greek community very happy; shelves are being filled with produce not seen in five years.  But the most astonishing change came with the opening of the Fina petrol station 20 days after the barges arrived.

After two weeks of intensive labor, day and night, the new pumps were installed, the station painted, concrete poured and a couple of dozen Fina flags set up along the perimeter.  On the morning of the 22^nd, cars, which had been so well hidden during the war, appeared out of no where and were lining two hundred meters down the street waiting for the first fill in five years and dozens of small motorcycles and men with Jerry cans grouped disorderly around the pumps.

During the five years of isolation, fuel was flown in from the East and sold on the streets in little bottles by vendors called Gadhaffis.  The price averaged from 500 fc (Congolese Francs) to 800fc a liter (a dollar is worth 350 fc in Kisangani this week, up from 330 fc before the opening of the city to commerce with the West) and their clients were mostly those who had a small motorbike.  The cars were hidden because they knew the RCD-Goma people would take them and send them to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, and make a little money on the side.

When the Fina barge arrived with 1000 cubic meters of fuel, flights of petrol from the East ended and even the Gadhaffi had little to sell.  The price soared to 1500fc a liter.  But the Gadhaffi are not worried about their future. 

Mariam Pendeza stands in front of her street vendor station, very pregnant but still manning her two ancient hand pumps.  The woman of Indian origin is the President of the Associaiton of Vendors of Petroleum Products, otherwise known as the Gadhaffis.  She says there is room for everybody.  “We will just buy from Fina and continue to sell on the street.”

Fina opened Friday selling at 372fc a liter.  It remains to be seen if the city’s monopoly will keep the price there.  Before the war, there were also Shell (now rented by the UN), Mobil and Texeco stations.

Among the cars waiting for gas were Kisangani’s taxis.  “We’re back in business,” says Edouard Amboko, a stocky man of about 35, standing next to his 1986 white Nissan Bluebird.  “The only question is the clientele.”

During the war and the blockade, people used the Toleka bicycle taxis, which cost from 20fc to 60fc a ride, less than the taxis, which operated before the war.  The Toleka have another advantage: they can go right up to the door on the poor roads which the taxis cannot do.

But the dozen taxi drivers huddled around Edourd’s Nissan all agree: “The day of the Toleka is finished.”  They say there have been too may accidents.  There certainly will be more given the way these people drive.  I understand the mayor is going to ban the Toleka inside the city now that the taxis are back.  He can collect more tax on the cars than on the bikes.

The drivers told me there used to be about 100 taxis before the war.  That is likely an exaggeration.  Most are not running because there are no spare parts.  I have not noticed any garage being prepared to open for business either.

I should say a word about road rules.  Congolese drivers do not slow down at intersections, speed through streets crowded with people and never cede to the other unless he is a much bigger vehicle.  The Toleka yield the way to a car, while still peddling, timing the car’s turn so that they do not have to stop.  Accidents happen when you stop to let the Toleka pass or slow down out of fear.  He cannot understand the signal.  So, you go about your drive, slower than the Congolese but not worrying about the Toleka who are managing driver-safety for you.  Any attempt to drive with sanity here would end up in a catastrophic and bloody accident.  This said, there are many accidents given the small number of vehicles.  There are also financial benefits to being hit by a UN vehicle and some are specialists at it.

Highway robbery goes on

The RCD-Goma continue to lose their grip as people believe the transition government is for real.  The RCD sent a delegation to Kisangani from Goma to collect the taxes from the many services in town whose job it is to make sure Congolese pay.  The delegation were forced to stay in flea-bag hotels and went back to Goma empty handed.  Not one tax collector accepted to give the Goma people a penny.  They all said they now answer only to the government in Kinshasa.  (This does not mean they are sending the money to the government.)

Of course, we covered the story but were unable to contact the delegation who did their best to avoid us.  They even sent us an offer for an interview with them scheduled for … the day after their departure!

RCD-Goma men in uniform (I cannot call these thugs soldiers) continue to racket the population every chance they get.  We are getting reports of heavy tolls being imposed in the countryside but we cannot get to the check points to verify.

Lokombe Onyumanga is the director of a primary school in Bafwa Balenga, 233 kilometers from Kisangani on the Ituri road.  Everything was destroyed by the Ugandans and what was left, including the dispensary, was pillaged by “men in uniform”.  No NGOs work in the area because of the insecurity. Mr. Onyumanga’s people, who have not been paid in five years and have no equipment, teach under trees.  Although located in the MLC controlled zone, the mild mannered man rode his bicycle four days to Kisangani to meet with the RCD-G governor of Province Orientale and ask for aid.  He was racketed by RCD gunmen for more than ten dollars along the way; an astronomical sum in the Congo.

The Armies are supposed to be unifying under a common command during the transition but nothing has changed along the fronts and none of the ‘soldiers’ have been recalled to barracks or disarmed.  As a matter of fact, the RCD ran a new group of recruits, many of them very young, in front of UN HQ.  This is pure provocation as the goal is to downsize the number of armed men in the country.  Child soldiers have still not been sent home and can still be seen walking around town with their Kalashnikovs.

There is still a lot of violence.  These so-called armies never really fought each other unlike the, Angolans, Chadians, Namibians, Ugandans, Rwandans, Zimbabweans and others who fought in Congo.  The Congolese mostly just looted, raped, pillaged and murdered their own peoples whenever they could.  This is still going on.  They are continuing a long tradition of predator armies.

One of my reporters proposed a story about a man who had both ears cut off by the Mayi Mayi in an attack on his village 150 kilometers outside Kisangani.  I read the story: the Mayi Mayi attacked at four in the morning, beat up the man and cut off his ears.  This was followed by an interview with the victim in hospital.  Then in the closing lines he writes: “within an hour, the Mayi Mayi had looted the village, cut off Mr. X’s ears and kidnapped 40 women.”  KIDNAPPED 40 WOMEN!  I hit the ceiling and moved the story from fifth, a mutilation, to the lead, the kidnapping of 40 women.  The journalist could not understand, even after I explained it to him, that kidnapping 40 women was more important than the man losing his ears.  “I understand.  Even raped, a woman is still a woman,” he said.  He had not even asked if the women had been released.  The Brigade Commander did not know either.  He said his men had secured the village, that’s all.

I have said it before: rape is as common as theft in the Congo and is equated with it in the Congolese mind.  Not much has changed since the Belgians who would hold a man’s wife and daughters to make sure he came back with the rubber he was sent to the forest to collect.  This is still standard practice.  The rape is an extra, a premium which comes with the uniform.

Another form of robbery is taking place here in the East.  The RCD people wanted to keep the franc artificially high at 330fc for a dollar while in the Western government zone it is at 430fc.  With the formation of the transition government the RCD was forced to accept the 100 franc notes used in the West.  Up till now, they had imposed the use of the old 20, 10 and 5 franc notes no longer available in the West.  Of course, sharks were quick to understand that if they bought francs in the West with dollars at 430fc and bought back dollars in the RCD zone at 330fc, they could make $25 on every $100 invested. The same thing goes for produce.  This is ruining people and sapping the whole economy.

Another thing people cannot understand is the fact the prices, which at first fell with the arrival of the barges, are now back up.  There are reports of hoarding and of the wholesalers striking exclusivity deals with certain retailers to do away with competition and make sure the prices stay high to increase profits.

On Sunday morning I was having my coffee on the terrace at the UN Welfare Club and at a table behind me were two RCD parliamentarians from Goma who had missed their connecting flight to Kinshasa for the opening session on Friday.  One starts yelling so loud into his cell phone, one would think he wanted Goma to hear him without the phone. 

            “Why are you yelling,” I asked annoyed.

            “Does it bother you?”

            “Yes, it does!”

            “What about Liberty?” the idiot asked me.  This parliament is going to be really interesting.

A certain idea of Okapi dies

I am not allowed to talk about this so it remains between us.  That means confidential.

I have renewed with Hirondelle for another two months even though Okapi is no longer the radio I came to work for.  The conservatives won and it looks like Okapi is becoming the voice of the UN. It could be worse.  I thought it was a good idea to give the Congolese a radio with Congolese reporters giving Congolese news using the rules we teach in school.  It created a need among the Congolese they did not know they had.  But radical new ideas rarely work the first time.  Eventually, people will understand that education and access to complete and well-rounded information are the only things that will help people like the Congolese eventually get out of the dark ages.  Granted, with the Congolese, it will take much longer than with most.

I think they have it backwards.  What the Congolese do not need right now, and are a long way from being prepared for, are democratic elections.  They do need Radio Okapi as it was conceived to be: a voice to expose the wrong doings of those in power and the accomplishments of honest brokers; a voice which showed that all Congolese are equal and accountable for their acts.  This is especially true given that the transition government and the parliament are composed of the self-appointed murderers and their hand-picked favorites who all now compete in Western eyes to be sons of democracy. It is strange that the transformation of Okapi comes with the setting up of the new government.  It is probably just a coincidence.

   The barges rolled into town, we gave the RCD-G authorities a hard time and they backed down but not much has changed.

 Moroccan Colonel Lemrahi and RCD Colonel Kamwanya-Bora Uzima

I have not written you a report since my good friend, mentor and adopted father, Paul Oren, died on July 23.  The man had redirected and quite probably saved my life.  I am very grateful to him and his death is a tremendous loss for me.  Maybe now, I will finally get down to reading his cube theories on social interaction and its parallel with the I King.

A lot has happened in the past three weeks and not all of it bad.  The major event was the arrival of the long awaited convoy of commercial barges to Kisangani.  It was the first time since the beginning of the war commercial barges had made the run from Kinshasa.  It was not an easy voyage.  Five barges left the capital at the end of June after lengthy negotiations with the various parties who control different parts of the Congo River.  It took five weeks to accomplish the 12 day trip and, to make matters more complicated, three barges of passengers, not agreed upon in the accords, joined the convoy at Mbandaka.

But on August third, at around 15 hours, the barges slowly began arriving in Kisangani with UN 04 leading the way.  Tens of thousands of people lined both banks of the river; the tom-tom drums, which had been beating all day, began to echo furiously; piroguiers attached themselves to the barges, got on board and began dancing; in dozens of other pirogues people were standing and dancing and singing; and the crowd chanted “Libere! Libere!”  It was a very moving event and very embarrassing for the ruling RCD-Goma, who are quickly losing a grip five years of Rwandan backed and often led terror imposed.

The high point came with the arrival of the three barges full of passengers, who, for the most part, were returning to their hometown and families for the first time in five years.  The people waved palm branches, the dancing and singing continued both on shore and on the barges: the people the RCD-G calls “clandestines”.    The last barge pulled into town at about ten in the morning of the fourth and the Boyamais (people of Kisangani) were still enthusiastically singing and dancing on the banks.

The lion is not yet without teeth

The RCD-G have their army yet and their soldiers are still robbing and frightening the people but there are examples of tolekas refusing to give soldiers free rides and others talking back at check points.  The soldiers did not like the UN breaking the blockade of the city.  They do not like our attempts to interfere in their freedom to murder, rape and rob with impunity. I was taken aside by three officers looking for a fight.  “The UN are really false hearted (de mauvaise foi)  and don’t care about us,” said one.  The reason he gave was that the UN did not set up flood lights at the port for the barges.  It never crossed his mind that maybe it was the RCD-G’s responsibility to provide lighting for the port of Kisangani.  But we are dealing with people who never did anything for themselves and believe we must do everything for them, right down to wiping their asses.

To further prove this point the other officers continued: “Is the UN going to leave us Radio Okapi?  When is the UN going to give us a TV station?  Are you going to leave all the vehicles for us?  If you don’t it shows you really don’t care for the Congolese,” and so on.  I am so fed up with these bloodsuckers that I too became belligerent and over the week, the RCD-G local authorities and the Army learned about the power of the press, at least as long as we are protected by the UN because the threats were thinly veiled.

For once, the pen beat the sword

I took a reporter to a check point where the soldiers were making poor people with bicycles pay 200 francs to cross the bridge at the Tshopo River dam.  When we showed up they had bicycles stopped.  As soon as they saw us the cowards let the bikes go and denied any wrong doing.  We went away and came back a half hour later, the same thing.  One man told us: “I have to go to a wake on the other side but I don’t have the money to give them and I will miss the funeral.”

The Bourgmestre of Tshopo Commune, Therese Benda Malio, complained that the army should not be there at all; that it was the job of her tax people to collect money (one to five dollars per annum) and the job of her police to provide security.  She said she had informed those higher up of the “tracasseries”, the hassling of the population but that nothing had come of it. We aired everything.

Third Region military commander General Bora Uzima told me a few days later that he could have me arrested for interrogating his soldiers.  He also told me he had moved the checkpoint away from the bridge.  He wanted to know why Radio Okapi was picking on them.  I said: “You have every right to ask that I be repatriated.”

“Oh, no.  You completely misunderstand me.” The General said, and then went on to explain how much he hates injustice because he had suffered so much under Kabila father.

Earlier in the week it was the Seventh Brigade commander, Colonel Seramphin Zirimani, who was angry with me and threatened one of my reporters.  We had heard that he had encouraged his men to “pay themselves from the population” because Colonel Zirimani was not given money by the Congolese Central Bank to pay the soldiers.  It is very strange that he would want to pay his men now, with the reunification that the RCD-G people do not really like, when the RCD-G has not paid the men a penny in five years.

Of course, during a ministerial change of planes at the airport, I had a reporter ask the Interior Minister, Theophile Mbemba, from the Kinshasa camp, if he had heard of planned looting in Kinsangani.  At the same time, the Senior UN Military Observer, Senegalese Colonel Samba, warned Colonel Zirimani that he would be held personally accountable for any misdoings by his troops.

Colonel Zirimani told me I was not to broadcast anything about his army without clearing it with him first.  Apparently, he actually believed I agreed to this when all I merely said is that I would be happy to come and interview him.  Of course, he was nowhere to be found when we did the story on the bridge road block.

And then it was the turn of the Governor, Jean-Pierre Bilusa.  He had put pressure on the Director of the Kisangani branch of the National Radio and TV, the RNTC, to fire the program director for having de-programmed two daily RCD-G slots.  The program director believed that now the country is reunified, there is no room for partisan programs on the national TV and that Kinshasa had to define program policies.  Well, our story not only sparked a strong reaction from the Minister of Information in Kinshasa but also from Reporters sans Frontieres. The Governor backtracked, ordered the program director to be reinstated and denied any prior knowledge of the sacking or pressure on the station director to fire him.  Nevertheless, the governor ordered the two RCD-G programs to be maintained adding that pluralism means everybody gets a chance to have partisan programs on the national TV.  The Governor will be burned once again on this one too.

The Governor is a strange man and I know psychiatry has words to describe this sort of person.  His kinky hair stands straight up as if he is in a static electricity zone; his eyes bulge out and move in jolts; the former professor of history talks non stop as if not letting anybody else get a word in means his arguments are accepted as truth and he rambles in such a way as to not make sense.  He is an extremely frightened man and seems to feel constantly persecuted by the outside world.  Perhaps talk of tribunals for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity have something to do with it.  He has been heard to say “it is time to turn the page and forget the past.”  Bilusa has a lot to answer for.

Another sign the RCD-G is losing a grip was on August second when they decided to celebrate the founding of their movement.  The date is in fact the fifth anniversary of the Rwandan invasion of the Congo.  Their movement arrived in Goma from Kigali on August 22, 1998, so they were in fact celebrating the beginning of the war.   Nevertheless, given the reunification and the attempt to melt all the different armies into one national army, the lower ranking RCD-G military and police refused to parade during the ceremony saying they were a national force now and the RCD-G was now a political party.  The military (Junior) officers also warned the RCD-G to pay them.  It was this celebration which probably explains why the RCD-G held the barges up an extra day in Isangi, 114 kilometers down river, postponing the arrival by 24 hours.  If they had arrived on the second, it would have taken all the attention away from the RCD-G rally and parade.

The reunification process has put a lot of pressure on the RCD-G to pretend to be going along and they have not quite figured out how to slow it down or sabotage it and at the same time make it look like they support the process.  One way they do this is by demanding a control over the new national army which the others could not possibly back and then saying it is the others who are blocking the process because they refuse to accept to give the RCD-G a role.

Fighting continues to rage here in the East but with small bands being presented as independent militias although it is clear they are RCD-G soldiers and those of other groups. Fighting is a big word.  It is mostly the killing of unarmed civilians. The RCD-G say they have been attacked by the former Rwandan Hutu army responsible for the 1994 genocide who hide in the Congolese jungle, the Interahamwe, with the backing of Burundi’s Hutu rebels. Some of this could be true. It is obviously an argument which the Rwandans will use to justify an ongoing presence in the East.  And without Rwanda, the much hated RCD-G would not last long.

We managed another good scoop this week.  Each of the major factions sent delegates with the barges: 5 for the government, 4 for the MLC and 4 for the RCD.  We were tipped off that on Wednesday night, August 6, RCD military police came on board the barges and arrested the delegates.  We went to the Military Prison Friday and ended up seeing General Uzima who admitted they had arrested the delegates because some were thought to be soldiers disguised as civilians.  As it turned out, four of the government delegates were in fact members of the FAC military intelligence and were posing as civilians.  The RCD-G had every right to be suspicious and even arrest them.  But with Okapi on the story, they decided to present them to the Monuc to prove they had not been mistreated and then let them go free under Monuc observation.  The RCD-G wanted to hand them over to the Monuc but the UN people refused to take them.  It is a Congolese problem they said.

As one MilOb put it, if it were not for you guys (Radio Okapi), they would be in prison for a long time.  

Who is doing what for whom?

I have found myself getting even nastier with some of the Congolese to see what their reactions are when they come out with this the ‘the world won’t do anything to help us’ crap.  At the UN Welfare Club, during a news item on Liberia, one of the Congolese workers asked: “Why is there so much war in Africa?”  I said :  “Maybe Africans like war.”  (I do not believe this). He said the UN could send in troops and put a stop to all this fighting.  I mentioned that nobody was ready to pay the bill to which he responded that the UN did it in Yugoslavia.  I informed him the UN did not do it in Yugoslavia, NATO did.  He left very upset. 

I have never yet heard a Congolese say “We must do something to end this war.”  It is always “What are you going to do to help us.”  Nothing is their own fault.  It is always the fault of those on the outside. But this war in the Congo is an African mess and the Congolese are the ones who have made it for the most part, with some help from their neighbors.  The UN has done a pretty good job just by containing this mess to the Congo.

I am sure I will eventually get in trouble for saying this truth out loud when official policy is the poor Congolese are suffering and we have to show compassion and respect.  However, most of those who are here feel as I do: Yes, they are suffering and no, they are doing nothing to put an end to it.  They are just waiting for others to do everything for them, their hands stretched out for the money they think they deserve.  It will take generations to overcome this.

A Canadian officer asked whether the Congolese had a missing chromosome which prevented them from remembering or understanding the consequences to their actions.  He says he has raised thousands of kids aged 17 and 18 during his Army career and that the Congolese are very much like those kids:  they are in need of the same treatment of consistency and not threats but action; i.e. you’re fired!  We all agree that the worst thing which could happen to them right now is the democracy they are in no way prepared for. “They need an intelligent and benevolent dictator,” we agreed, to which the Canadian added: “the last one they had the Americans killed: Patrice Lumumba.”

The interesting thing is that with the new tougher UN mandate enacting Chapter 7, the use of force, the UN military guys are getting harder on the Congolese thugs.  This could be dangerous because other than the paper and the status, we have no real protection should the thugs decide they have had enough of us and work up the courage to strike out at  the ‘father figure’.

 This week: there is always some place worse; Uruguayan soldiers teach local kids bad English; and Eugene Yololo is a one-man press agency who makes sure Makanza knows.

I traveled quite a bit with the Military Observers to both sides of the cease-fire line but never stayed in one town or village long enough to find out very much. I could see there are still a lot of trees in the jungle. I could also see soldiers are still manning their positions although their main preoccupation is hassling the people; hitting them up for money non-stop.  Most of the places are lost to the world; the people are at the mercy of the local commander and his troops who may or may not have been forgotten by their respective leadership.

I feel very sorry for the Military Observers posted in the remote jungle bases with absolutely nothing. The worst I have seen is Bolomba where three MilObs are stuck in the middle of a FAC army camp, which is in the middle of the jungle, on a strategic dirt path, with no electricity, no water, no TV, no local bar…no nothing. The MilObs cannot even use the internet except for one hour a day for official use because it costs the UN two dollars a minute for the telephone satellite connection.  The mobile earth station they need is sitting at Mbandaka HQ.  The UN is reluctant to pay the $140 000 to get the MI-26 helicopter from Kananga to Mbandaka to pick up the big dish and then carry it to Bolomba and get the helicopter back to Kananga. The six months the MilObs spend there is enough to drive anybody nuts.

The MLC controlled city of Bumba is a port on the Congo, halfway between Mbandaka and Kisangani.  It is considered the bread-basket of Equateur province.  There are well over five-hundred-thousand people in the immediate area.  According to the captain of the Port, hundreds of thousands of tons of rice, maize and beans are loaded onto barges every month.  A claim I find hard to believe.  The food is taken to Kinshasa and Kisangani on the Congo River and to Zongo up the Ubangui River.

The power plant is out of service for lack of fuel and spare parts.  The same goes for the water treatment plant.  Thus, there is no power; no clean drinking water. I could tell the population is infected with parasites by the bloated bellies on the children.  I am sure there are many other nasty things killing them off.

Despite the lack of power, the cell phone operator Vodacom is to begin service in the town this week.  I have no idea how they are going to recharge their cell phones.  Perhaps  the guys who use car batteries recharged with solar panels as I have seen in other cities can recharge the phones.

The people in Bumba can hardly go a hundred meters without unpaid MLC soldiers hitting them up for money and food.  Life is a nightmare.  The people say they want the formation of a transition government to put an end to the constant harassment.  While the members of the new government, former warlords and corrupt politicians play children’s temper tantrums in Kinshasa, the people in the countryside, towns and cities hold very high hopes.

Life is worse for the people in the rebel zones where soldiers and police have not been paid in five years but there are also problems in the government zone.  In Mbandaka, people are stopped, arrested and racketed at night from ten o’clock even though the governor, Jean-Bertrand Ewanga, assured me there is no curfew and that people can circulate freely whenever and wherever they want in the city.  One soldier even went into a house and stole a pot of rice.  When the women began running after him, he fired his weapon to scare them off.

On the one hand, people’s hopes are dangerously high.  It is hard to tell what will happen if they are dashed again.  In Bukavu Friday, the population took advantage of the change of flag, which came with the swearing in ceremony in Kinshasa, to express their hatred for the Rwandan backed RCD-Goma rebel movement.  They tore off car license plates imposed by the rebel movement, a symbol of tax harassment, and attacked a pro-RCD journalist.  Cars were burned, shots were fired, people were hurt.

On the other hand, the unpaid soldiers and police are watching Kinshasa with a weary eye, worried that they will be sacrificed by the warlords they fought for and, as usual, if they get angry, they will take it out on the civilian population.  There is a very tense mix on the ground and I am not sure the International Community took it into consideration seriously enough.  Kinshasa is a long ways away.  Things can get out of control very quickly in the rest of the country.

In Mbandaka, the people have the most hostile attitude towards internationals I have come across in the Congo.  They will not get out of the way for your car; look at you as if they are going to spit on you; and as you pass by, shout things in Lingala that cannot be nice.  One of the Okapi reporters explained that the people here think we are rich (we are) and that our money is coming from the Congolese budget and that we should share it with them.  The Congolese budget?  That is a new one for me.  Nevertheless, it is quite clear that they would need no pushing to lynch us all.  Yet they grovel before the most outrageous oppression and corruption by fellow Congolese.

I often think it may have been better to just leave the Congolese alone and let them go at each other until they have enough or until there is nobody left to kill or until they advance a few hundred years out of whatever age they are in. I am not sure we are really helping.  And I still wonder whether the best solution was not for one of the factions to win the war.   I do not share the Congolese confidence in the new transition government.  I think this is probably the most dangerous moment since I arrived in the country and my feelings are shared by many of the officers here.

Another town lost in the jungle, which I visited this week is Befale.  The UN is financing the building a new five room school house to replace the one they destroyed.  In June 2002, the MONUC helicopter blew off the school roof.  The rain finished the job and the walls crumbled.  A little over a year later, the UN finally forwarded $3,700, enough money to replace the roof.  The MilOb team Leader, Lieutenant Colonel Mohamadou Baraze (Niger), watches the masons with pride saying the school will be finished in two weeks.

The local masons however, who have neither wheel-barrows, nor buckets, and must carry everything on their heads, say they will be lucky if they finish by the beginning of the school year on September 2.  They also say the money, which was enough to replace a roof, is not sufficient to build a school.  But Lt. Col. Baraze will not be daunted.  He is even thinking of redoing the school latrines.

I should remind you that not all children go to school.  Only those whose parents have the money to pay and as the teachers have not received their salaries in years, the parents pay directly to either the teachers, or the school superintendent who is sure to rake off a sizable share for himself before giving the rest to his political masters. The superintendent is almost always a man of the faction in power in the area; a political appointee.  But there is no superintendent in Losombo. The one teacher is paid in chickens and other produce. The village is so lost they do not even have a road to get out of there.  From Losombo, it takes seven days to reach Mbandaka by pirogue.  Oh, but their are troops in Losombo.  It is a barrier on the Lulonga River. 

On Saturday night as I went to the Uruguayan pizza and beer party, five or six kids, about the same age, asked me for 100 francs.  I told them where to go and one six-year-old said in English: “I fuck your mother.”  I thought I almost detected a Spanish accent in the kid’s pronunciation.  Alright, the kids are learning to beg, like their parents, and there is probably no chance they will ever go to school but the internationals are not helping because, I am sure, the soldiers are not only teaching them choice phrases in English but are also certainly “fucking” their mothers.  Six and seven year olds take the soldiers home to their sisters and their mothers:  “You come home.  My sister/mother very pretty.”  The problem is, many people think, when they see the internationals walking home with little boys, that they are having sex with the boys.  Yes, there are reports that in some cases they are.

Another witchcraft story made our headlines earlier in the week. A man was almost lynched by his own children and neighbors who accused him of witchcraft.  One of his sons died after a three-year illness.  He was the sixth of the man’s nineteen children to die.  The police intervened to save the father, which led to a pitched battle with the neighborhood youth.  The strange thing is the man confessed to witchcraft in his son’s death although he denies any involvement in the deaths of the five other children.  The father says the tools his father left him are cursed.  No autopsy was practiced to prove that the thirty-year-old died from something, which was not witchcraft.  They do not do autopsies in Congo.  Christ, they do not even have money to care for the living.  Any way, everybody knows science proves nothing when it comes down to witchcraft.

On a brighter note, apparently, during all the looting and wanton destruction, the rampaging gunslingers never once raided a brewery.  Every brewery in the country is intact.  The Congolese love their beer.  The only reason the Bralima brewery in Mbandaka is not operating is because there is not enough electricity.  There could be if they paid for it but why set a bad precedent as they never paid for it before.  Any way, the Bralima director here, a mustachioed fat man who has trouble finishing his sentences because he forgot where he began them, is still living a very comfortable life thanks to the funds of the state owned Bralima breweries.  He lives on the Bralima Estate, which has power 24 hours a day, just not enough to run the brewery.

However, the UN people living in town are forced to pay $100 a month for power, which is only on from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.  the Congolese also pay a hefty sums. The governor says they only get five hours power per day because they do not have enough fuel to run the power plant.  The UN people say it is in large part because the governor is corrupt and filling his pockets.  At any rate, City Hall, which consumes 56% of the power supply, has never paid its bills.  Why set a precedent with good and transparent management?

I wish I had more good things to say about the Congo, or even about the Congolese.  I promise you I am looking (see AMAP below).  Very often when I come across something which looks positive, I discover it was a game to make me happy because the person wanted something, or in the best of cases, just wanted not to upset me.  I read that pygmies will always say ‘yes’ at first because they want to make you feel at home, but the real answer is ‘no’.

Most Congolese use the pygmies as their punching bags. The pygmies are considered somewhere between the monkey, which is food here, and a human, but not quite human.  I was surprised when they told me that “a pygmy will break his plate after eating because he cannot understand he will need it again tomorrow.”  This is how I see all the Congolese.  Maybe it is time I leave the Congo for a while.  The amazing thing is people who remain in Kinshasa, even if they make short visits to the provinces, do not see this side of the Congo.  However, I feel reassured in the fact that so many of the UN people in the sticks and the zones, both Black and White, have come to the same conclusions as I have and with the same self apprehensions: “Am I becoming racist to say such things?”

Not really.  Here’s a positive note. Makanza is a city of some 20 000 people 220 kilometers up river from Mbandaka.  There is nothing here.  The last time the hospital was supplied was when a Unicef barge brought in some medicine in November 2001!  The hospital is basically a brick building with small rooms fit for pigs; no water, no windows, no mattresses…no nothing.  But Dr. Bernard Yola, another hero, still operates, day or night, using only natural light and without an anesthetist. 

There is not one NGO in the whole zone.  The people ask us why they are being ignored when others are getting help.  Part of the answer is in the racketing and thievery of the MLC rebel soldiers who, I must say again, have not been paid in five years.

Makanza is so isolated, the people receive no Congolese radio stations on their battery powered radios, when they can find batteries and if they are lucky enough to have a radio to put them in.  There is no electricity of course.

But the people of Makanza know exactly what is going on in their country thanks to Eugene Yololo who founded AMAP, Agence Makanza de Presse.  AMAP is Eugene.  Every day he listens to the BBC, RFI, VOA on short wave… and writes the news down on a blackboard which he then takes to the town market for all to read.  Eugene does this several times a day.  He is calling on the international press to show solidarity by sending him some batteries.  He could also use some chalk and an eraser.

A bon entendeur, salut!

In June 2002, when the MONUC first came to Befale (a city of over ten thousand people in Equateur province) to set up a Team Site, the helicopter blew off the roof of a school.  The rains then finished the job and more than one hundred and twenty pupils were left without class rooms.

A little over a year later, work has begun to build a new school with local labor and UN financing.  Team Leader Lieutenant Colonel Mohamadou Baraze (Niger) says the work should be finished by the end of the month.

Although the laborers share Lt. Col. Baraze’s enthusiasm, they do not share his optimism.  They fear they will not have finished by the beginning of the school year on September second.  They also say $3,700 will not be enough.

The new school building will have five class rooms and an office.  Lt. Col. Baraze says he is also looking for financing to rehabilitate the school latrines.

Mbandaka is in the government zone.  It is just one big military base with what seems to be tens of thousands of troops.  I drove forty-three kilometers out and came along at least six company sized army bases with trenches and machine gun nests and all ready for combat.  The airport is completely surrounded by trenches and troops at the ready.  The troops are all here with their families, and like the Indians around the forts in the Old West of the US, people have collected in and around the city bringing its population to over five-hundred-thousand people. 

As elsewhere in the government zone, all the soldiers have been issued new all green uniforms and black leather boots.  This is a sign that the government is getting financial backing for its military, which the rebels are not.  I have no idea where this backing is coming from yet but I intend to find out. 

Inside this giant military base are the Bolivian and Uruguayan contingents (roughly 500 troops in all) to protect the United Nations installations.  The UN here is completely military as well.  It is the base of operations for all of the North of the Congo.  There are no female UN workers here.  The only women are the handful of lucky Army ladies with the two contingents. 

There is no economic activity in Mbandaka.  None.  I suppose when the Belgians founded the town, it was to collect the rubber they exported to Europe.  Before the war, there was a European owned saw mill, which has now fallen to ruin.  Once again, the only economic exchange is the UN.  But because it is purely a military base, the UN has not created much employment for the locals. 

Much of the town is composed of big brick and concrete colonial buildings.  Many of them got a fresh paint job for the June 30^th Independence day celebrations when President Joseph Kabila came here to announce the formation of the transition government, but nothing was done to repair the roads.  The two cell phone operators, Vodacom and Celtel, have also painted part of the town in their company colors: blue and white for the former, orange and blue for the latter.

 The Big River Keeps on Flowing 

The port, if it can be called that, is divided into two parts.  Across from UN HQ is the Congolese Navy port with empty brick warehouses and a few flat bottom river boats converted into small-arms gun-boats tied to the bank.  There are a couple of unused and useless cranes standing against the mostly gray sky.  There is absolutely no activity here except for the Uruguayan Rivarine River Patrol company, which took over one of the brick warehouses and gave it a fresh blue and white paint job. 

About three hundred meters down river is the civilian port.  Barges and their tugs are tied to each other four or five deep and moored to the river bank.  There are no docks and the impression is that of pictures from the 1800s of boats tied to the banks of the Mississippi or the Missouri rivers.  

Six of the barges were supposed to leave for Kisangani with a UN escort over a week ago.  They are to be the first commercial boats to go from the government zone to the RCD-Goma zone in five years.  The barges are still waiting for a seventh to join them before they leave, if they can leave.  The authorities have impounded the boats because they have gone over the 48 hour limit barges are allowed to stay docked here.  I suppose they will have to pay a hefty tax.  In the meantime, passengers and crew who expected to be in Kisangani by now have run out of money and provisions.  This is largely the fault of the UN.  They should not have waited for the seventh barge and left at the agreed upon date. 

All along the river front road is the market where people sell what ever has come off the boats from Kinshasa.  This week it was badly made but very colorful towels, soap and articles of clothing.  Along with that you have villagers bringing in the boucane (smoked) fish, antelope and monkey, which apparently will keep for weeks until you break the still furry skin to get to the meat.  It is all laid on the ground. 

Behind the sellers and on either side of the paths going down to the river is waste, both jetsam and human.  The stench of sewage is hard to take without becoming nauseous.  There are no latrines and there is no such thing as trash collection.  NGOs want to build some latrines at the city’s markets but they decided first they had to teach people how to use them and maintain them, i.e. keep them clean and functioning.  People usually use latrines to discard everything thus blocking them up and they often miss the target and they do not bother to flush or clean and so on.  So, to teach the population, NGOs thought it best to begin by teaching the city’s officials.  We are still a long way away from public latrines.  

There is some electricity during the day in Mbandaka.  The power plant is a fuel burner and because it is so hard to get fuel here, the power usually goes out at 8 p.m.  I am told that when President Kabila was here, they had power 24 hours a day.  There is nothing to do anyway and only three bars in town, so the electricity serves little purpose, unless, of course, you want to read.  But who reads in this country?  The internationals and soldiers can stay in their offices or barracks where UN generators keep the power going.  Mbandaka is a quiet town where nothing happens. 

The excitement for us is the pizza and beer party the Uruguayans throw on Saturday night.  They took over the only big hotel in town, which gives them a very comfortable and barracks style life. Officers and enlisted men in civilian clothes mingle with the internationals while the eight or nine Bolivian and Uruguayan women soldiers, who are far from beauty queens, have great success on the dance floor and could not possibly drink everything the young soldiers want to buy for them.  Salsa music blares.  I am happy just sitting there watching the Uruguayans behind the bar hustle to serve drinks, a far cry from the foot dragging Congolese who take five minutes to come for your order and another five to bring you your beer before they go back to look for the bottle opener and they probably forgot to bring you a glass any way. 

Proud Mary Keeps on Going 

I am staying at the convent Notre Dame.  The nuns are very nice to me and are also very discrete.  My room is so small I can touch both walls at the same time but I sleep wonderfully.  On the little shelf over the sink, I have a plastic Virgin Mary with a broken crown holding a big and pudgy five-year-old Jesus with a big King’s crown.  On the wall I have a cardboard cutout of the Virgin Mary; a cross over my bed; palm leaves over the door.  Breakfast is served in the guest dining room after the six-thirty prayers.  They also serve good lunches and dinners, a sort of Afro-Belgian mix.  But I have to stay away during the day for a week because they have colleagues here for some sort of seminary.  

My biggest problem this past week was finding a toilet clean enough to use.  I finally found one at UN HQ:  a Italian made prefabricated mobile unit the UN brought in for personnel and which was set up behind the HQ building, not far from supply.  The toilets in HQ are insufferable.  The toilet at the Nunnery is sickening.  Now, you may laugh, but toilets are an important and major part of my life, not only because of the problems I have following my operation, but also because so much of what I eat here makes me sick. 

Despite its size, Mbandaka is just one big country village.  The big excitement this week concerned two buses.  When President Kabila came to town, he brought with him seven buses, which he said he was giving the town so they could have public transportation.  Two of those buses are now on a barge to go back to Kinshasa.  The people were in an uproar, students threatened to demonstrate (there are students although the University has been ‘temporarily’ shut down), people went to see the mayor and governor and Radio Okapi followed the events daily, making life even more uncomfortable for the authorities. 

The governor assures us the President only gave the city five buses and that the other two were for official use and have to go back to Kinshasa.  “But the President promises to send another five buses” giving the city a total of ten.  The bus toll is the same as the Tolekas (bicycle taxis): 100 Congolese francs or about 20 US cents. That is high for the Congolese and four times more than in Kisangani or Gbadolite. The governor insists the “soldiers have to pay like everybody else.”  Of course, this never happened in real life.  With the buses full of soldiers, no paying travelers can get on.  I suspect the bus company will not make the money it needs to maintain the buses, in large part due to military and official abuse and appropriation, and in three months they will all be idle and needing repairs and spare tires.  It is more of the same.  An economic experiment and public service, which should succeed, will go under because of near sighted profiteering.  Unless the Army brass really do make the soldiers pay for their rides.  And where do soldiers who do not get paid themselves find money to pay for a bus ride?  And since when has a soldier in this country ever paid for what he takes?  No, the new bus company will go under, I am sure. 

The people also expressed their anger over 250 mattresses, which the president had brought for hospitals and which were loaded onto barges.  In this case, the inhabitants were wrong.  Half the 500 mattresses the President brought were destined for hospitals deep in the province and not just for Mbandaka. 

Let it be said that the public outcry and open demonstrations of discontent are new and promising for the future.  It shows there is greater liberty in the government zone.  In the RCD-Goma zones, as in the others I am sure, some of the people would have been shot, many others arrested and mistreated.  There is no democracy in the government zone, but there seems to be a benevolent despotism that could take the country in the right direction, and at the very least, respects some freedom of expression. 

In the village of Wendji, 20 kilometers down river, I saw the perhaps the biggest crocodile I have ever seen.  It took four strong men to carry the three-meter-plus monster only a few yards.  The beast had got caught in their nets and they killed it with a machete.  This meant a big feast.  They usually just cut the crocodiles in strips and cook them.  I suggested they skin it and find somebody to sell the skin to in Kinshasa.  I told them about shoes, belts, purses and wallets and the prices they can go for.  This was all new to the villagers who asked me if I wanted to buy the skin.  I said: “I don’t make shoes.”   

I do not know what got into me.  If the villagers discover they can get lots of money for crocodile skins, then they will kill them all off as they have done the elephants and the hippopotami.  The other troublesome thing is you have these monsters right where the children play in the water.  I wonder how many people are eaten by crocodiles? 

You may laugh.  There is an unfounded rumor a Uruguayan soldier near here was recently eaten by a python.  They say a group of the guys got drunk one night and in the morning they could not find their comrade.  They came across the giant snake digesting, killed it and cut out the body of their friend.  Although this one case is not true, whenever I stop to urinate on the roadside, the first thing I do is take out my knife.  There are certain levels in the food chain I refuse to be.  Welcome to the jungle.

 

A country?  What country?

June thirtieth marked the forty-third anniversary of the end of Belgian rule and the continuation of the horror under Black faces.  It was also the day President Joseph Kabila announced the composition of the Transition Government in which all the war-lords got the most coveted positions as the just rewards for their roles in mass murder and the total destruction and looting of the country.

It was the first time since the beginning of the war that the people of Kisangani turned out in large numbers to attend the official celebrations put on by the RCD-Goma.  The economic operators also turned out to be seen with the authorities who have impoverished and terrorized the population while filling their pockets.  But the two social groups turned out for different reasons.

As is typical of the Congolese, they really want to hope someone will do something to end the mess. The naming of a transition government is all they needed and so the Pirogue men marched with their oars high in the air, the workers at the Bralima brewery, the only factory still operating, marched in their company colors cut into men’s shirts and women’s pagnes, along with various women’s auxiliaries of this and that and other elements with an official name from the old days that was supposed to give those who have nothing a sense of sharing in the wealth of the country, not to mention the military and police who were brought out in force.  They all pretended for a day that they are the members of one big happy and united Congolese family, despite the stepped up fighting only a couple of hundred kilometers away.

Even the Okapi reporters were enthusiastic.  Fidel came in beaming, telling me “this is the anniversary of our country’s independence.”

“What country?  You don’t have a country.”  I said ruining his day because he was forced to agree.

The businessmen, however, seem to think the authorities will have power in a new government and it is time to be seen rubbing elbows with the officials if they are to get a piece of the cake. They understand that as things are, if a government is formed, it will be the same as before, as always: favoritism, corruption and nepotism.

It is hard for me to comprehend the high spirits.  Nobody has been paid in five years; neither the soldiers and police, nor the workers, nor the employees, all of whom are obliged to show up at their work stations.  Everybody lives off of ripping off the next guy and there is no indication anywhere that this is going to change.  But then again, hope is all the Congolese have.  Unfortunately, it is hope somebody else will do something for them.  Those at the bottom are doing nothing to change their ways and those at the top are making much too much money to want to.  But this hope is also a good reason to party much to the delight of the Brelima breweries.

The Fair was supposed to be a showcase that the future is upon us.  Except for a stand by the UN, one from the Red cross, one from the SOTEXKI textile works (see below) and a couple of cigarette makers’ booths, there is no economic activity on display.  All the rest of the stands are Bars, over forty of them, each with a terrible speaker system blaring at full blast what may have been music in the beginning but now comes out as competing and deafening noise.  However, the bars are full and the Primus beer is downed by the cubic ton.  This orgy of male public intoxication is to last a month.  Women are not allowed to consume beer in public.

Making matters worse is the dry season has been marked by heavy rains transforming the fair ground rented out by the Palm Beech hotel at forty dollars a stand into one big mud bowl.  Of course, officials insist on coming in with their four-wheel drives, get stuck, spray people and bars with the sticky earth and make the mess even worse.  As an aside, the Palm Beech is owned by a high-ranking RCD member.

Drinking Culture; The Economy on Hold

Palambi Kumute Kindu is the Head of the Culture and Art Division, a sort of Minister of Culture here.  He was wearing bright purple trousers, a yellow and blue RCD shirt and an unkempt graying beard. There are three rooms in his dark and dusty ministry, two of which are lined with shelves full of musty and rotting hand written archives.  The third is  Kumute Kindu’s office which is full of artifacts: masks, spears, statues, earthen works and so on.  When asked why he organized a fair for public drunkenness and not for economic prosperity, he said: “We want to give people a chance to celebrate their independence.”  He insisted there will be cultural activity although the program had not been drawn up and he listed the three companies present at the fair, one of which is the Brewery, as proof it is an economic fair too.

During the whole interview he watched me eye his small museum.  As we left he said: “What do you want to buy.  All of this is for sale, just name your price.”  I asked him how he could sell state property to which he answered, “It’s all mine.”

Well, one man who does not agree with Mr. Kumute Kindu is Raymond Mokeni Ecopikani, a very active man who is one of the few to have rebuilt his house after the destruction of the war and who tries to keep his economic activities going.  He is short and a cripple in both legs but beams with energy.  The office in his house has three computers with internet access, the television with its satellite channels plays in the next room, his yard is well kept and clean.  Whether in Swahili, Lingala, French, English and I suspect Greek, Mr. Ecopikani, President of the Federation of Economic Operators, explains there are no businesses at the fair “because there is absolutely no economic activity in Kinsangani and the authorities are doing everything to prevent any.”

Raymond Mokeni Ecopikani

Mr. Ecopikani holds out great hope for the arrival of the first barges to be allowed up the Congo River from Kinshasa.  Four or five are expected to arrive in about two weeks, that is, of course, unless the RCD-G change their minds again.  But Mr. Ecopikani is proof that there are still people here ready to bring Kisangani back to life and the fact that he is (mostly) White has not dampened the confidence his Black colleagues have in him.

I visited the SOTEXKI textile works this week.  They are at the fair trying to sell off stock.  The company was set up as a joint venture with a French company called Beaujolain (?).  Before the war it employed 2500 people and gave work to countless others as it threaded the cotton it bought locally.  Today less than 100 people keep the place up waiting for the day when the war ends and they can get back to work.  According to one manager, what little they do now is with the financial and material help of the French mother company.

All the machines are in tip-top shape, the buildings are intact, the gardens are spotless and near the administration building is a pasture created by a French paysagiste which looks just like Normandy and the lemon trees in the back could pass easily for apple trees.  I said the only thing missing are the cows. “They were stolen by the soldiers,” as were the sheep.  So, why is SOTEXKI still intact?

The story goes the employees, mostly at the top of the echelon, welded shut the gates and told the soldiers they would have to kill them if they wanted to pillage the works.  This is a mystery because these so-called soldiers have never stopped at killing anybody to pillage.  But the factory is there, ready to spin tomorrow, if only there was a market and an environment which would allow them to harvest their profits.

The first commercial flight from Kinshasa since the beginning of the war arrived in Kisangani Friday.  This coincided with the appearance in Kisangani this week of about eight high-class, brand-new, luxury Cherokee Jeeps and Toyota Prados.  They were not driven here.  There are no roads to speak of.  All gas, which is not stolen from the UN, is flown in.  Another mystery.

Also on the plane was the American Celtel man  whose Rwandan based Lebanese operator landed the contract for the local monopoly in cell phones (see previous report).  He brought along about forty Congolese sporting orange CelTel tee-shirts, including reporters and the RCD, after the luxury car motorcade from the airport, hosted a street speaking event to cut the blue ribbon that officially opened CelTel’s Kisangani headquarters.

Meanwhile

On Thursday I went to see the body of a 17 year-old girl shot in the back of the head by her husband’s brother, both of the latter RCD soldiers.  The brother was cleaning his Kalashnikov and decided he did not have to take out the clip.  The bolt slipped forward and the shot went off killing his sister-in-law who was having breakfast with her young brother and husband.  This is further proof of two things:  the thugs are given weapons but no real training and the Congolese do not project, they cannot foresee the consequences of their actions.  That is why, as soon as pedestrians see a vehicle coming they run, not walk, for cover.

The Brazzaville quarter of Kisangani, like all the others, is a poor mud housed village where people believe in witch-craft, like all the others.  At four in the morning Thursday, Mangaza Shabani took her crying child out for some air.  She saw a white human figure come out of the hole of the garden toilet and move towards her.  She cried three times “in the name of Jesus Christ.”  By this time her husband Felix and the neighbors had come out to see what was going on, there, near the outhouse, was a white rabbit.  The specter had been transformed.  The villagers decided the best thing to do was burn the creature.  The village chief says their community has been the victim of many curses recently, such as the half buried duck, which, when they came back, had become a snake.

The UN is trying to fight the belief in witchcraft.  There has been a sharp rise in the number of (unwanted) children being killed because they are accused of being sorciers.  But not just children, adults as well are being killed for sorcellerie.  In many cases, as I have written about, the witchcraft is accompanied with incidents of cannibalism.  It is a good way to get rid of a nagging wife or an insolent neighbor.

Our problem was the Okapi reporter who covered the story also believed it.  Getting him to write it correctly, and not as a factual report like the girl shot in the head, was an arduous task.  Why cover the story at all?  For the people of Kisangani, the ‘event’ was important.

Peace and Transition

What about peace and transition?  Fighting is intensifying in the East.  There are further reports of Rwandan troops being massed for attack.  Of course, unconfirmed by the UN.  RCD-Goma troops have also advanced into MLC territory.  Given the track record of the Congolese signing everything they are asked to sign and then copiously ignoring the paper, I doubt sincerely peace is at hand.  But something is happening here; barges are coming, a flight arrived from Kinshasa and this just as an American takes over as the head of the UN mission to Congo and President Bush sets off on a five-nation African tour.

My analysis is that the US thought carving up the Congo was a good idea in the beginning.  It would be easier to get to ‘our’ resources through Uganda and Rwanda, both backed by the US and Britain and the Congolese were not doing a good job of managing ‘our’ resources in the first place.  But then came 9-11.  It became clear that the war-lords would do anything in exchange for money and people like Ben Laeden have plenty.  So, Washington has decided that having loose guns and anarchy here is not such a good thing.  I expect US pressure on Rwanda to get out of the Congo and this would mean the end of the much hated RCD-Goma.  I was informed of a top secret CIA team coming through town a couple of weeks ago to check up on reports of Rwandan combat helicopters attacking pro-government and UPC positions near Butembo.  Something the UN has been unable to confirm.

Meanwhile, dogs continue to feed on human cadavers. I was wondering why they always eat the feet, legs and arms first so that when you pick up the decaying, and often headless, body it has these sticks protruding from where the limbs used to be?  National Geographic taught me the wolf always eats the tongue and liver first.  So, what is the matter with African dogs?  It is a mystery.

 

In which I complain about money-hungry-fishermen, the Congolese complain (again) that  the UN is not fixing their country and I get to visit the city’s prison.

Things remain quiet in Kisangani even though there are many more troops to be seen.  The fighting is a few hundred kilometers away.  The RCD-Goma is moving North against Isiro, deep into MLC territory, probably with the intention of then swinging South and taking the RCD-K/ML in a pincer movement.  Meanwhile, Goma has complained that the people they attacked and pushed out of Lubero and Butembo are regrouping and posing a threat to them. 

The UN said : “the presence in Lubero of units of the RCD-Goma is the result of their own military offensive denounced by the international community.”  Basically, the UN told them to pull back and respect the Bujumbura Accords they signed the previous week.

The Mayi Mayi in Beni have threatened to take revenge on UN personnel there, if nothing is done to stop the RCD-Goma and its “Rwandan allies,” while in Bunia the French seem to have things well under control.  The Hema and Lendu have moved out of town to continue slaughtering people and leaving the carcasses for the dogs to devour.  At least the UN personnel are now safe. As you can see, it is peace as usual.

A fish story

The village of Sabatini is a mud hut quarter of Kisangani near Stanley Falls, a thin line of rapids which block navigation on the river Congo South of the city.  Sabatini is the village of  the fishermen.  They supply the city with its daily needs.  There is no running water and few houses have electricity and no sanitation.  Belgian cooperation just built two toilets but have them pad-locked until they can teach the people how to use and maintain them.  The goal is to build thirty in all and get the people to stop relieving themselves in the water they use to drink, wash and cook, i.e. the river.

                   Chief Beaka on the tom-toms

Across a small lagoon, which becomes a raging torrent in the rainy season, is Wagagnia, also know as Hippopotamus Island although the last hippo was eaten more than two decades ago.  In the exposed rock of the dry season, the fishermen hand drill deep holes into which they put high tree trunks to hold the scaffolding they use to hang their funnel shaped baskets from, catching the fish caught in the pull of the rapids.

Like so many fish eating people (the English, the Japanese) this is an aggressive tribe known for its violence.  I first spotted the village chief carrying a meter long Capitain fish to wash.  A young man of about thirty, he was wearing a blue plaid shirt and white boxer shorts with some sort of dirty brown design on it. The chief looked as if he had a mental disability he inherited from birth.  It did not take long for the impression to be reinforced.

A little later the Chief came out in a brown burlap loincloth over his boxer shorts and some sort of feather headdress to beat on the village tom-tom, taking me for a tourist and not a reporter with the Okapi journalist who came to do a story on them.  The tom-tom was a log set on three old tires.  As he beat a silly rhythm he was obviously trying to think up, one of the villagers pretended to translate: “ He says a white man has come to visit us today in our village.”  The ‘translator’ also assured me the village across the river would answer at four p.m. sharp.  “Now you give the chief five hundred francs.”

 Chief Beaka as the fisherman

When they asked for twenty dollars for the pirogue back across the lagoon, I lost my temper.  I was so violent with them that Jacques, the Okapi reporter, became very nervous, so I gave the vultures three hundred francs, less than a dollar and told them “I don’t pay to work. If you had told me before hand, you wanted me to pay to allow you to express yourselves, I would have gone back to the office and left you in silence.”  Jacques assured me they were unable to comprehend what I was trying to tell them.  “When they see a white, they automatically think you have money to give them.  They have no idea how much twenty dollars is.”  Jacques was also worried about their reputation for violence.

It was June 24, National Day of the Fishermen, and we had taken advantage of the day to give them a chance to speak of their problems and what they need.  They were more than willing to expose their grievances over the airwaves but like most people in this country, they think you should pay them for breathing.

I left Wagagnia disappointed.  If tourism ever comes back to the Congo, no tourist will put up with that kind of treatment.

On keeping art alive

Tschopo district is up a dusty dirt road called Route Bouta, carved deep by the rains.  Along the road are a series of thatch-grass-roved stalls with ivory and wood handicrafts exposed on shelves and tables or on the ground.  Inside, men use chisels and files to carve the traditional masks and statues.  I could see whole herds of elephants in the exquisite carvings exposed in the stalls.

“Before the war there were 300 paillotes here,” said a little man who ran one shop that had about a dozen laborers. “Now, there are only seventeen left.”  This is good news for the remaining elephants. Apparently, these handicraftsmen are so well known that souvenir dealers from around the country will get their produce from them.  But with no tourism, business is very bad and the crafts are sold for nearly nothing.

Not so for one man who runs a shop called Atelier Libération.  He is a tough looking silent man who spends his lunch times outside the Hellenic Center trying to sell produce to UN personnel.   He has an ivory and wood chess set I would like to buy.  His original price was $200.  I offered $50.  He came down to $150 but won’t budge from there.

Across from his paillote is one, which also does paintings.  The artists, a round man and his son, do tremendous work using construction paints, printing inks and petrol to thin them out and brushes so used they defy description.  The themes are always the same: beautiful African women with exposed breasts, villages on the water with a golden sunset and animals in the forest.  The paintings are done on the back of thick wallpaper.  The starting price is $40, which means you can get one for less than ten.

They are all suffering from the war and do not hide their anger.  “Why don’t you UN people do something to get the Rwandans out of here?” a man asked me.  “You can see them here.  They walk past all the time.”  He added as have said so many others: “without the Rwandans, there would be no war.  The RCD is nothing without Rwanda.”

“Why don’t you do something about it?” is my usual answer.  I make it clear to the Congolese that as far as I am concerned, they are going to have to straighten out their mess themselves and that the international community can only assist them, not do it in their place.  It is a message they do not really like and never have an answer to, probably because they had never been told to take care of themselves before.  But it is confirmation once again at how much the RCD-Goma is hated in the zone it occupies and how much their Rwandan masters are despised and held responsible for the war.

With the transition coming (maybe) and the UN drawing up lists of war criminals, the RCD is trying to get a new virginity as the French say.  This was seen in their participation in the International Day Against Torture on June 26.  The ceremony was held in the presence of the UN and local Human Rights groups at the Kisangani prison, a Belgian built fortress-like brick structure dating back to 1925.

Now the RCD-Goma people know all about torture and summery executions so they are well placed to speak about Human Rights violations.  The Vice-Governor’s speech went something like this: “In a state of rule of law you need rule of law because rule of law will not work without rule of law.”  It seemed the fool, Mr. Floribert Asiane, had learned a new word but had no idea what it meant.  It was interesting though that they allowed us to visit the prison in which, they say, they only have a little over a dozen prisoners.

This is the dry season but we had quite a bit of rain this week.  I love the tropical rain from inside the house.  The gray clouds come like a slow moving tidal wave.  It is a darker gray than in Europe, seemingly reflecting the green forest.  The lightning is a high, long and narrow lightshow.  The wind comes suddenly and bends the trees in a circular movement about a minute before the rain starts and it is no slow start either.  The shower is turned on full blast straight away.  The water pours off the corrugated metal roofs forming long thick prison bars in front of your windows. Where the roofs fall together, you literally have a waterfalls.  The rumble of the water hitting the ground is tremendous.  The streets turn to muddy rivers in seconds.  The walls of the buildings are lined with people taking cover until the storm blows over.

After the rain ends, there is a few seconds of intense silence and then the city comes back to life with its hundreds of Toleka taxi-bicycles peddling their clients to their destinations and people walking with determination.

The rains made a mess of the Kisangani fair, which was supposed to open on Friday but only timidly began Sunday afternoon.  I was not so much disappointed by the shin deep mud as I was by the lack of local business booths.  Except for the UN and the Red Cross and maybe a handful of other stalls, the fair, or Karmesse as they call it, is in fact more than two dozen bars, each with there own lousy sound system on full blast, making what could have started out at one time as music, a deafening, brain-destroying, fuzzy noise.  It seems to be an occasion for the Boyamais (as the people of Kisangani are called) to party and get drunk in public on Primus beer.

To end this weeks report I have to tell you about the end of a war within the UN.  I had earlier told you how the Head of the Public Information Service, the chief PIO, was fighting with the Director of Radio Okapi and that both had told the UN it is me or the other.  Well, the UN has decided it is neither and has sacked both of them.  The chief PIO wanted Okapi to be a UN radio, promoting the UN, while the Okapi Director wanted the radio to be a Congolese public service managed and protected by the UN, giving the Congolese uncensored news about what is happening in their country and making the different actors explain themselves to the public.  What started out as a philosophical battle ended up as a personal war between two people who hated each other with a passion.  This made the UN look very bad and deeply divided the people within the UN information service.

We do not know who is taking over and what his philosophy will be as far as the radio is concerned.  Will the new person want to continue the joint venture with the NGO I am working for or will he want it to be fully managed by the UN?  At any rate, he will have to clarify things.  It has never been clear to me who manages what and this has led to clashes between PIOs and station chiefs within the UN, according to whether they lined up behind the chief PIO or the Okapi director, and a very undefined role for people like me who work for the Fondation Hirondelle.

A month after being sacked by the Fondation because they were not happy with my work, but nevertheless continuing to work, I have finally received my new contract (yet to be signed), which is basically the same as the old one, except it is for three months, renewable, and I am no longer a training officer, although it is not clearly defined in the contract what I am to be.  They say I will be station manager, but that needs a detailed job description for the reasons given above. 

Needless-to-say, all of this makes for a murky mess and bad morale.

 Leon and the kids at the school he ran

This week Malaria kept me in the hospital (see Malaria, June 17) so I was unable to observe very much but I do have a couple of good stories to tell you: UNICEF finds a way to help the warring parties improve forced conscription, young Rappers lash out at the war-lords and Kisangani gets the cell phone before the stage-coach.

UNICEF declared June 16^th “The Day of the African Child” and in the Congo, they found no better campaign than that of registering children with the administration. Only one percent of the children are registered at birth. We are in a country where males are forced into militias as young as eleven and twelve years old; where villagers are rounded up by the thousands and forced to do hard labor without pay for weeks on end, especially in the interests of the military although the authorities say it is in the interests of the “cause”, which means in the interests of their keeping power and filling their pockets.

I pointed out to the UNICEF representative in Kisangani that this would just help the warlords know where the people are to round them up.  I said you are helping them find the resources to wage war and the proof is in the enthusiasm with which the RCD-Goma people took up the campaign along with UNICEF.  The Rwandan backed dictators hardly ever join the international community in an effort to improve the lives of the people.  I suggested that the registration could be done when peace comes and it is time to draw up lists of voters for the elections.  I also suggested that lists of births exist in the churches where the children are baptized and that these lists could be used to help in voter registration when the time comes.

The UNICEF man was appalled that I was not going to put Radio Okapi one hundred percent behind their drive.  Yet, he had no answers to my objections.  To make matters worse, the RCD-G people make parents pay one dollar for every child registered.  This is a lot of money for the people here.

When the reporters asked people in the streets why they do not register their children all of the above reasons were given.  They also said, “why should we pay one dollar to the RCD when they don’t even pay the civil servants they make work for them?”  Yet, further proof that people can see where their interests lie and they are not in the RCD-G “cause”.  Fortunately, the campaign was a big flop and the radio raised all the right questions.

A Canadian with UN Public Information came through town this week.  Sebastian is a very young man who wears his blue UN cap like a gum-chewing kid and looks like he would be more at home on a college campus than in the Congo jungle. He shaves every fourth day hoping the stubble will give him a more mature air. He is also a fairly useless guy who spends his time licking the ass of his superiors and talking on the phone with friends.  While I was in hospital, he did nothing to help out the reporters even though Radio Okapi is included in his functions, but from what I am told it is just as well he left them alone. I think his place is on a skateboard somewhere in Toronto and definitely not here in the Congo.

He was brought out of Butembo where the Mayi Mayi were threatening to take the UN people hostage because the UN did nothing to stop the RCD-G offensive in North Kivu against them and the RCD-K/ML allied with the government.  But Sebastian had special treatment.  Accused by the Mayi Mayi of being a Rwandan agent, he was simply to be put to death.  So, the UN brought him out of Butembo, three days before it was taken by the RCD-G, and are sending him to …. Bunia!

  Kisangani Prison built by the Belgians, not repaired but still in use

There were also reports on RFI and the BBC that the South Africans allowed the RCD-G to seize three of their armored vehicles fully equipped.  The UN denied this. It would be nice if some day somebody verified something in this country.

As the fighting continues, the different battling factions signed yet another ceasefire on June 19 in Bujumbura.  The International Community puts a lot more importance on signing papers than the Congolese do.  Like children who say “I’m sorry” and go right back to doing what they are yelled at for doing, the Congolese factions sign the papers they are told to sign and ignore them royally, just to sign another one a week and thousands of dead later.  And for the moment, despite their obvious direct involvement (reports of MI-24 helicopter gun-ships and tanks), the Rwandans are not being called to account at all, at least not publicly.

On Sunday, June 22, the New York Times ran an article on Bunia, in which they said the United States feels more troops in Congo is not what is needed.  What is needed, Washington says, is greater political pressure.  It does not look like the US is ready to stop their Rwandan friends.  This is a far cry from the US attitude concerning Iraq.

On Saturday night, the Public Information Service organized a competition of local Kisangani Rap groups on the theme “Rap for Peace”.  It was a great success with a full house of 350 people and hundreds more outside hoping to get in.  The show was also rebroadcast on one of the two local TV stations.  This is amazing because the message from these young rappers would have landed them in jail even in France.  They called on youth to refuse to go into the military and told parents to send their children to school.  They chastised the warlords for waging a useless war, filling their own pockets and causing misery for the people.  Nobody likes the RCD-G and they know it.  That is one reason why they are sabotaging the peace process.  They do not stand a chance of getting elected. 

But few people express openly their hostility to the RCD for fear of detention, torture and even death.  The fact that the rappers did this with the Governor and the Mayor (both appointed) in the concert-hall shows a great deal of courage.  I am sure the RCD got the message.  The following day I sent the Okapi reporters around to the homes of all the groups that took part to make sure none of them were arrested during the night, something the PIO had not thought of.

Another interesting thing about the concert is the attempt by the Governor to prevent it.  He said the groups had not paid the taxes they have to pay in order to perform in public.  He also wanted the UN to pay a tax for holding the event and include them in the list of sponsors but of course without contributing any money.  The PIO told the governor in no uncertain terms: “ if you want to hold a concert nobody is stopping you.  If you stop ours we will tell everybody you did and why.”  The Governor backed down.

A reporter with Le Nouvel Observateur and Le Monde Diplomatique, Rene Lefort, paid us a visit on June 21.  He spent a week in Kinshasa, is spending a week in Kisangani and will spend a third in Bukavu to write on Congolese survival strategies.  I tried to tell him he was visiting the wrong places, because in fact, the Congolese are not surviving; they are dying like flies.  But he will write about the cities where people have gardens in every corner that gets a little light and where fighting is rare and will not visit places like Kindu, where the RCD-G refused to let people out into the fields to farm and where every morning, they brought out the dead as I described when I was there.  Having strategies for survival means you are in a fairly safe place under the eyes of internationals.  He is visiting three cities where he can get decent accommodation, edible food and get in some tourism too and still write something about the Congo, which will make the French readers ouh and ah.  Of course, you cannot do everything in three weeks.  But would it not be more interesting to go to Kalima (see report from April) where the Coltan miners are dying of radiation sickness and their families of hunger and do a portrait of the town?  His article would not be on survival strategies but rather on how do any of them survive at all?

It is amazing to see how the people here will do nothing to invest in their futures or their country’s future but seize on anything modern when it is offered to them on a platter.  After nearly six years with no telephone service, a private cell phone operator on Monday, June 16, opened shop in Kinsagani.  Mr. Bilal, a Lebanese businessman based in Rwanda and therefore in with the RCD-G, was given a license to operate after paying a fee reportedly of 140 000 dollars.  His company is called Celtel and allows people to even call internationally using satellite.

The Okapi reporters all bought their cell phones even though they do not need them for work given they are all issued Motorola walkie-talkies.  They wear them hanging around their necks and play with the different rings and enjoy being seen talking to each other in public.  A number of locals have opened distribution shops to sell the phones and the recharge cards, too many for the available market.  You have as many as four distributors on one street.

  Mr. Bilal is well known in these parts.  His mother company, Société Lara, also runs the Lac Kivu company, which the RCD-G gave the monopoly on the diamond trade.  This has made the local Congolese diamond traders very upset.  They threatened to go on strike but cancelled their movement when they realized nobody would notice.

They told me when I got here that no matter how many prophylactics I take I will still get malaria.  “Everybody gets it and more than once.”  They said there are four strains of malaria in the Congo, each nastier than the other.  I was told that “the only thing the prophylactics would accomplish is hide the malaria from the test” when I get it.

Well, I did test negative but the Moroccan Army doctor, who recognizes malaria when he sees it, told me “the anti-malaria pills also decapitated the full effects.”  Thank God.

Malaria.  You are so cold your fingers become numb and you shiver only to sweat out more water than you thought your body contained a few minutes later.  I was in the North Pole mode when I arrived at the Moroccan Army level II field hospital and asked the orderlies to put my bed in the Hammam.  That was shortly before I lost consciousness.

Your entrails decide to empty everything in liquid form from both ends at the same time without stop.  Every joint in your body hurts, including the joints you don’t have.  I call these phantom joints.  My favorite phantom joint is halfway up the thigh.  Even the testicles hurt. Your head throbs with pain.  There are visions of people coming and going when you think you have your eyes open but you cannot be sure.  You lose complete sense of time.

For a couple of days your eyes feel like they are popping out of your head.  It is hard to walk straight and keep your balance.  I, being a man, which means being a big baby when I am ill, wanted Sonja to be there to hold my hand.  I would have even settled for my mother.  Come to think of it, those are probably the only two women I would have accepted.  Imagine that, my Mom?

I had been suffering the symptoms for eight days but had tested negative.  If I had seen this Moroccan doctor at first, I may have been able to avoid some of the discomfort over the previous week.  The Doctor, a tall, graying, officer with a handsome youthful face and a very aristocratic air about him, runs what they call a level II hospital.  To give you an idea, a level I hospital is a tent on the battlefield.  This hospital has a couple of rooms in prefabricated trailer like boxes, two large plastic-canvas tents with beds and a few shipping containers added on.  It is equipped with AC and running hot water when there is electricity and is clean.

The orderlies and nurses, all male soldiers, are very nice and the food is good, believe it or not.  I even had grapes!  They must have been flown in from South Africa by the Monuc for the contingents.

One reason the orderlies and nurses are nice to me is I saved four of them from punishment over the weekend.  They flagged me down in town and asked me to drive them back to base but not stop at the Moroccan checkpoint.  They were slightly AWOL.  So, I drove them to the hospital, past the Moroccan guards, and left them with the Uruguayan contingent, which allowed them to sneak back into their side of the camp unnoticed.  I told them I expected a mechoui and a tangine for the service.  Two days later, they were caring for me like the royal baby.

Nevertheless, like the child-soldiers who brutally hack their victims to pieces with machetes in free-license blood-orgies, the mosquitoes tormented me right into my hospital bed.

After the slight taste of the disease, which kills the most in the world, I now believe the statistics put forward by the British NGO, Merlin: five hundred thousand people die in the Congo every year from Malaria. 

I get pumped up with 12 pints of a glucose and quinine cocktail.  The Congolese sit in their village with nothing, not even aspirin.  This is one thing the Congolese cannot be blamed for.  I suppose it can be likened to the plague epidemics in Europe in the Middle Ages, except the Congolese are generally clean, which the Europeans were definitely not.  This deserves clarification because the Congolese know little about personal hygiene, which leads to many other complications but they do keep their immediate environment swept and litter free.

The Congolese are masters at fatalism.  Everything is God’s doing, from babies to premature death. An Okapi journalist in Kindu told me “it is not a problem so many die from Malaria in the Congo, because we have more than enough children to make up for them.”  Quite right, if you are into Malthusian logic and, if you are, then the Congo is the best laboratory you could hope for to prove your theories.  Many years ago, an aging French mercenary with an unhealthy agenda tried to convince me it is wrong to vaccinate the Africans.  “You allow them to live and they over populate, then even more die off than before.  You just upset the balance and make things worse.”

At the very least, one should expect this bout with Malaria to bring me closer to the Congolese.  I now share something with them.  I have a little bit of the Congo flowing in my veins and perhaps for the rest of my life, but, unlike many whites, I do not have a bit of the Congo lining my pockets or filling my bank account.  Maybe, as Plekanov wrote, I just don’t know my arithmetic.

It has been an interesting and more or less relaxing week for me with a near diplomatic incident due to an Okapi reporter’s blunder, the UN finally learned of smuggling of goods on their barges from Kinshasa and the Welfare Club held a good-bye party for Scotland’s Mike Dora, Kilts and all.

I was extremely enthusiastic when a reporter came back from a public meeting in which the RCD-Goma mayor (appointed) of Kisangani supposedly admitted Rwandan troops are in the Congo.  Despite all the testimonies that the troops are here, the UN has not been able to “verify”.  Such a verification, as I have said before, could hurt the peace process already in shambles.  I thought if we got this recorded statement on the National airwaves, then somebody would have to do something to get the Rwandans out.

I sent the recorded statement to Kinshasa for the national broadcast and we aired it on our local news bulletin introducing it as an RCD-Goma official publicly recognizing Rwandan troops are in the Congo.  Well, the mayor, a bald short and square man with an angry face and shaven head, who likes banning any public meetings but his own, including football matches, wasted no time in angrily reacting and summoning us to his office immediately.  We ignored the summons, so he came to us and said we had taken his words out of context and that he was speaking in the past.  The speech was in Swahili and so I asked other reporters to listen to the whole tape and the mayor was right!

We discovered that he was using reported speech in the present tense in a context he clearly made the past.  He said something like: “ a few years ago, the government admitted what we have been saying all along: There are Interahamwe in the country.  For the Rwandans the Interahamwe are a threat.  So the Rwandans say: ‘We can’t leave the country until the security is assured.  We have to stay and won’t go home until the Interahamwe are no longer a threat.’”

Fortunately, the national radio had not broadcast the extract taken out of context and so we avoided a major diplomatic incident, which could have had international repercussions, not to mention my future employment with the UN. Can you imagine if the UN and the EU picked up on it and said “look, the RCD-G admit you Rwandans are in the country.  Get out!” On the local station we broadcast a correction with an extract of the same thing, this time clearly in the past, of a speech made in Lingala the following day.  The worst part of all this is this reporter, who is not really very bright, still does not understand what he did wrong.

The real problem is the Rwandans are still in the country.  While all eyes are fixed on Bunia and the French troops deploying there to stop the Lendu and the Hema from massacring the population along with each other, the RCD-Goma have launched an offensive on the RCD-K/ML, allied with Kinshasa, and have taken a few towns near and including Lubero further South.  There are reports of MI-24 Russian made attack helicopters giving RCD-G troops air support.  The only ones with those helicopters are the Rwandans.  I saw a dozen of them at the airport in Kigali in April.

The RCD-K/ML also say they have taken Rwandan prisoners.  Of course, none of the international press has bothered to “verify” this information.  If they would confirm the information, then we could perhaps attack one of the major sources of the ongoing war in the DR Congo; i.e. Rwanda.

To make matters worse, the RCD-K/ML say they will not apply the Geneva Conventions to the Rwandan prisoners; that they are bandits.  What this means is they will torture and kill them and keep the spiral of inhumanity going.  And as nobody wants to “verify” the information, nobody will complain of the mistreatment of prisoners of war.

Also adding to the heat is the move by the RCD-G towards Beni (with Rwandans?) brings them closer to the Ugandan border, something Kamapala has clearly said it will not tolerate.  So, there is a good chance the Ugandans will come back into the fray.  Meanwhile back in Bunia, French Mirage fighter jets fly low to impress the drunken and stoned fighters and cause villagers who have never seen such technology to faint from fear in several cases.

The new head of the MONUC, the former American ambassador to Congo, may be able to convince Washington to stop backing the Rwandans. He may even convince them that American and Canadian mining companies will still be able to get their Coltan, Uranium, gold and other precious minerals out of Eastern Congo even with the Congolese in control.  I read in recent reports, including one from the UN, that George Bush father invested heavily in these mining operations around the time the war began.  When I get back to Kinshasa I will look up the names of the companies again.

On a lighter note, but still with dramatic consequences for the population, the United Nations has finally discovered the crews of the UN tugs bringing barges from Kinshasa to Kisangani are smuggling goods for small retailers.  You remember how I pointed out in March, that within an hour of the UN barges docking, the people were selling salt, smoked fish and other produce from outside the RCD-G zone, just one hundred meters from UN HQ and that everybody knew, including the RCD-G officials, except the UN.  Christ, I learned of it just three days after arriving.

Well, last week a security patrol spotted pirogues off-loading sacks from the barges late at night and called in more security.  Although apparently most of the stuff had already been off-loaded, the UN discovered a sizable list of things which were not on their cargo manifest: hundreds of sacks of cement, hundreds of sacks of salt, machetes, bicycles, cases of soap etc.  Of course, now that the UN knew, the RCD-G could use it as a further reason to keep the river closed to traffic and thus denying the people of Kisangani access to more and cheaper produce.

Upon investigation, the captain of the tug said the crew had smuggled the goods on board without his knowledge and begged the UN not to cancel the contract with him.  More interesting in unraveling the Congolese way of thinking is the reaction of those Kisangani businessmen who paid for the stuff to be smuggled.  They merely handed in a list of the names of the ‘owners’ of the produce with a complete list of what was on the boat that ‘belonged’ to each and demanded the UN hand it over.  The UN decided to send the barge back to Kinshasa with the goods still on board.

Once again the Congolese have shown that for them, there is nothing wrong with illegal activity, even if it jeopardizes the welfare of a whole city, in this case giving the RCD-G an excuse to keep the river shut to traffic.  The only thing wrong is getting caught.  And once again we have a further example of just how bad UN security is.

Even the reporters at Okapi who are supposed to be among the elite that will build the new modern Congo are in this ‘live in the moment, take what you can and tomorrow never comes’ mentality.  They think it is normal the UN driver uses the UN vehicle to drive them home from work, a task that takes over two hours.  I try to convince them to buy a bicycle ($ 70) or a 100cc motorbike ($500).  I remind you they make $750 a month.  I explained to them that my motorcycle cost me three months salary and took me two years to pay and that theirs would cost less than one month’s salary.  Comparatively, and given the standards of living, their salaries go much further here than mine does in Paris.  But investing in the future is something they cannot fathom, especially when they can milk the system dry in the present.

Here is another major problem.  They see the MONUC as a bottomless pit of money.  They waste office equipment as if ‘there is no tomorrow’, and cannot understand when I ask them to be a bit less wasteful.  They think the eight hundred million dollar MONUC budget is enormous.  You can tell them it is less than the budget for the New York Fire Department or less than what the UN wants to give Iraq in food aid alone, they just do not want to hear it.  This is discouraging for me.  The Okapi reporters are the elite, the people who are supposed to be setting the example for the Congo we would like to see enter the modern world where all citizens get their just rewards for their labor and where citizens also think about the collective good.  That is one reason they are paid so well and have legal contracts.  Congolese outside the UN system have no contracts and never get paid.

Lets change the subject. Often, people with the UN behave more like a university fraternity club than an international organization with a tough mission. Mike Dora, a high-ranking UN official is leaving the Congo. You may have seen him on TV. You cannot miss him. He is the Scot running around the jungle under fire in a light-blue helmet, flak jacket and wearing a kilt. The Welfare Club gave a going-away party for him on Saturday and kilts were a must.  The Irish had little trouble fitting in.  I may add, Irish kilts are much shorter than Scottish kilts, which seemed to please the Congolese women.  Nor did other Scots or those with Scottish descent have problems dressing for the occasion. But a few had to use their imagination.  One chubby and balding man wore his army sleeping bag wrapped around his waist as a big fluffy camouflage kilt. It was ridiculous.  However, the buffet, although much too much for the carnivorous to my taste, was quite good and only cost eight dollars.  Everybody was forced to sing ‘The Flower of Scotland’, which does not bother me in the least as I never liked ‘proud King Edward’, nor his Army.

I have moved into the flat of the person who runs the radio here while she is on leave.  Rachel is a small Haitian métisse who co-owns a documentary film production company in Port-au-Prince in her real life.  The flat is very big and open behind bars on both ends, with three-meter high ceilings and fully furnished, to Congolese standards that is.  Rachel has bought a whole forest in native woodcarvings and I am curious to see how she will ship it all home.  She says she has no idea yet.  If she does find a way, it will help me because I am on the path to establishing a little collection of artwork.  The locals are always trying to sell me Ivory and leopard skins and things made out of other endangered species.  I have not yet found a way to make them understand that the products are illegal and why they are illegal.  I’m not sure there is a way.

Greek church and Hellenic Center, Kisangani

Every day, when I go to the Hellenic Center for my good Greek lunch, it is the same thing.  The trinket sellers offer me the produce. I tell them again I cannot own such objects and why I cannot and they will offer me another object made out of the same banned material.  But I am afraid that if I come across a carved ivory chess set I may do something that could get me in trouble.

I met a couple of painters selling their touristy themes.  They have that nice African naïve style with those beautiful colors of the red earth and the jungle.  I do not know how they get their oil paints. They say it is very difficult.  I was thinking of proposing they try palm oil and local dyes to make colors. They use burlap or canvas bags to paint on.  I am hoping to go to their homes and watch them paint.  I just wish they would offer me some sort of original idea and not the kitschy man-with-pipe or elephant-in-the-sunset.  I regret that they are more interested in selling me a painting than talking to me about their lives, techniques and so on.  If I buy one, they will just want to sell me another and I do not think I would ever be able to sit down and have the real chat with them I want to have.

Just look at what happened with the artist in Gbadolite.