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Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town. Warren John St.
Читать онлайн.Название Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007380947
Автор произведения Warren John St.
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
The new nation was really an arbitrary assemblage of ethnic groups and tribes with little in common save their location within an imposed and haphazardly drawn border, so ethnic and tribal tensions immediately set in. Lumumba, after turning to the Soviet Union for backing, was tortured and killed by a commander named Joseph Desire Mobutu, an act done with the blessing, if not the outright aid, of the CIA.
Mobutu renamed the country Zaire and appointed himself president, a post he held for thirty-two years with the support of the United States, which was eager to have a Cold War ally in the heart of Africa. Mobutu soon became the caricature of a violent, dictatorial kleptocrat. Recognizable to Westerners for his leopard-skin pillbox hat and gaudy large-frame glasses, Mobutu bought villas and yachts in Europe, flew around on the Concorde, and stashed billions of dollars in Swiss banks, including one he bought for himself. To distract the public from his misrule, he fomented ethnic rivalries and supported guerrilla movements in neighboring countries that killed countless civilians. Nevertheless, President Ronald Reagan praised Mobutu as “a voice of good sense and good will.”
But when the Cold War ended, financial and political support from Washington waned. To continue funding his extravagance, Mobutu simply appropriated the national treasury, printing money whenever he needed it, which led to staggering inflation that further weakened his failing country.
An aging Mobutu supported Hutu militias in the eastern districts of his country and in Rwanda, militias that ultimately contributed to the Rwandan genocide. He then found his country destabilized when hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees fled into refugee camps in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, fearing retribution from Tutsis in Rwanda. Mobutu’s own army allied with Hutus in those camps, a move that led a broad coalition of Tutsis and other ethnic groups in eastern Zaire to form their own militia and join forces with the governments of Rwanda and Uganda against Mobutu. The leader of this coalition was a man named Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a former Marxist rebel who had been educated in France and was, until his rapid ascension to power, a relative unknown in Congo. Kabila’s coalition defeated Mobutu’s entrenched regime with surprising ease, and in May 1997, Kabila entered Kinshasa and declared himself president of a country he renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mobutu fled the country for Morocco, where he died a few months later.
PAULA AND JOSEPH Balegamire were from Bukavu, the capital city of South Kivu on the border with Rwanda, which had been overrun with Hutu refugees in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Paula taught dressmaking and her husband was an information officer at a local farmers’ collective. They were Tutsis—and allied with a group in Laurent Kabila’s coalition led by a military commander named Anselme Masasu Nindaga. When Kabila assumed the presidency in Kinshasa, he brought Masasu, as he was more commonly known, along with other generals to work in his new government, and the commanders in turn brought along people of their own ethnic groups and regions. The Balegamires joined up and moved from the east to Kinshasa. But Kabila soon revealed he had little interest in maintaining this broad coalition. He appointed close friends and family to government positions, began to jail political dissidents and human rights advocates, and prevented the United Nations from investigating the slaughter of thousands of refugees in eastern Rwanda, for which his own men were responsible. He soon fell out with his former ally Anselme Masasu Nindaga as well, whom he suspected of plotting a coup. In 1997 Kabila had Masasu arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
During the next two years the Kabila government engaged in a relentless purge of anyone it thought might have been associated with the plots against him—especially Tutsis from eastern Congo, and anyone who had ever had anything to do with Masasu. As Tutsis from Kivu, the Balegamires were especially vulnerable. According to a report by Amnesty International, “Anyone from the Kivu region, or with links to the region, appears to have been at risk of arrest and incommunicado detention without any judicial authorization or supervision.” Some were tortured, others “disappeared.” Congo was descending once again into an all-out ethnic war.
Paula and Joseph began to fear for their lives. Paula took her children out of Kinshasa and headed east, traveling by bus to Rwanda and eventually traversing Lake Tanganyika to Tanzania and, later, Zambia. Eventually, Paula concluded that conditions were safe enough to return to Kinshasa, after a month on the move, but soon after she arrived with her children, violence against those from the east resumed.
In January, a group of twenty-nine men—most of them former associates of Masasu, including Joseph Balegamire—left Kinshasa in small dug-out canoes and paddled across five kilometers of the muddy Congo River to Brazzaville, the capital city of the former French colony the Republic of Congo, in an effort to escape the violence. The men took refuge in a small house on Franceville Street that had been rented by a fellow refugee from across the river. When the house became too crowded, nineteen of the men, including Joseph, moved to another small house at 373 rue Lweme, in the Plateau des 15 Ans section of Brazzaville. The men received letters from the United Nations, noting that they had been in touch with the organization—important protection should they encounter deportation threats from the local government. They sought out representatives of Amnesty International to inform them about the torture, disappearances, and killings of people from Kivu that were being carried out by the Kabila government across the river.
Eventually, Paula Balegamire and her children joined her husband in Brazzaville. The house on the rue Lweme was overcrowded with the men who had fled Kinshasa, so their wives and children stayed with other refugees around Brazzaville so as not to draw the attention of local security forces who were hostile to the refugees pouring into the city. The plan was to lie low until the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) could place the families in a safe refugee camp, or even better, in a country far from the violence.
On January 16, 2001, a few weeks after the men had fled Kinshasa, a bodyguard approached Laurent Kabila at the presidential palace there and fired at least two shots into his back. The assassin, a man named Rachidi Minzele, was immediately shot and killed, taking with him the only definitive knowledge about the motives behind his deed, which spawned a confounding web of conspiracy theories. Kabila’s son Joseph assumed control of the country ten days later, when Laurent-Désiré Kabila died of his wounds.
Back in Brazzaville, news of Kabila’s death sent a shudder through the men who had fled Kinshasa weeks before. As they feared, the younger Kabila immediately began a crackdown against his father’s political enemies—especially those associated with Anselme Masasu Nindaga. Nindaga himself was executed. Scores of others were rounded up, thrown into prison, and tortured into implicating friends, neighbors, and associates. Countless more were killed or vanished.
The crackdown didn’t stop at the banks of the Congo River. Kabila’s security forces had been cooperating with the government in Brazzaville to patrol the riverbanks for refugees and fleeing political rivals who could be detained as suspects in the quickly growing conspiracy. In the middle of the night of January 28, police descended on the house on the rue Lweme and arrested the men inside, including Paula’s husband, Joseph Balegamire.
Paula was five months pregnant and had five children when her husband was arrested. She and the wives of the other men who had been arrested began a panicked search for their husbands. They besieged the local UNHCR office, demanding to know the whereabouts of men who had applied to the UN for safety. Pressed by the UN and Amnesty International for an explanation, the government in Brazzaville at first denied any knowledge of the men’s whereabouts, then later said they had been moved to the interior of the country for their own safety. Days later, through a report on an African radio news service, the wives and families of the men learned the dreadful truth. The government in Brazzaville had handed the nineteen men over to Joseph Kabila, in obvious violation of international law, which forbids nations from sending asylum applicants back to countries where they may face harm. No one knows exactly why the men were handed over. A rumor circulated that they were given to Kabila as part of a prisoner exchange. Perhaps Kabila’s government