All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo

INTRODUCTION

We went in first with soldiers, young and terrified Ugandan kids straight from the villages, whip-thin in their baggy fatigues and wound tight around their triggers even high above the clouds. The Ugandan army flew Antonov-26s into Congo, scrapped by the Soviet bloc and born again for African war, steel Trojan horses loaded with gun-mounted jeeps, barrels of diesel, and crates of banana moonshine. You found a place on the floor and instantly started sweating, nestled between rifles and rocket launchers so close to your eyeballs you could study the paint chips on the grenades. There was little cabin pressure to soothe the landings, and going in fast, you felt like your eyes would pop out of your skull. The soldiers buried their faces in their hats to hide the tears. And all you could do was wince and give a thumbs-up and be thankful the engines were so loud that no one could hear you scream.

Later on it was UN Air, the almighty move-con, sleek, white 727s that floated in like flying nuns. Inside you were greeted by cordial South African blondes who served Coca-Cola and gave quiet comfort to the malaria evac whose IV drip hung from the overhead compartment. You could read a book or fade out with your headphones or lose yourself in the six hundred shades of green below. Coming in was normal enough, but after returning from the field still plugged into the war, stepping into those planes was like being dunked in pure oxygen, or finding your way to the mother ship after crossing a hostile, unsheltered land.

There were eleventh-hour charter flights and Airbus red-eyes, six-seater Cessnas and the French-army Hercules, where female crew members doled out pizza and left you feeling ashamed by your own filth. There were speedboats across the Congo River, old German warships that ferried you over Lake Tanganyika, and one guy I met rode all the way from Paris on a Honda four-stroke before the border guards rolled him clean.

There were journalists and aid workers, diplomats and diamond dealers, assorted opportunists, and third-world peacekeepers deputized and deployed into hell. You could guess the new guys by the way their eyes never left the window; sitting next to them always made me nervous. There were many ways of going in, and everyone had his own reasons. But when we arrived, there was always the same war. Many came simply to test themselves against the brutal country, and I’ve learned there is nothing wrong with that. What mattered was what kind of prints you left behind in the red dirt. Five centuries of those bootprints now packed the soil and snaked into the trees, so many they bled into one enormous trail that hid below the camouflage and slowly choked the land.

But get down close and you can see.

One of those trails was mine.

Chapter One

IN THE VALLEY OF THE GUN

I

For me, the war started with the sound of a horn.

On the morning of April 3,2003, as dawn broke over the green hills of northeastern Congo, several hundred ethnic Lendu warriors gathered along the lip of a narrow valley overlooking the sleeping villages of Drodro, Largu, and Jissa. The villages were mainly occupied by members of the Hema tribe, who’d become archenemies of the Lendu in a macabre conflict hatched amid Congo’s larger, ongoing war, which had swept across the vast nation in 1998 and already killed several million people.

The Lendu fighters carried AK-47s held together with duct tape and wire, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar tubes strapped to their backs. Some had long spears with steel tips whittled to saw teeth, arrows dipped in poison, and broad machetes ground to a razor edge. They’d marched all night from their villages deep in the hills, trailing along their women, children, and elderly, who now gathered in the rear and waited for the signal. Finally it came: the low wail of a horn, of a warrior squeezing his air through the narrow bore of a bull’s antler. And at the sound of the horn, the bottom dropped from the hills.

They came in three waves: the first rushed in behind a volley of machine-gun fire, rockets, and mortars. The mud-walled huts of the villages exploded and burst into flame as rocket fire and shrapnel ignited the thatched roofs. Villagers scrambled out of their homes and ran for the trees, only to find that every exit was blocked. Gunmen caught them in the open and cut them down with rifles, while others emptied their guns into the thin walls of homes, then torched the roofs.

The second wave moved through with spears, arrows, and machetes to finish off the wounded. Those found hiding amid the manioc and sugarcane were dragged to the street and their throats cut. The warriors pounced from body to body, their long blades painted with blood, shouting, Come out, Hema! The Lendu have come!

Those who managed to hide in the trees lived to watch the massacre unfold. One father watched a group of Lendu boys surround his six children in their yard. The boys carried machetes and AK-47s. One of them took a running kick at the smallest child, a six-month-old infant crawling in the yard. The blow sent the child straight into the air, like a deflated ball, and machete blades caught her tiny body on the way down. The warriors then dismantled the remaining five children in the yard.

Down the road, survivors kept still in their hiding spots while several warriors opened the chest of a dead man, cut out his heart, and ate, blood streaming down their wrists. Other fighters held severed arms over the burning rubble and picked at the charred meat with their fingers. As the warriors dispatched the living, the third wave, the Lendu elderly, women, and children, rounded up cattle in the nearby fields and looted the village food pantries.

Around eight A.M., a second horn sounded and the warriors melted back into the hills. That morning, over a dozen Hema villages and nearby settlements were raided and destroyed. Initial reports estimated nearly one thousand people were murdered in just under three hours.

At the time I was living in Nairobi, eight hundred kilometers to the east and a universe removed. I was two months out of New York City and still mesmerized every time I stepped outside into all that sunshine. I’d moved to Kenya to find work as a freelance reporter and had been spending my days and nights with detectives patrolling the Nairobi slums, hunting the carjackers and thieves who made that city one of the scariest places I’d ever been. But few editors in the States seemed interested in my African cop saga, and after two months’ work, I was going broke with nothing to show for it.

During my first week in town I’d made friends with the bureau chief of the Associated Press. Susan Linnee was a twenty-five-year veteran of the wires who’d seen her share of people like me, guys who rolled in with half a clue about the region and talked as if they were reading from an encyclopedia. But she graciously allowed me to use the bureau to make phone calls and use the computers and never once bristled at my inexperience or naïve comments.

In Congo, the news of the Drodro massacre took two days to travel seventy kilometers south to the small United Nations base in the town of Bunia. Susan received the news flash across the wire, and a few hours later I walked into the office from one of my patrols. She called me into her office.

Have you ever been to Congo? she said.

I shook my head.

Do you know anything about Congo?

I said no, nothing.

Well, I’m sending Rodrique and Azim on a flight this afternoon.

Okay.

You should go with them, see how they work. It’ll be a good experience for you.

She handed me an envelope with a plane ticket inside. I looked up, confused. Rodrique Ngowi and Sayyid Azim were seasoned staff who’d been to Congo many times; I had no connection with AP at all, other than loitering in their office.

Pay me back when you can, she said. I’m sure you can sell the story somewhere. I rushed home and packed a bag, then paused at the door before finally walking out. By evening, I was sitting in a hotel bar in Entebbe, Uganda, buzzing with paranoia about the morning departure. I thought of the map of Africa that had hung on the wall of my old apartment in New York. I’d marked the places I’d wanted to work, places in Ethiopia, Eritrea, along the Serengeti for the great migration. But Congo remained this green abyss, stitched by lost-looking rivers that snaked through bad jungle. Guys like me disappeared in places like that, I’d thought. There was a small television in the corner of the bar playing CNN, and while I sipped my beer, American tanks were rolling into Baghdad.

The Ugandan army had occupied Congo since 1998, when Uganda and Rwanda invaded the country to oust the Congolese president, Laurent Kabila. They still ran their flights in and out of Congo from the old Entebbe airport, the one that had been attacked by Israeli warplanes in the hostage rescue in 1976. The white concrete terminal remained chewed and peppered with bullet holes the size of golf balls. We piled into one of the old Antonovs parked on the tarmac, piloted by a ruddy, potbellied Ukrainian wearing white athletic socks and sandals. As we climbed the ladder, I saw he’d dismantled the landing gear and had it scattered across the tarmac like evidence at a crime scene. Inside the plane, the reporters and soldiers were pressed shoulder to shoulder. I found a seat on a stack of paint cans in the corner of the hold, and as we lifted off, the pile collapsed and doused the soldier next to me in thick, blue paint. He didn’t even flinch, just clutched his rifle and watched the paint dribble down his leg and pool onto his boot. Forty-five minutes later, the pilot nose-dived into Bunia and we emerged into the white light, tears streaming down our cheeks and deaf from the noise.

Bunia was the regional capital of the Ituri district in the sprawling Oriental province, where seven thousand Ugandan soldiers were based. I’d expected Congo to be thick jungle and sucking humidity. But Bunia sat on the western rise of the Great Rift Valley, over twelve hundred meters above the forest, where the landscape was mostly grass-covered hills. The air was hot, but dry. And in the early mornings when the sun was right, the town’s dust-choked boulevard looked as lonesome and lawless as in an old John Ford film.

The Ugandan soldiers were scattered throughout the hills of Ituri and, following the Drodro massacre, had moved several platoons to that village for security. The next morning their jeeps drove us the seventy kilometers north into the hills toward Drodro, a spine-shattering ride that took five hours over switchback roads that were rutted and washed from the rains. The soldiers were based at a redbrick Catholic mission tucked amid the trees, where about one hundred half-naked and hungry survivors had staggered from the bush for protection.

Inside the tiny mission clinic, the wounded were doubled up on beds and foam mattresses that lined the concrete floors. There was a woman who’d lost her leg to a machete, her eyelids fluttering like moth wings as she faded in and out from the pain, and a five-year-old boy with a necklace gash from ear to ear where the raiders had tried to take his head. The clinic had no real medicine, and inside the hot, airless chamber, the sickly-sweet smell of infection hung thick and syrupy. After half an hour my vision began to pixelate and I nearly fainted against the wall. I stumbled out into the fresh air and was sick in a nearby latrine, praying none of my colleagues had seen me run. I managed to go back and finish my interviews and came out with a decent story, one I sold to the Chicago Tribune for four hundred dollars—my first.

But I wasn’t satisfied with just one story. One story had only lifted the lid, and down inside was this dark, forgotten war that grabbed hold and wouldn’t let me go. By the time I flew back to Kenya two days later, all I could think about was going back to Congo.

In Nairobi, I tapped into AP’s archives, borrowed books from friends, and began reading everything I could find. The war in Ituri between the Hema and Lendu was just another front in Congo’s years-long war, a devastating conflict entirely orchestrated by outsiders. The war had initially been sparked by the 1994 genocide next door in Rwanda, when Hutu militia had massacred around eight hundred thousand ethnic Tutsi in just one hundred days. When Tutsi-led rebels finally crushed the genocide and took the capital, Kigali, tens of thousands of Hutu killers rushed over the border into the forested mountains of Congo. There they regrouped for further attacks on Rwanda.

Rwanda’s new Tutsi-led government began accusing Congo’s then dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, of giving refuge to the rebels. In late 1996, Congolese rebels backed by Rwandan and Ugandan troops seized control of eastern Congo to exterminate the Hutu militia. And once they had a foothold in the east, they marched for seven months across the jungle to Kinshasa in the west and overthrew Mobutu, imposing the rebel leader Laurent Kabila as president. But once in power, Kabila alienated and ousted his Rwandan staff who’d put him in office. So in August 1998, Rwanda and Uganda invaded again with the help of neighboring Burundi, while Kabila mounted a firm defensive with troops from Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Chad, and Burundian rebels.

The country eventually divided into three parts: the regions held by Kabila’s government-allied forces; Rwandan-occupied areas shared with their Congolese rebel group Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD); and the Ugandan-held territories controlled alongside their rebel groups Movement for Congolese Democracy (MLC) and an offshoot of the RCD called RCD-Kisangani. The mercurial allegiances of Rwanda, Uganda, and the government to their various rebel factions caused even greater turmoil and infighting. As a result, these groups splintered throughout the war and produced a dizzying list of acronyms like RCD-G, RCD-K/M, and RCD-N that filled several pages. But civilians were always caught in the middle no matter who was fighting, and over the next nine years, the war claimed over five million lives, most dying from sickness and hunger as they fled the fighting. The death toll from Congo’s war would surpass that of any other conflict since World War II.

The armed groups fighting in Congo financed their stay largely by stealing the nation’s minerals. The battlefields of eastern and central Congo were full of gold, diamonds, and other minerals such as coltan, which was in great demand to manufacture the cell phones and laptop computers for the dot-com boom of the West. The forests were lush with exotic wood, and the southern plains spilled with copper and cobalt just waiting to be dredged. By 2001, the Rwandan army was estimated to be earning nearly $20 million per month from stealing coltan, and the RCD rebels pulled in $1.5 million a month from diamonds. One rights group estimated Uganda exported over $60 million in Congolese gold in 2003 alone, most of it headed for Switzerland.

To administer their looting of gold, coltan, diamond, timber, and coffee, Uganda and Rwanda used these rebel groups as proxy forces to hold power. They trained them in jungle camps and flooded them with weapons, ultimately creating even more factions when those groups would splinter. And to hold sway over these groups, Rwanda and Uganda exploited the deep well of ethnic tensions that already existed among the tribes. In Ituri, the two foreign armies began salting the wounds between the Hema and the Lendu.

The Hema and the Lendu tribes of northeastern Ituri had lived in strained harmony near the Ugandan border for three hundred years. The Hema had crossed into Congo in the sixteenth century from Rwanda and Burundi, cattle herders who were closely related to the Tutsi of those regions, along with Hema and Banyoro tribes of Uganda. The Lendu were a mix of Nilotic and Bantu peoples, farmers and hunters, and one of the more populous tribes that mostly occupied the vast, remote hill country.

Mobutu had always favored the Hema. Like the Tutsi, they were the educated, landowning, and politically savvy elite. This favoritism had begun with Congo’s Belgian colonialists, who’d rewarded Hema with large tracks of grazing land, jobs within the colonial government, and made extra efforts to educate their children—all of which alienated the Lendu, who were regarded as backward stock. During the chaotic last days of Mobutu, a wealthy Hema farmer in the Walendu Pitsu region of Ituri seized a large tract of Lendu land in a backroom deal with government officials and began evicting Lendu residents. The Lendu farmers could do little to stop him, since most of their deeds and documents had disappeared in the crumbling Mobutu empire.

So in 1999, the Lendu assembled their warriors and staged vigilante raids against Hema in the region, killing some ten thousand people in eighteen months. Hema militia then turned to the Ugandan army for help, using them as guns for hire against their enemies. Together, they slaughtered thousands of Lendu. In turn, the Ugandan army began arming the Hema militia to control the region’s gold fields and other resources. When that relationship spoiled, the Ugandans backed the Lendu. Over the next several years, the number of slaughtered Hema and Lendu civilians exceeded fifty thousand—the death count spiking as warriors supplemented their spears and arrows with automatic rifles and RPG-7s supplied by their neighbors in the east. Mass killings of civilians like the massacre at Drodro, Largu, and Jissa had been happening in Ituri regularly, yet many were never investigated or even reported.

In July 2002, Rwanda and Congo signed a peace pact in Pretoria, South Africa, that ended the Rwandan army’s active role in the conflict. Rwanda pulled its twenty thousand troops from Congo by October 2002, leaving Uganda as the last foreign army still operating in country. Soon after, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, under pressure from the international community, gave the orders for Uganda’s remaining seven thousand troops to begin their slow exodus home.

The security of Ituri—still angry, factionalized, and armed to the teeth—would now be the job of UN peacekeepers, who’d soon arrive to replace the Ugandan soldiers. Peacekeepers already held positions in North and South Kivu, near the Rwandan border where the war had begun, but the UN had little presence in Ituri. Despite the grisly deaths of over fifty thousand people in the war between the Hema and the Lendu and their sponsors, the UN had only a small contingent of unarmed military observers in the vast area covering over four million people. Because the scale of Rwandan and Ugandan support of Hema and Lendu militias in Ituri was largely unknown until May 2003, many in the UN (and many of us journalists) still considered the conflict merely a tribal war, with few links to Congo’s larger multinational war.

The Ugandan army threw a big parade on April 25, 2003, as they began rolling out of Ituri. All across Bunia, shops closed early, and hundreds of sweaty bodies jammed both sides of the airport road to watch the soldiers march past. A thirty-piece army brass band stumbled through a lethargic rendition of the Ugandan national anthem, followed by a procession of armored personnel carriers, gun-mounted jeeps called Mambas, and two rattletrap Russian tanks piled with dozens of gaunt, whooping soldiers. The traffic made the dust unbearable, and when the tanks sputtered past, they coated the reeling crowd with an aerosol of hot engine grease.

As several companies of soldiers took up the rear of the parade—weathered Kalashnikovs dangling at their hip, gum boots slapping the yellow dirt—young girls rushed out and loaded them with cigarettes, boiled eggs, and bags of peanuts. Farther up the road, groups of women spit at their feet and shouted for them to just go away. The parade was a colossal event, never mind the size, for it marked the ending of a brutal period of foreign occupation and, much to our collective fear, also kicked off a brand-new era of viciousness and murder.

Anticipating the Ugandan withdrawal, hundreds of fighters, both Hema and Lendu, were gathering in the hills outside Bunia, waiting for the perfect moment to seize the prize. Bunia was already an embattled spoil of war, occupied by several rebel factions over the years who’d vigorously fought to hold it. It was a nexus of trade routes in and out of Uganda, both overland and across Lake Albert, thirty kilometers to the east. Bunia essentially connected the Oriental province to East Africa and Asia, and Lake Albert itself provided a flourishing fish trade. Bunia had a functioning airport, a sprawling and healthy market, and most of all, the hills around Bunia were filled with gold.

Many of the once-nationalized gold mines in the hills north of Bunia, located near the towns of Mongbwalu and Kilo, were seized by Uganda or Rwandan-backed militia when the second war began in 1998, with miners forced to dig for the militia or to pay entry fees in gold or taxes. Alluvial gold is also bountiful in the streambeds of the Shari River on Bunia’s outskirts, which provide many local men their living. The tumbledown wooden shacks of gold dealers lined Bunia’s main boulevard. Prospectors in mud-crusted clothes filed in with gold dust and nuggets wrapped in cigarette foil and walked out with wads of American dollars. Controlling Bunia went hand in hand with controlling the gold, and whoever controlled the gold carried the better guns.

The Hema militia had taken Bunia in August 2002 and quickly moved to seize Mongbwalu. Earlier that summer, Lendu combatants had killed scores of Hema in the gold-mining town, so the Hema were bent on revenge. They attacked in November, murdering more than two hundred Lendu and ethnic Nande civilians, who they gunned down in the streets or brutally executed by smashing people’s heads with hammers and slicing their throats, then burning the bodies.

The Hema militia was led by Thomas Lubanga, a beanpole of a commander, who towered over his militia army, many of them child soldiers whom he’d recruited from villages decimated by Lendu raids. He was charismatic and loved publicity; he would throw marathon press conferences when reporters were in the area, ending his diatribes against his current enemies by dancing atop the tables. (Two years later, he would also be the first war criminal arrested to stand trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, charged with conscripting and using child soldiers.)

Uganda’s relationship with Lubanga’s militia had spoiled in mid-2002, and in March 2003, army commanders had used Lendu fighters to help expel the Hema from Bunia. The Lendu militia itself consisted of two subgroups—one from the north of Bunia, the other from the south. Uganda’s relationship with the southern faction—known as the Ngiti—subsequently failed, and the Ugandans had begun trying to push them out in turn.

The Drodro massacre made a puff in the newspapers, but was dead gone the next day. And the UN started saying the death toll was largely exaggerated, even though it hadn’t conducted a real investigation. But in reality, the April 3 attacks had been so efficient and macabre that humanitarian workers in Congo were afraid the conflict was spiraling into another Rwanda. I convinced an editor to send me back to chronicle the killings and join a UN forensic team scheduled to uncover the mass graves. I arrived back in Bunia as the Ugandans were pulling out and started trying to arrange rides into Drodro. But once there, it became clear another massacre was unfolding right there in town.

The last Ugandan soldiers were scheduled to leave Bunia on May 6, two weeks away. When they did, it was almost certain the Lendu Ngiti militia would sweep right in to fill the vacuum. By the time I arrived in Bunia, they were hitting the Ugandans every day, slowly closing in on the town. Bunia’s population of Hema took on the mien of the hunted. Everyone feared the raid, it seemed, but the UN.

II

After a few days in Bunia, I quickly fell into the rhythms of the town. I buzzed up and down the broad boulevard on the back of motorcycle taxis and hired a steady driver named Oliver. The 350,000 residents of Bunia were mostly traders and merchants who operated out of the white-stone colonial shops that lined Lumumba Boulevard, the main commercial strip, selling everything from motorbikes imported from China, to radios, jumper cables, and the ubiquitous Blue Band margarine found in every corner of Africa. Along the narrow paths of the town market, plump women sat behind tall mounds of brightly colored beans, manioc root, and spinach, and stacks of salted fish that smelled so strong it stung your throat in the heat. All down the boulevard, little boys walked the road hawking fried chapatis, and women glided in tight lines down the grassy median, balancing bundles of laundry atop their heads and bowls spilling with bananas. Old men rested their tired bones in the awning shade with radios pressed against their ears; chickens scratched in the dirt; moto-taxi drivers waited at the junctions in sunshades and open shirts; and the stoic money changers sat at their stands hovered over cubes of grimy francs.

The Mobutu government had neglected Bunia for decades, leaving the stately colonial buildings along the boulevard to crumble and fade. And numerous battles between armies and militia had left the boulevard scarred with gun pocks and blast wounds. The post office had been locked for three years, and the bank for ten. The water ran cold and brown from the pipes, and electricity was a precious luxury. The roads leading to town were full of sinkholes that reached up to snap the axles of trucks and flatten tires. Gasoline was sold by little boys with jerricans and tin funnels, while down the road, pumps at abandoned filling stations were rusted and stripped for parts. The remnants of better days still whispered in mocking tones: one building along the boulevard bore a faded advertisement from a colonial-era insurance company. OWN YOUR LIFE, the sign suggested.

Just as I arrived, the first cellular tower was being erected, and in the coming days residents would line up at the new office of Cel-tel for phones and prepay cards that would change how they did business and bring the rest of the massive country much closer. Across the street was the new MONUC headquarters (the French acronym for the UN’s Congo mission), where painters were trimming the windows in UN signature blue, a color so mixed up with Congo’s blood it would later pinstripe the new national flag.

I had checked into the Hotel Takabeya, just on the edge of the market, where the women wore brassy blonde wigs to serve greasy omelets and tea at six thirty in the morning. During the day I’d stop by the UN to check about rides into Drodro, maybe do some interviews, then have dinner at the Club Hellenique, the only decent bar and restaurant in town, located next door to UN headquarters. At night, it was cold beers on the patio of my room listening to BBC and Voice of America on my shortwave radio.

I’d needed an interpreter for interviews, so the day I arrived at the airport, I’d walked around asking everyone, Know where I can find a translator? Only one person had answered in English and said he’d send someone over. It was a dumb rookie move, especially since I didn’t know anyone or their delicate tribal affiliations, but it paid off. The next morning I walked out of the dining room at the Takabeya and found Johnny Ngure waiting for me in the courtyard. Johnny was short and thin with a wispy, boyish mustache and baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. He was a student at the local teacher-training school and his English was good. I hired him on the spot.

Johnny told me how his father had been murdered by Lendu fighters a year before, shot in the back as he tried to run during a raid north of town. His body lay in the street for three days while Johnny hid in the bush. Johnny had buried him alone in a hand-dug grave. The only story about his father that he seemed to enjoy telling was how he gave Johnny his name. After Johnnie Walker the whiskey, he said. I was always walking and running away.

Johnny lived in a dim, mildew-infested dormitory just behind the UN headquarters. His mother had died of illness years before, and after his father was killed, Johnny paid his tuition and rent by pushing wheelbarrows of dried fish from Lake Albert to Bunia, a two-day haul through the mountains.

I hope that you will be happy with my job, he said that day. It’s important to me. My father was a journalist, too.

I spent my mornings that week having tea with Brigadier General Kale Kayihura, commander of the Ugandan army in Congo. We’d sit under the shade of the small concrete terminal at the airport, from which his men were gradually departing.

What troubled the general most was how the UN was preparing for his withdrawal. The first of 350 Uruguayan peacekeepers had begun trickling in that week, and MONUC was hoping the small force could contain the war slowly creeping toward town. To maintain their international force, the UN was flying in tons of cargo every day, erecting a giant prefab city of good intentions that would soon dwarf the town it’d come to help, a blue-and-white Potemkin village shuttled about in white Toyota SUVs that filled the streets and every parking lot.

The people of Bunia didn’t realize it, but the UN had no intentions of saving them in the event of an attack. The Security Council’s mandate for MONUC only allowed soldiers to protect UN staff and property. The mandate worked swell for those areas of the country where fighting had ceased. But in Ituri, the blue flag of the UN only cast a shadow, and not a long one at that.

It was an ugly paradox the Security Council refused to swallow. Everyone agreed the Ugandans desperately needed to leave, but in the same breath they’d acknowledge the troops were preventing further massacres (or helping stage them, depending on whom you asked). The Ugandans were dirty cops, but they were the only law the people had. And during those mornings over tea, the general assured me, over my astonishment, that history would regard the Ugandans as heroes once MONUC dropped the ball and Bunia was awash in blood.

Does the Security Council think about the security in this region? he said to me one day. Their politics seem to be prevailing over human life.

He’d often conclude these rants by squeezing my shoulder and with a long, exhausted look saying, I’m so glad you’re here as a witness.

I mainly spoke with the general because he wasn’t afraid of journalists, unlike the UN staff, who seemed to deflect my every approach. The general was good with questions, even if answers were never