Kibati Playground

originally published in the Daily Nation, Kenya

Less than a kilometer from where two rotting bodies of Congolese soldiers lay bathing in a swarm of flies as a warning to all, the Bizimanas practice their back flips.

Claude, 10, and his cousin Francois, 9, have been living outside Kibati with their mother and aunt for months. They can’t remember when they first got here, but say that the came from the north in Kibumba, a former refugee camp now under the auspices of Tutsi-rebel Laurent Nkunda.

Though the boys speak Kinywarwanda, a language specific to neighboring Rwanda, they say that their father’s “fight for the Congo,” but for Claude and Francois, the war around them, and their parents’ involvement in it, is meaningless.

“Take photo, watch me jump,” Claude says. “Do you want to play football?”

For many of the internally-displaced in and around Kibati, a sense of normalcy has come to volatility. Some families have crossed back and forth over the front lines eight times in the last two weeks.

One man that journalists spoke to is now running a makeshift barber shop at the UNHCR camp. He claims to have crossed 42 times in the last three years.

While the Bizimana mothers sell potatoes, cigarettes and homemade alcohol—many times to Congolese and Angolan soldiers doing little more than loitering nearby—Francois, Claude and their friends pass time by asking for money, kicking around a bundle of banana leaves they have made into a ball, and hitching rides on the back of trucks up and down the length of the camps.

When asked what they think of the war, or whether they are afraid, the boys shrug their shoulders. “We also fight for Congo,” Francois says with a smile, and then makes a gesture as if he’s shooting again.

Six kilometers south, in the provincial capital Goma of 600,000 that is the focus of rebel, government and international attention, there is little sign other than United Nations troops that the city’s fate is up for grabs.

As rebels pushed on the city limits in late October, threatening to overrun the city, Goma became a ghost town. But in the resilience to death that only comes from overexposure to it, the city has sprung wildly back to life.

Streets team with hawkers, motorcycles, and Congolese music studios that provide a soundtrack to one of civilization’s frontiers.

Amini Gaspard, 32, has lived in Goma his entire life where he has a business on the main avenue leading out town selling upmarket dress shoes. Like most in Goma, no matter what violence comes, he will stay where he is.

“I had to close my shop for a week last month,” Amini says, when Nkunda’s rebel forces were pushing on the city limits. But it wasn’t rebels he was afraid of, nor even the Congolese army, which has many times been a more immediate danger to Goma’s citizens.

“Congolese do stupid things when they are afraid,” he says. “We panic very fast and when we run we take things.”

Despite impending war, he says he had no choice but to reopen his store just a couple days later. “I have to make money,” Amini says.

Across the border in Rwanda, the sleepy town of Gisenyi watches softly. For a week near the end of October, when aid workers were evacuated from North Kivu, this “resort” town became an ex-patriot refugee camp in itself.

It is through here that 2 million real refugees—many of them perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide—fled across the border and into Goma, where they still live and fight, till this day.

It is also through here that the Rwandan army will pass—as they have passed twice before in the last decade—en route to Goma, virtually a contiguous municipality.

These days it is virtually empty.

At the Kivu Sun, a five-star hotel on the beach—where the aid workers stayed—the bar downstairs is empty but for two Europeans speaking softly in a corner and a sole waiter standing in the middle of the room watching an interview with Paul Kagame on the news. The picture flashes to clips of children in a displaced-persons camp outside Goma.

“It is very bad over there,” says Michael, as his nametag reads, referring to the Congo. He’s been to Goma many times, he says, but would never live there. “They kill many people. There is no security.”

Rwanda, on the other hand, is one of the safest countries in Africa, if not the world. But Michael is glued to the news because that security is once again being threatened.

This is his war. This war is about Rwanda. It is about what happened there 14 years ago and about how that problem has never really gone away. It is right across the lake, in Michael’s shadows.

Kabila has refused to comply with his own promises to disarm the FDLR and breakaway factions. First his father, Laurent-Desire turned against Rwanda and Uganda in 1998—the powers that brought him to power—by expelling their armies and his political aides from those countries and ignoring the FDLR problem.

Now, the second Kabila faces accusations by Rwanda, the CNDP and the international community at large of picking and helping sides.

Each rebel group in the Congo is to some extent a proxy of a stronger, more interested party. The Mai-Mai, Pareco, and FDLR are all pro-government, in that they in that they do not share the CNDP’s subversive desires. The Congolese army, as weak and disorganized as they are, are happy to have the extra security help.

To its most serious—and only real—political and security threat, Laurent Nkunda, Kabila has adamantly refused to speak with the man, something his spokesperson, Bertrand Bisimwa, has called “a declaration of war on the Congolese people.”

Although the CNDP is not only generally disliked by many in Goma, but seen as a foreign entity, a growing number say they would like to see direct negotiations.

“I think the best solution is that they [Kabila and Nkunda] sit down and talk,” says Frank Bagira, a manager of a popular hotel in Goma. “Maybe that is hard for an African president, but it is what is necessary at this time.”

If Kabila doesn’t negotiate, there is no question for people like Frank as to what will happen next.

“I think it is going to get worse before its better.”

“I know Rwanda will come. Rwanda always comes. There is no doubt in my mind, they will be here. This could be the third war.”

Though he says he’s afraid—“I must be afraid,” he says—he will stay right here.

For Frank, what matters is not which group governs him, but the resolution of peace, reciting the new de-facto national anthem of the Congo, “We Are Tired of War.”

“The Congolese soldiers are very bad. They do some of the worst things, the worst. Rwandans could treat us better,” he says. “They are more professional. They are nicer.”

Frank has been at his current job for a month. He was here at the hotel when Congolese troop went on a murderous rampage through the city after being routed by rebel forces on October 29.

Fourteen people were killed that night, 12 women raped and scores of businesses destroyed. Frank worried soldiers would target his hotel and he called the United Nations mission in the Congo, Monuc, for extra protection. None came that night.

It is particularly because of atrocities such as those on October 29 in the Goma, and the most recent looting further north in the town of Kanyaboyanga that rebel Laurent Nkunda believes he has a moral legitimacy or the legitimate government.

But Frank, as a resident of Goma and a citizen of the Congo, believes that Nkunda is not doing his job in disseminating his message.

“We know that he has a purpose, but we don’t really know what that purpose is,” Frank says. “What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t make his message clear. If we knew what he was fighting for, maybe we could welcome him.”