Читать книгу Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town - Warren John St. - Страница 12

Many of the refugees in Clarkston had been displaced by events far removed from their immediate lives—the decision of some despot hundreds of miles away to clear a region of a particular ethnic or political group in order to seize its resources, or the sudden appearance of soldiers in a village, fighting for a remote cause with no concern for collateral damage. For these refugees, the events that sent them running for their lives had a mysterious and unknowable quality, like a life-altering natural disaster. For others, though, there was no mistaking the reasons for their flight, the specific people who had driven them to flee, or even how their seemingly circumscribed personal stories fit into the broader political narratives of their countries and ethnic groups.

Paula Balegamire fell into the latter category. A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, she had arrived in Clarkston with her six children in 2004 after escaping Africa’s deadliest conflict in modern times: the second civil war in Congo—formerly Zaire—which raged from 1998 to 2002 and claimed an estimated 5.4 million lives. To get to safety in a new country, Paula had been forced to make a terrible choice: to remain near her husband, Joseph, who had been thrown into one of Congo’s most notorious prisons in a political purge, and to live under constant threat of violence or death herself; or to leave her husband behind and take her children to a life in an unknown town in another hemisphere.

The long chain of dominoes that led to that aching choice first began to fall more than a hundred years before, in 1884 in Berlin, and tumbled through the twentieth century until ultimately bursting through the doorway of a small house at 19 rue Lweme in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, in the middle of the night on January 28, 2001.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, Paula’s homeland, occupies territory deep in the heart of Africa that remained mostly beyond the reach of Western powers until the 1870s, when the Welsh-born explorer Henry Morton Stanley became the first Westerner to successfully traverse Central Africa and returned to a hero’s welcome in Europe. Stanley was soon courted by King Leopold II of Belgium, a weak monarch who believed that Belgium should emulate other European powers by establishing its own colonies in Central Africa. In 1884 at a conference of European leaders in Berlin, Leopold held himself out as a kind of protector of the Congo’s people and proposed the formation of a political entity there called the Congo Free State.

Leopold formed a corporation with himself as the lone shareholder and funded Stanley to return to the Congo region to build a railway deep into the jungle that would allow for the systematic looting of its natural resources, primarily rubber and ivory. Extraordinary brutality followed. Leopold’s men enslaved natives and literally worked them to death. Families were separated, noncompliant villages burned, and those who disobeyed the brutal security apparatus, the Force Publique, had their right hands chopped off, or worse.

The savagery went unchallenged until a report written by a British consul named Roger Casement detailed the horrors that had befallen the people of the Congo—he estimated that three million had died, while current scholars put the number at between five and ten million—causing an uproar in Europe that gave birth to the modern human rights movement and that eventually, in 1908, forced Leopold to cede control of the Congo Free State to the Belgian parliament.

The Belgian government oversaw the Congo for another fifty-two years, during which it gradually lost control to ethnic and regional leaders. The emergence of African nationalism further weakened Belgian control of its colony, and in 1960, the Republic of Congo was granted independence. A parliament of regional leaders in Congo elected a nationalist named Patrice Lumumba as prime minister.

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 simply paid a bounty. But whatever the reason, there was little doubt about what awaited the men when they arrived into Kabila’s hands.

The men were jailed in one of Central Africa’s most notorious prisons: the Central Penitentiary and Re-education Center in Kinshasa, known to most locals by its old name, Makala. Makala was—and is—a place of extraordinary brutality. A 2003 U.S. State Department report on human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo stated that at least sixty-nine people had died in the prison during the previous year, some from torture, others from malnutrition or disease. Inmates at Makala were regularly deprived of the most basic necessities. For several weeks in September 2002, the State Department reported, the prison provided inmates no food whatsoever.

The nineteen men from Brazzaville were stashed, along with other Kabila rivals and political dissidents, into a high-security section of Makala called Pavilion One. They were held incommunicado, and without formal charges. Eventually, they were lumped into a group of 135 people who were charged in the assassination of Laurent Kabila and the plotting of the supposed earlier coup attempt. In trials that were roundly denounced by human rights groups, the nineteen were eventually given life sentences. They were among the fortunate. Some thirty of the supposed Kabila plotters were sentenced to death.

The United Nations—embarrassed by the handover of men who had sought its protection to such obviously dire circumstances—responded by expediting resettlement proceedings for the wives and children of the men whose trust the institution had violated. But resettlement in Europe or the United States presented the women with a painful decision. Separated from each other and half a world away, they could not advocate for their jailed husbands as effectively as if they stayed together nearby. Further, inmates in Makala depended on family and friends to bribe guards to get them food and other basics. But Paula had her children to care for. She could not return safely to Kinshasa, and even Brazzaville was becoming risky. Congolese security forces from Kinshasa were now combing Brazzaville for Kabila’s political enemies, and violence against Tutsis was becoming widespread. Paula lived in Brazzaville for nearly three more years, in a state of unrelenting fear. Her children couldn’t attend school. She had no reliable income. But she held out hope that things would calm down and that her husband might be freed. At one point, it seemed possible. Kabila announced an amnesty for some of the men imprisoned at Makala, but in the end, Joseph was not among those released. The final straw came, Paula said, when she and another woman were nearly corralled by a mob intent on burning them alive. The two women escaped, and Paula resolved to get out of Brazzaville however she could. The UNHCR offered her resettlement in the United States, and in November 2004, Paula left Brazzaville with her five children, destined for Georgia.

Paula and her family—Josue, the oldest; Grace; daughter Christelle; twin boys Manace and Ephraim; and a newborn baby girl, Gloria—were placed in an apartment complex called Willow Ridge. Through the International Rescue Committee, Paula found a job as a seamstress at a factory that made sports shirts. The work wasn’t bad, but the commute was more than an hour each way, requiring Paula to leave home at five-thirty each morning. Through contacts in the refugee community, she eventually met Luma, who encouraged her sons Grace and Josue to come out to play football and eventually hired Paula to work at her cleaning company. Since arriving in the United States, Paula’s only contact with her husband has come through telephone calls he was able to make on cell phones borrowed from the friends and family members of other inmates at Makala. Grace, who was just five when he last saw his father, said he can barely remember his face. If the family is to be reunited, Paula said, it would have to be in the United States.

“There’s no point in thinking about where to go back to,” she said, “because there’s nowhere to go back to.”