There it was. This man had made the decision, and the wheels were in motion for us to meet with the person the international press had described as a ruthless murderer. The old admonition about being careful about what you wished for came to mind, but knew that I had to move forward. I would not allow myself to be paralyzed by my own uncertainty. The next days, weeks, and months would become an exercise in the Buddhist admonition to become “comfortable with uncertainty.”
We began our journey in Rwanda at Ruhengeri, entered Uganda at Cyanaki and crossed into Congo through the “back door” of Bunagana. Virunga National Park was to our west, the international boundary with Rwanda to our east, and Goma 60 kilometers to the southwest. This was the Mikeno sector, heart of mountain gorilla territory, and 200 of the world’s 700 remaining mountain gorillas lived here. Jomba marked the northern outpost, and Ptolemy’s fabled Rwenzori mountains—the “Mountains of the Moon”—were somewhere to the north, forming the boundary between Uganda and Congo.
Henry Morton Stanley wrote about this region in the late 1800’s while on an expedition for Belgian King Leopold, whose International African Society was in fact a private holding company looking for a land grab. Disguised as a philanthropic organization, the International African Society helped establish Leopold’s brutal rule over the Congo Free State. At the turn of the century, the rubber and ivory of Congo became the source of Leopold’s wealth, and the system was built on slavery. The enslavers were Henry Morton Stanley and his colonial Force Publique— comprised of conscripted and enslaved natives. For every Congolese killed to enforce the system of taxation and terror, a hand was cut off and brought back to account for the bullet expended. The severed hands of men, women and children were piled high in the Colonial outposts. I was treading on bloodstained, sacred ground. Not much had changed in a hundred years.
Nkunda’s rebel army had recently seized Jomba, which once was the gateway to gorilla trekking in Congo. The geography of the outpost and the location was etched in memory, but this was not the time to be asking questions about the strategic location of a rebel leader that the government of Joseph Kabila wanted delivered “with his head on a silver platter.” I had learned more than my share about personal betrayal in the previous years and had instructed my team to not ask questions about our location. We had no idea whether Nkunda viewed us as friend or foe, but the code of confidentiality of the journalist respected the discretion of his location. One thing was clear. This was deep in rebel held territory and neither Rwanda nor Congo would approve of our visit. Someone had greased the wheels, but they had done so at great peril to themselves and to our team. They had also done so because they respected Laurent Nkunda as a leader who offered hope to the beleaguered people of eastern Congo. The people of Kivu respected the man.There was no other way to explain how he had made such great gains in his military movement in recent years.
Distant thunder in the Virunga Mountains created a soft rumble in the Great Rift Valley that stretched endlessly to the purple peaks in the distance, but the sky was only slightly overcast. We had prepared for the chill of altitude, but it was shirtsleeve weather and a soft breeze belied the distant rumbles. As I scanned the hillsides and valley below, I mentally retraced the route we took through the closed border crossing with Uganda at Bunagana and along a narrow dirt road lined with banana fields. My waypoint as we drove past villages and fields was the sign that pointed to the Travelers Rest Hotel in Kisoro, at the border between Rwanda, Uganda and Congo. Travelers Rest was infamous as a refuge for gorilla watchers, including the legendary primatologist Dian Fossey, in the days when the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, was known by the colonialist description of the “Belgian Congo.” Fossey’s diaries and letters described her narrow escape from Congolese militia at Walter Baumgartner’s Hotel, and I scrutinized the peaks searching for the signature of Mount Sabinyo, where the boundaries of the three countries converge. It seemed reckless to ask strategic questions as we approached the headquarters of a rebel army that had made spectacular tactical gains at the expense of the Congolese government, Rwandan rebel armies, and international interests, including the Chinese, who had just inked a deal with Congolese president Joseph Kabila to trade mineral wealth for infrastructure. The United Nations Mission, MONUC, had sent Chinese-built helicopter gunships with US/Canadian made Pratt& Whitney engines to wipe out the man we were about to meet.
The irony of my previous employment at Pratt &Whitney as a young communications specialist did not escape the touchstone of memory.
I had been trying to get to Nkunda for two years, ever since I overheard a conversation between British conservationists and mercenaries that they “had Nkunda where they wanted him.” Up until that time, I had bought into the idea that Laurent Nkunda was a ruthless warlord and murderer. When I learned that agents from the Frankfurt Zoo had intercepted a communiqué from Nkunda that was emphatic in its insistence that he was not responsible for a recent rash of gorilla killings near Jomba in late 2006, I knew something was terribly wrong with the conservation movement in eastern Congo. This was obviously a campaign to discredit, and the international press had been reporting word for word what the conservationists were feeding them through press releases that were never vetted. Whoever had the best public relations team would win in this war of media access. Nkunda would play a part in my reporting from that day forward...
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