Beyond The Gates

There is a very good movie with the great Jon Hurt, commemorating the atrocities of the 1994 Rwandan genocide when over 800,000 men, women and children lost their lives in horrific fashion in the deadly war between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. The movie deals with a single act of great courage in inhuman circumstances by a Catholic priest who gets executed for saving Tutsi children marked for execution. It is a sobering movie about man's inhumanity to his fellow man when pressed for resources and space, and it is also a movie about hope in the midst of hell. The movie made me think of the time I spent in Kinshasa in 1980, when Mobutu was still wielding his reign of terror. Apparently, Kabila has not improved the situation much, as there are now reports surfacing about rebel factions in the Congolese army getting support from Rwanda rogue military, attempting to further destabilize the powder keg that has been the eastern part of the Congo. After Mobutu was ousted in 1997, the illusion of peace under Kabila did not last long, and the most devastating war since World War II ensued in 1998, that killed between 2.7 and 5.4 million people, and was called the great African War. Most of these deaths were due to disease and starvation, a problem the war continues to inflict upon the Congolese people. This war, centered mostly in Eastern Congo involved 9 other African Nations and directly affected the lives of 50 million Congolese. I remember the precarious nature of daily life in Kinshasa on a good day. Hundreds of people eating and camping out daily by the rail road tracks, living from day to day. I remember the beggars and the slums. I remember the sad eyes of the family cook as he asked for a day off to bury his young son who had died because he had not been able to pay for the medical help and medicine   his son  needed. I still feel the ache of looking into his deeply sorrowed face. I remember the sweet young family masseuse, her incredibly peaceful smile, who had walked for two hours, from her village at 4:00 A.M. to get to the family's house by six to give the daughter a massage. The young masseuse was so quiet, she only spoke a few words and afterwards, she left just as quietly, to walk back the two hours to her village. I started thinking back to my friends in the Kinshasa area, good people just trying to make a living in a very complicated country. How did they fare during the genocide that was happening between 1998 and 2003, and the terrible aftermath that is still going on? What happened to the cook and his wife, and their children, and their children's children? What happened to the masseuse and her family? She was just a young girl in 1980, she may already have been a wife and mother in 1998. I shudder at the fate of countless women in her country who were brutally raped and slaughtered, and the rape at the hands of the RCD still continues to this day, at the rate of a 1,000 women and girls a day! I looked up some of my Belgian and Italian friends from the area. I found a couple, and they are all working in the Brussels area, with I am sure still plenty of ties and connections to the Congo. I wonder where they were when the first Congolese war erupted in 1997, and whether they left or braved it until the second deadlier wave hit in 1998. I remember how the militia had limitless power and how people feared them for it, as Mobutu once famously said he was not sure why they wanted a salary, as he gave them access to weapons. I witnessed first hand the mercenary quality of the underpaid, hungry and dangerous because of it militia. My Italian friend's mom had a shop that another merchant coveted because of its prime location. This man had a lot of money, so he paid some militia to show up at her shop, ransack it,which was a scary thing, as I was there when it happened, and they literally put her out of business. No one did anything. Money was the only rule of law, and since the other party had more of it, they won. His mom lost the shop and had to relocate to a part of town where there hardly was any commerce, and her shop was in constant threat of going bankrupt. The fabric of society was barely held together on a regular day, the chaos and madness caused by a civil war must be harrowing, at best. I was glad to find evidence that Jean-Pierre and Dany D. and Michel V.P. are all right, and I hope Solomon A. and his family and all their employees and their families made  it through also. Leonardo da Vinci once said,and he knew this well, as he was around it enough, that "War is the ultimate madness." It was true 500 years ago, and sadly, it is still true today.