The people of Bweni in Congo are generally supportive of President Joseph Kabila. But the problems facing his government are tremendous. ( Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)

By Jeffrey Gettleman

March 27, 2007

KINDU, Congo: The highway out of town is a single dirt motorcycle track. The colonial-era railroad has finally broken down. The last of the mighty river barges lies rotting on shore with weeds shooting up through its ribs.

And so Kindu, a once prosperous city here in Congo's interior, is now so cut off that everything is flown in by plane: bottled water, panes of glass, cookies, cucumbers, gas, at $12 a gallon. This is Congo six months after a historic election, the most expensive in Africa and one that was touted - by the Congolese and the United Nations officials who paid half a billion dollars for it - as the end of a free fall.

Decades of misrule have reduced the 60 million people of this mineral-rich country to among the poorest in the world. Ceaseless rebellions have destabilized an enormous chunk of Central Africa and killed an estimated four million people. Congo's fledging government is now trying to stitch the nation back together, as if it ever existed at all. But a recent 1,900-kilometer, or 1,200-mile, trip across the country by plane, truck, motorbike, hiking boots and dugout canoe shows the Congo-sized obstacles that are not going away.

Kinshasa, the steamy, sloppy capital at the western edge of the country, looks as if a war has been fought in its streets. There has been some violence here, like the recent clashes between the presidential guard and a militia loyal to Jean-Pierre Bemba, a tycoon and former warlord. But it is not tanks and bombs that have reduced the streets to bone-jarring rubble and many elegant buildings to teetering shells. It is neglect and corruption, which continue to this day.

Just a few weeks ago, when it came time to form the first truly democratic government in Congo's history, a political party connected to President Joseph Kabila submitted the name André Kasongo Ilunga for trade minister. The problem was, there was no André Kasongo Ilunga. Naturally, when the government appointed Ilunga to the cabinet, he did not show up. The president's advisers soon discovered that the name had been submitted as a ruse to ensure that another politician got the post.

"It was very embarrassing for all us," said Kikaya bin Karubi, a member of Parliament and a Kabila confidant.

A few days later, Congo's top nuclear official was charged with making an unauthorized deal with a British company to sell Congo's copious supply of uranium.

This all happened just a few days before Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank, arrived in Kinshasa to discuss a $1.4 billion aid program. He said that fighting corruption was the "foundation of all the other things that need to be done in this country," but he warned that "it took many years to bring the country to this point."

"It is not going to be fixed overnight," he said.

Kabila has vowed to do his best, and his advisers say he has a stronger hand after winning a runoff election in October by a convincing 58 percent. Before that, Kabila was president of a transitional government in which power was awkwardly divided among him and four vice presidents, two of them warlords.

That system was partly to blame for millions of dollars in disarmament money disappearing. In 2004, Western donors gave Congo more than $200 million to get 330,000 militia men out of the killing business. The plan was to provide each militia member who voluntarily disarmed with $25 a month and job training. But last summer the money suddenly ran out, after helping only a fraction of the gunmen.

"The money got stolen," said Ahmed Shariff, the top official in Kindu for the United Nations, which has 17,000 peacekeeping troops stationed in Congo. "It was used to build houses and buy cars."

The government has yet to revive the program, leaving tens of thousands of former militiamen angry, armed and in the bush.

Sabuni Bokota is one them. He is a 5-foot-tall tomato farmer and a former militia commander, with 3 wives and 15 children. They all live in a string of mud brick huts along the east bank of the Congo River in an isolated village called Lotangi, a day's paddle from Kindu past 30-meter-tall, or 100-foot-tall, stalks of bamboo and baseball-size spiders. During Congo's recent wars, Sabuni commanded 2,000 Mai-Mai militia fighters who greased themselves with palm oil, hung ivory amulets around their necks and chewed up antibiotic pills that they thought would give them magical powers.The Mai-Mai were a surreal dimension to the chaos that exploded in Congo in the late 1990s after the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the longtime dictator of Congo, which was then called Zaire. Troops from six neighboring nations poured across the borders to plunder Congo's minerals. In Lotangi, locals like Sabuni fought back.The Mai-Mai were supposed to be part of the national disarmament plan, but since they lived in far-off places, many heard about the monthly salaries only over their crackly radios and never saw a dime.Now, they are getting antsy. A few weeks ago, Sabuni greased himself up again, threw on his amulets and led a contingent of Mai-Mai to Kindu to protest. "We've been waiting five years," he said. "But they keep telling us it will take time." And time has not been kind to Lotangi. It used to be part of a network of sun-baked river towns connected by barges, railways and roads built during the Belgian colonial era to cart away as much gold, ivory, produce and timber as possible. The old palm oil plantations and banana warehouses are still there. But they are sinking into the riverbanks, more jungle-eaten evidence of Mobutu's kingdom of rot."We used to have electricity," said Germain Musombo, a 38-year-old Kindu resident. "We used to have a movie theater. We used to have decent roads and a train that could take us to Lubumbashi in three days," a distance of almost 1,000 kilometers. Now, that ride takes a month. Congo is spread across more than 2,330,000 square kilometers, or 900,000 square miles, but it has only 480 kilometers of paved roads. The infrastructure problems keep the people poor. Kindu's farmers used to export bananas, wood, rice and peanuts. Now much of their land, among the most fertile in Africa, lies fallow because there is no way to get crops to market.

"There's only so much you can carry on your head," said the acting governor, Katharina Aziza Sadiki.

Farther east, the anti-government frustrations intensify. Kichanga, a little town about 1,600 kilometers from Kinshasa, lies clearly outside Kabila's control. It is reachable by a 60-minute United Nations flight from Kindu to Bukavu, a two-hour speedboat ride from Bukavu to Goma and then a three-hour slog up a steep, muddy road.

The last government checkpoint is in the market town of Sake. After that, boy soldiers in unmarked uniforms march along the roads with rocket-propelled grenades and knee-high rubber boots. Villagers pay taxes not to the Democratic Republic of Congo but to Laurent Nkunda, the local warlord.

Nkunda is a Tutsi nationalist, and with Hutu death squads still roaming the countryside, he sees himself as all that stands between Congolese Tutsis and genocide. "The Tutsis who were killed in Rwanda were my friends," he said. "I cannot accept it here." Eastern Congo is the probably the most beautiful part of the country, but also the most brutalized, and confusing. Thousands of lives have been lost here to disease, starvation and a shifting mix of rebel groups. The trouble began in 1994, when Rwanda's Hutu majority turned on the Tutsi minority, and 800,000 people were killed. Ever since then, Rwanda's Hutu-Tutsi violence has continued to play out across the border in Congo, where both communities have lived for decades, showing how this vast country is still under the gravitational pull of its tiny neighbor next door.

But something new is happening, which might bring stability. The Kabila government, empowered by the elections and freed from having to gain the approval of four rival vice presidents for every project, is striking deals with a number of warlords, including Nkunda. Sometimes, Kabila has little choice.

In November, Nkunda's forces humiliated government soldiers and advanced to within 15 kilometers of Goma, one of the biggest cities in eastern Congo. They would have seized it if UN peacekeepers had not sent in helicopter gunships to cut down Nkunda's troops.

"Our national army is a joke," aid Aloys Tegera, the manager of an aid organization in Goma. "It's a serious problem. How can you rule this huge country without a national army? Everybody is celebrating this big moment of democratization, but we're building on sand."

In Kichanga, government troops have been placed in an uneasy chain of command under Nkunda's officers, but it is hard to know whether warlords like him are part of the problem or the solution. The town of Sake was occupied first by Nkunda's soldiers, who basically left it alone, and then by government troops, who summarily looted it. Yet Congolese officials continue to accuse Nkunda of war crimes, including massacring prisoners of war, although many residents here seem to like him, for obvious reasons."If you're sick, he gives you money," said Sesaga Nzabonimba, a farmer near Sake.Nkunda said he would rather join the government than strike out on his own. And that may be one of Congo's greatest mysteries - how after decades of brutal colonial rule, kleptomaniacal dictatorship, ethnic fighting and regional isolation, a faint pulse of nationalism still survives. "I am a Tutsi, but more than that, I am Congolese," Nkunda said. "I truly hope that one day I'll be part of the national army. They need the help."

Source: The New York Times