Inside Kolwezi: Toll of Terror

Toll of Terror

Rebels are gone, but fear lingers on

Kolwezi was a city of the dead. Almost as swiftly as it had begun, the seven-day battle for control of the industrial heart of Zaire's copper-rich Shaba province ended last week. Driven from the city by the hard-fighting paratroopers of France's Foreign Legion (see box), an estimated 2,000 Katangese rebels faded back into the bush, retreating toward their home bases in eastern Angola. The paratroopers took up new positions at Lubumbashi, 160 miles away, turning over their guard duty to Zairian troops loyal to President Mobutu Sese Seko.

Virtually all of the city's 2,250 white residents had been airlifted to Belgium, where many told anguished stories of rebel terror and massacre. Thousands of Kolwezi's 100,000 blacks fled elsewhere, fearing reprisals that were only too soon in coming. The city was without food, without water, without electricity; streets were littered with unburied bodies rotting in the hot African sun.

It may be weeks before authorities can determine the final death toll for "Shaba II," as Western diplomats called the incursion. At least 80 whites and 200 blacks were brutally massacred by the invading rebels of the Congolese National Liberation Front (F.N.L.C.). The total could run higher: abandoning the city, the guerrillas took a number of Europeans hostage. At week's end their fate was unknown.

Some of the rebels retreated along the east-west Benguela railroad toward the town of Chicapa, where the F.N.L.C. fighters and their families make up a community of 35,000 people. Others traveled dirt roads in northern Zambia to a forward camp at Kameni, just across the border in Angola, where recent travelers in the area reported seeing the lights of hundreds of campfires.

Although the rebels had come on foot, many rode home aboard an estimated 350 vehicles stolen from Kolwezi residents. TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood, who visited northern Zambia last week, reported that the improbable parade looked like "the largest and best organized stolen-car ring in history: dozens of sparkling Peugeots and Fiats, sedans and pickups, careening along amid clouds of dust, blue-and-gold Zaire license plates glinting in the sun. One overloaded car carried a man clinging to its hood. Occasionally a stolen truck passed by jammed with rebels, not in uniform but arrayed in an astounding assortment of rags and new clothes. One rebel leader proudly wore a brown pinstripe suit jacket over tattered shirt and pants.

"Nor was that the only loot brought back from the quick war: most of the rebels had transistor radios slung across their backs, and music blared. Others carried small tape recorders. A few had weapons -- Belgian or Portuguese automatic rifles.

"The retreat was well organized. According to villagers in the area, at least one refueling vehicle came from Angola packed with jerricans of gasoline. From time to time, cars would stop, allowing passengers to trade loot for food with cheering Zambian villagers; many of the local residents, like the rebels, are members of the Lunda tribe. Impromptu food stands, selling fresh pineapples, corn meal and other staples, sprang up along the line of retreat. Some of the food was given away, but quite a few villagers were seen sporting new T shirts or shoes. There was a holiday air about the retreat. Even the missionaries who travel these roads to bring eagerly awaited medicine and food never got this kind of reception."

It was hard to realize that at the source of this exuberant retreat was a bloody massacre. The attack on Kolwezi by the self-styled Katangese "Tigers" had been thoroughly organized. A year earlier, an estimated 2,000 rebels had launched Shaba I, an incursion into the region that was halted short of Kolwezi after 49 days of fighting between the F.N.L.C. forces and the French-supported Moroccan and Zairian troops. The rebels promised to return to Shaba and overthrow Mobutu's regime. They carefully planned this infiltration. After the liberation of Kolwezi, French paratroopers found three railroad cars filled with weapons, ranging from Soviet AK-47 automatic rifles to Israeli-made UZI submachine guns. Along with the guns

and ammunition were .stores of food, including U.S. military rations, cans of fruit salad, and frankfurters. Much of the material had been either stolen or purchased illicitly from the Zairian army, whose soldiers are so poorly paid that corruption is endemic.

Some witnesses of the Kolwezi attack reported the presence of Spanish-speaking observers who might have been Cubans. Jose Gomes Jardim, a Portuguese resident of Kolwezi, said he had seen and heard four black men and one white speaking Spanish during the assault. "One of them wanted to kill my family," Jardim said later, "but a Katangese commander said, 'No, he is Portuguese. Don't kill him.' Whether they were Cubans or not I do not know."

The Tigers first surrounded the city, then struck at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, before much of Kolwezi was awake. Although there had been rumors in Shaba for weeks that trouble was imminent, the city was defended by no more than 300 Zairian troops. Recalled Belgian Civil Engineer Freddy Wauters, 39: "At first I thought it was soldiers letting off a bit of steam." But then the rebels appeared and demanded to know whether Wauters was French. They were looking, as it turned out, for Moroccan and French "mercenaries" who had thrown back the F.N.L.C. last year. Several Libyans working in Kolwezi were executed because rebels mistook them for Moroccans.

At the outset, said refugees from Kolwezi, the rebels appeared to be tough and well regimented; they also knew their business. Harold Amstutz, of Portsmouth, Va., a pilot for the American Methodist mission in the city, radioed news of the invasion on the first day of the attack. The next time he tried to broadcast from his house, guerrillas swarmed through the neighborhood, banging on doors and shouting "Missionary! Missionary!" in an effort to locate Amstutz and his radio. Said the pilot: "They must have had good equipment, including a direction finder, to pick up my transmission that quickly."

Amstutz destroyed the transmitter, and he and his wife Elsie spent the next six days praying for rescue, while rebels ranged up and down the street, occasionally firing random barrages into their house.

The discipline of the Katangese soon collapsed. Drunken guerrillas ran amuck, shooting, killing, wounding, maiming and raping. Random executions increased after the rebels heard that a rescue attempt was under way. Some of the guerrillas displayed a kind of gallows humor. A mission priest was confronted by raiders who admired his cutlery, clock and radio.

"Would you like to give us this?" asked a rebel.

"Take what you want," replied the priest.

"No," said the rebel. "The revolution doesn't take from people. It only accepts what they give it. Now, do you want to give us your things?"

Belgium had agreed to help out Mobutu for humanitarian reasons. Concentrating on the rescue mission, Brussels' 1,300 red-bereted paratroopers cleared the key routes into Kolwezi, set up an emergency medical-aid station at the city's airport, and began evacuating refugees. The fighting was done by 600 legionnaires, who encircled Kolwezi, took up positions on the main roads, and then launched foot patrols inside the city. The French troops encountered an ephemeral enemy that drifted away rather than risk a pitched battle. There were, however, a few fierce skirmishes, in which the legion lost four men.

Then came the uncovering of horrors. Most of the slaughtered Europeans had been killed in clusters--including one group of 34 who were gunned down in a small room of a house where they had taken refuge. Bodies were left lying in the streets for days. The Zaire news agency AZAP lamely tried to explain that "for purposes of identification and to facilitate the work of the press and the Red Cross, all bodies have been left at the spot where they were killed." As the stench became intolerable and the threat of a cholera epidemic grew, Red Cross officials recruited local workers, provided them with masks, and set up burial crews.

Even as the graves were being dug, new bodies were found.

Several days after the fighting ended, one legionnaire patrol came across a group of 20 hysterical women and children on the outskirts of Kolwezi. Near by lay the bodies of their men, killed by the retreating rebels.

Zairian forces added to the death toll. In Kolwezi, suspected rebel sympathizers were taken in a long line to a quarry on the city's outskirts for interrogation; from time to time the sharp rattle of gunfire filled the air. Toward week's end, President Mobutu ordered his troops to clear civilians from a 65-mile stretch of Shaba province along the Angolan border. The area, he warned, would be a fire-free zone, in which Zairian troops would have permission to shoot at anything that moved.

In the devastated European section of Kolwezi, where houses had been shattered and looted by both sides (Zairian troops walked off with whatever the rebels had left behind), houseboys by habit padlocked gates and tended gardens, waiting for their employers to return. In Brussels, however, the majority of white survivors insisted that they would never go back, out of fear that a reign of terror in which so many friends had lost their lives could be repeated.

Said Anne Press, the wife of a British metallurgical engineer: "I could never go back. We have lost too many friends. It would not be the same."

A European exodus would mean economic disaster for Zaire, which does not have enough competent black technicians and managers to run the shuttered copper mines that provide about two-thirds of the country's foreign exchange earnings. Belgium's mine holdings were nationalized eleven years ago, but Belgians continue to run them and to export much of their product to Europe. Even if all the whites who worked at the vast Ge;camines mines that dominate Kolwezi could be lured back, it could still, after the last weeks' destruction, require up to a year to get the copper mines working again. In addition, the mines of Kolwezi account for about 90% of Zaire's cobalt output--roughly half of the world's annual supply of that strategic metal--as well as sizeable quantities of zinc.

If the Europeans are not returning, the Shaba rebels almost certainly will be doing so. The Tigers' losses were limited, considering the size of the operation, and the captured weapons can easily be replaced. In an interview last week with the Paris-based weekly Afrique-Asie, F.N.L.C. Leader Nathaniel Mbumba said that the Shaba incursion had resulted in an "irreversible situation" and that the rebels were determined to drive President Mobutu from power. The next stage in that effort may be a low-level campaign of harassment that Zaire's 40,000-man army will find hard to counter. Late last week F.N.L.C. troops made probing attacks on two towns near the Angolan border, about 300 miles from Kinshasa. Surveying the sad ruins of Kolwezi, a Belgian pilot may have put it best. "It is not finished," he said. "It will only start now."

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