LET us first go down to the lakeside at Goma, to a shiny palace of marble, mirrors, jacuzzis, velvet and gilt. Here lived President Mobutu Sese Seko in the 1970s, building his nation in his own way, amassing a massive personal fortune through looting his country's massive wealth.
Bottles of Chanel No 5, Armani scent and other un African toiletries sit untouched in the separate rooms housing two jacuzzis. The pillow cases are monogrammed with the initials of the President's full adopted name. Mobutu Sese Seko Kuko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga results in a considerable amount of lettering on the pillow cases. When Joseph Desire renamed himself, he didn't believe in selling himself short.
The name means, roughly, "the all conquering who leaves fire in his wake" although reporters in Goma this week were informed that it means "the cock who jumps all the chicks in the farmyard".
Half a mile from the palace the people of Goma plead for food bury their dead and celebrate the fact that the writ of Mobutu no longer runs in the town. "We don't have a leader, Goma is free," said Shamba, a man in his 30s who said he had not eaten for two days. "We have buried relations beside our houses."
"It is very unsanitary," he added as if it were a minor detail.
The young of Goma looted what was left in shops and abandoned houses. Armed men rode up and down the main street in jeeps stolen from aid agencies and the UNHCR, dodging smashed refrigerators and other unwanted spoils of thieving.
Yesterday fighting was heard west of the town, presumably between the Zairean army which has retreated and the rebels. One must say "presumably", because no aid agency personnel or journalists have been allowed past Goma. Rebels fired warning shots in the air to deter the few who tried.
The palace in Goma is unguarded now, and being toured by foreign journalists. One looted the monogrammed pillowcases as a souvenir. It can't be long before the locals loot everything else, although Chanel No 5 and jacuzzis are not high on their list of priorities right now.
Mobutu's style was shared by many old style African dictators, most of whom have died, resigned, been overthrown or assassinated. "When these people got to rule Africa, they thought they owned it as well," said a man in Goma.
Mobutu never saw much distinction between his own wealth and that of his nation. But, unfortunately for him, as one rose, the other fell, and he did not see that this could spell disaster.
In the mid 1970s, he nationalised almost everything in sight and put his cronies in charge of the major industries. They set about making themselves very rich indeed, with Mobutu salting funds, estimated at £2-£4 billion, into Swiss bank accounts.
Meanwhile, the industries of the mineral rich country collapsed, the infrastructure rotted. Now Zairean banknotes flutter along Goma's streets, discarded as worthless by the people.
Mobutu has spent the last two months out of the country receiving treatment for prostate cancer in Switzerland, in a lakeside hotel which may have reminded him of home. He repaired to Nice last week from where a statement has been issued on his behalf assuring his people that he will be home soon, to live in one of his several other palaces.
But the rebels have different ideas. What was initially a local ethnic Tutsi revolt has gathered momentum. Disaffected people from elsewhere in Zaire have joined the clamour for an end to Mobutu's rule, although opposition groups in the capital, Kinshasa, still express loyalty to the state.
Among the debris of Goma's looted shops this week local people welcomed the victory of the rebels. Nothing could be worse than the corruption and intimidation of the rabble that was Mobutu's army, they said.
"We are not afraid of the new soldiers," said one man. "After what went before, we are afraid of nothing." As armed men from out of town roamed the streets, it was clear that this was true: the people of Goma are not afraid.
"We can build a new republic," said one man. Did he mean a new Zaire, or an independent republic? "It doesn't matter, so long as it is new."
"Our goal is to liberate Zaire," said a rebel military leader, Andre Kissasse Ungandu, in Goma on Monday night. Reporters were summoned over the border from Gisenyi, less than two miles away, to hear his message. "We are fighting the government, and we will fight anyone who wants to argue for secession." Mr Kissasse is not a Tutsi, although he wouldn't say what he was.
The rebel political leader, Laurent Kabila, is a Baluba from Shaba, the mineral rich former province of Katanga. He also has a power base in Kasai, another province which has tired of Mobutu.
Mobutu's Zaire is an abject failure as a nation. New forces and alliances are emerging that could take it over and start building it again, or could divide it further.
LET us go now less than a hundred miles west to the country church at Ntarama.
From the bottom of the avenue leading to it you can see some of the skulls. Near the door, the stench of rotting corpses is stifling, making you hold your breath. Inside, a mass of ribs, vertebrae, broken skulls, jawbones and bones from all parts of the body cover the floor from wall to wall, from the door to the altar.
Many of the corpses are still wrapped in the clothes and blankets they were wearing on April 15th, when the Hutu militia with their own idea of nation building came to slaughter up to 5,000 of their neighbours.
The doors were barricaded, so they knocked holes in the walls and lobbed in grenades. Then they went in with machetes and heavy mallets to finish them off. Two side buildings look like Sunday school classrooms. They are also filled with rotten corpses.
Outside, the skulls and bones of people killed in the area are piled neatly on a platform. Some skulls still wear women's headscarves. One has a spear stuck through it. A few are so small they must have belonged to very young children and babies. Almost all the dead were women and children.
Revocata, who was then a 15 year old girl, has a deep scar across the back of her neck. Two weeks after the church massacre, the Interahamwe - the Hutu miltia - came through the swamp, hacking and chopping everyone they could find. Her father and eight brothers and sisters were killed. She, her mother and two brothers survived.
The Interahamwe came to the swamp on two consecutive days. "On the third day the Rwandan Patriotic Front arrived, driving the Hutu forces out of the area and going into the swamp to tell the survivors that it was safe now.
The Rwandan government has designated the Ntarama church and half a dozen other sites as national monuments, to be preserved as they were left by the Hutu militias.
Marc Nsadimana is the guardian of the monument. He is a Hutu, but I was told he had protected many Tutsis at great risk to himself. He won't talk about it. I asked how he protected the Tutsis, and he shrugged. He pretended not to understand a question as to why he, a Hutu, had done this.
Mass graves are everywhere in Rwanda, some marked with crosses showing that victims ranged from infants to people in their 70s. Human bones can occasionally be seen along the country's dirt tracks. The bodies of the estimated 800,000 to one million dead are still being found.
THE palace and the church are both monuments to the failure of nation building in much of Africa, but they have one to connect them.
The Hutu militias who perpetrated this slaughter have been in Mobutu's Zaire, just a few miles from his palace, for two years. Their presence, in turn, has contributed to the greatest political crisis facing Zaire's dictator after 31 years of power.
For two years, 1.2 million Hutu refugees have sat in refugee camps in eastern Zaire, right on Rwanda's border. Thousands are brutal killers, thousands more are implicated indirectly.
The armed militias have lived among the refugees carrying out military training, attempting to destabilise Rwanda by launching, raids across the border and laying down the law in the camps. They have been kept going by western humanitarian assistance.
They remain a political and humanitarian problem. Many doubt the official Rwandan government line that they want them to return. At Ntarama, the notion of reintegration seems laughable.
The frightened booking man met skulking behind a truck inside Zaire just 100 yards from the Rwandan soldiers also appeared doubtful. His business card, which he gave me, showed he had the same surname as a very high profile former extreme Hutu politician.
On the back he had written a note to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees asking to be escorted from his hiding place, "with his wife, children and brother in law, into Rwanda.
Of the 1.2 million Hutus roaming Zaire unfed and unwanted, he was the only one to be seen attempting to go home. And even he stopped short of the border.
