Yambuya was born in
Stanleyville,
Belgian Congo as the son of Abram Yambuya, high civil servant within the
Mouvement national congolais party of the country's first Prime Minister,
Patrice Lumumba. He was the grandson of pastor Yambuya, early
Kimbanguist in Stanleyville. He went to school at the
Athenée royal in Stanleyville in 1957. As an adolescent, he fought in the
Comité national de libération alongside
Laurent-Désiré Kabila during the
Simba rebellion in 1964. He subsequently went into exile in
Sudan,
Uganda,
Egypt, and
Bulgaria. war Yambuya returned to Congo in 1966 and, after obtaining his high school degree in
Bas-Congo in 1970, he joined the
Congolese military and obtained his helicopter pilot licence in
Marignane,
France in May 1975. That same year, he returns to his native country to start at the helicopter squadron of
Ndolo base,
Kinshasa. According to his tell-all memoir about his time in the
Zairean army (Forces armées zaïroises, FAZ), ''Zaïre: l'abattoir'', he regularly had to perform "special missions", moving prisoners to places where they were tortured or assassinated. On other occasions, he had to drop packages of up to 600
kg. filled with corpses and debris in a river. during the
1976 Ebola outbreak He fought during the
first Shaba war in 1977 and
second Shaba war in 1978, when
ex-Katangese gendarmes invaded the Shaba province (formerly
Katanga) from
Angola and
Zambia and were pushed back by the FAZ and international interventions. During Shaba II's
Battle of Kolwezi, thirty European residents were murdered in a villa in the P2 quarter of the city during the so-called "P2 massacre" in May 1978. Blamed by Zaire's President
Mobutu Sese Seko on the rebels, Yambuya nevertheless claimed that FAZ Colonel Bosange ordered his troops to shoot through the blinds of the villa, killing the Europeans who sought refuge. One rumour even claimed that they were murdered by FAZ forces to provoke a foreign intervention. The international decision to intervene, however, was already taken by that time. On 30 October 1984, troops of Yambuya's superior general Bolozi arrested him when he refused to take part in a special mission and was mistreated in prison. An officer helps him to escape and he subsequently fled to
Rome. He began to work for
Amnesty International in Rome, published his memoir, gave interviews to newspapers, and participated in conferences. In November 1996, Yambuya joins his old rebel ally
Laurent-Désiré Kabila at the
AFDL. After Kabila replaced Mobutu as the country's President, Yambuya returned and founded the Directorate General of Migration (DGM) and was its Director from 1997 to 2004.
Joseph Kabila succeeded his father Laurent-Désiré who was assassinated, in 2001. Adversary to Joseph Kabila's regime, the security service decided to arrest Yambuya who once again went into exile. He appeared in documentaries such as
Thierry Michel's
Mobutu, King of Zaire about Mobutu's presidency. He published several volumes about "
Neocolonialism in Congo", in which he proposes the theory that Joseph is not the biological child of Laurent-Désiré Kabila. ==Publications==