Some
months ago, in a ditch beside one of the main streets of Bunia, a dusty,
war-battered city in northeastern Congo, I noticed a small, broken-down, dull
green armoured car, the gun barrel in its turret tilted awkwardly toward the
sky. Removing war debris can be an expensive luxury in a poor country, and the
wreck seemed an apt symbol of the indelible mark that 15 years of intermittent
conflict has put on this nation.
The
fighting has left tens or even hundreds of thousands of women gang-raped and
led to what may be millions of war--related deaths; at its peak, some 3.4
million Congolese (the only one of these tolls we can be remotely sure of) were
forced to flee their homes for months or years. But it draws little attention
in the United States. As Jason K. Stearns, who has worked for the United
Nations in Congo, points out, a study showed that in 2006 even this newspaper
gave four times as much coverage to Darfur, although Congolese have died in far
greater numbers.
One
reason we shy away is the conflict’s stunning complexity. “How,” Stearns asks,
“do you cover a war that involves at least 20 different rebel groups and the
armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or
objective?” “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” is the best account so far: more
serious than several recent macho-war-correspondent travelogues, and more lucid
and accessible than its nearest competitor, Gérard Prunier’s dense and
overwhelming “Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the
Making of a Continental Catastrophe.”
A
fatal combination long primed this vast country for bloodshed. It is wildly
rich in gold, diamonds, coltan, uranium, timber, tin and more. At the same
time, after 32 years of being stripped bare by the American-backed dictator
Mobutu Sese Seko, it became the largest territory on earth with essentially no
functioning -government.
Then
it was as if waves of gasoline were poured onto the tinder. When the Hutu
regime that had just carried out the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis was overthrown
in 1994, well over a million Hutu fled into eastern Congo, then known as Zaire.
These included both the génocidaires and their defeated army (the
abandoned armoured car in Bunia was theirs) as well as hundreds of thousands of
Hutu who had not killed anyone but who feared reprisals at the hands of the
Tutsis now running Rwanda.
In
their militarized refugee camps, the génocidaires rearmed and began
staging raids on Rwanda. To try to put a stop to this and install a friendly
regime in the huge country next door, Rwanda, along with Congolese rebel
allies, invaded its neighbour in 1996 in what is known as the “first war.”
Mobutu’s kleptocracy in Kinshasa rapidly crumbled; the dictator fled overseas
and died a few months later. Laurent Kabila, a portly veteran of some years as
a rebel in the bush and many more as a shady businessman in exile, now found
himself leader of a Congo where almost all public services had collapsed. He
was not the man to fix them. Stearns gives a vivid anecdotal picture of Kabila
as someone far out of his depth, trying to run a government by literally
turning his house into the treasury, with thick wads of bills stashed in a
toilet -cubicle.
Kabila
soon parted ways with his Rwandan backers. Then came the “second war”: an
invasion by Rwanda and its ally Uganda in 1998. They failed to overthrow
Kabila, however, because, dangling political favours and lucrative business
deals, he enlisted military help from several other countries, principally
Angola and Zimbabwe. A few years later he was assassinated and succeeded by his
son Joseph. Eventually, a series of shaky peace deals ended much of the
fighting.
But,
as Stearns says, “like layers of an onion, the Congo war contains wars within
wars.” For example, Uganda and Rwanda fell out badly with each other and fought
on Congo soil. Each country then backed rival sets of brutal Congolese warlords
who sprang up in the country’s lawless, mineral-rich east. And when Rwanda’s
Hutu-Tutsi conflict spilled over the border, it fatally inflamed complex,
longstanding tensions between Congolese Tutsis and other ethnic groups. This is
merely the beginning of the list.
The
task facing anyone who tries to tell this whole story is formidable, but Stearns
by and large rises to it. He has lived in the country, and has done a raft of
interviews with people who witnessed what happened before he got there.
Occasionally the chain of names of people and places temporarily swamps the
reader, but on the whole his picture is clear, made painfully real by a series
of close-up portraits.
In
one crowded refugee camp there were no menstrual pads; women could use only
rags that, repeatedly washed out, left rivulets between the tents streaked with
blood, as if a reminder of the carnage they were fleeing. Or here is a Rwandan
Army officer from a death squad that took revenge on Hutu refugees, including
women and children, telling Stearns: “We could do over a hundred a day.... We
used ropes. It was the fastest way and we didn’t spill blood. Two of us would
place a guy on the ground, wrap a rope around his neck once, then pull hard.”
Congo’s
history is interwoven with all of its neighbors, but none more closely than
Rwanda, whose government in the 1990s understandably feared that
Congo-based génocidaires could continue to rampage over the border
and slaughter more Tutsi. But the genocide in no way excuses subsequent Rwandan
massacres of tens of thousands of Hutu in Congo. Nor the way Rwanda quickly
became the latest in the long string of outsiders — from Atlantic slave traders
to Belgian colonizers to mining multinationals — who have so plundered this
territory.
Stearns
is somewhat easier on Rwanda here than he has been elsewhere, for example, in a
United Nations report he contributed to. But he does quote the Rwandan
strongman and current president Paul Kagame as calling his military
intervention “self-sustaining,” and cites an estimate that the Rwandan Army and
allied businesses reaped some $250 million in Congolese minerals profits at the
height of the second war. Such figures are backed up in abundant detail in a
series of United Nations reports, and ultimately led Sweden and the Netherlands
to suspend aid to Rwanda.
Not
so the United States. It has supported Kagame for years, contributing
indirectly to Congo’s suffering. How this media-savvy autocrat has managed to
convince so many American journalists, diplomats and political leaders that he
is a great statesman is worth a book in itself.
No
account of Congo can yet have a happy ending. Although Stearns dutifully makes
some policy proposals — more carefully directed aid with conditions on it; more
stringent regulation of “mining cowboys”; a mechanism for holding the worst
perpetrators to account — he is wise enough to know how difficult it will be to
halt 15 years of violence and pillage. Indeed, the price of recent peace deals
has been the incorporation of a number of rapacious warlords and their troops
into the ill--disciplined Congolese national army.
That
wrecked armoured car by the roadside in Bunia? It’s still there. A friend sent
me a cell phone photo the other day. Only now, like a trophy, it has been
lifted up onto a concrete pedestal, which is painted with the name of a nearby
army unit.
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