Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

by Jason K. Stearns

do not have a Unified Theory of the Congo War, because it does not exist. The conflict is complex and knotted, with dozens of different protagonists.

Overall, however, the greatest sins of Western governments have been ones of omission and ignorance, not of direct exploitation.

In Cambodia, there was the despotic Khmer Rouge; in Rwanda one could cast the genocidal Hutu militias as the villains. In the Congo these roles are more difficult to fill. There is no Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin.

This book tries to see the conflict through the eyes of its protagonists and understand why war made more sense than peace, why the regional political elites seem to be so rich in opportunism and so lacking in virtue.

By the time they were forced to hand over power, the Belgians had set the new nation up to fail.

By 1996, a regional coalition led by Angola, Uganda, and Rwanda had formed to overthrow Mobutu.

The weakness of the state had allowed ethnic rivalries and conflicts over access to land to fester, especially in the densely populated eastern regions on the border with Rwanda and Uganda. During Mobutu’s final years, he and other leaders cynically stoked these ethnic tensions in order to distract from challenges to their power and to rally support.

The conflict in the Congo has many causes, but the most immediate ones came across the border from Rwanda, a country ninety times smaller.

Rwanda’s genocide was organized by the elites but executed by the people.

In part, what was to play out over the next decade in the Congo was a continuation of the Rwandan civil war, as the new government attempted to extirpate the génocidaires and the remnants of Habyarimana’s army on a much broader canvas.

Whereas the price of food had peaked, the value of weapons and ammunition had plummeted because of their abundance.

“Where elephants fight,” he said, “the grass is trampled.” It was a convenient metaphor. Almost every commander I met in the region used it when I asked them about abuses against civilians.

Africa has the shape of a pistol, and Congo is its trigger. —FRANTZ FANON

No one imagined that Rwanda, a country ninety times smaller, could seriously challenge Zaire—in terms of size, it would be like Switzerland trying to conquer all of western Europe.

The most common insult was bor, which was local slang for “thing” as well as “penis.” “For them, we were no better than objects,” Serukiza remembered. Across the border, in Burundi, where many Banyamulenge fled, they were call kijuju after a local plant that looked like cassava but couldn’t be eaten—a useless, treacherous substance.

“You know, for westerners democracy is a good thing. But I don’t think for you and us that wonderful word means the same thing,” Serukiza said.

Then there was the genocide, when the countryside was filled with stinking corpses, when you couldn’t even drink the water in the wells because bodies had been thrown into them and contaminated the groundwater. Everybody seemed to be a killer or a victim or both.