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

by Jason K. Stearns

Women had other problems, as well. The aid organizations running the camps didn’t provide sanitary napkins, and women had to use rags or tear up sheets to use instead. As there was little soap, these scraps of cloth became hard and caked with blood. To their humiliation, women had no choice but to try to wash these in the same pots they used for cooking. “The bloodied water snaked in rivulets between the tents and little puddles of blood formed here and there.”

The response, as so often in the region, was to throw money at the humanitarian crisis but not to address the political causes.

It is essential to have revolutionary seriousness, an ideology that can guide action, a spirit of sacrifice that accompanies one’s actions.

an officer said, ‘We think you are a traitor. Every time you send us into battle, we get attacked!’ “‘But that’s what war is about!’

A rebel commander told me that three of his men on a motorcycle defeated two hundred Mobutu soldiers in another town in the northeast.

On May 15, 1997, Habyarimana’s body went up in flames in Kinshasa, over three years after his death. No one seems to know where his ashes are.

Kabila reprimanded his bodyguard with a laugh, fishing a key out of his pocket: “You idiot! I had the key the whole time! All my money is stored in that toilet—I couldn’t let him in there!”

have tallied the money left in the Central Bank,” he told the stunned room. “There is $22,000 for each of us. I have put it in sacks in a truck outside. Use it well.”

He signed a deal with the African Union Reserve System, a previously unknown company, to set up a central bank with a new currency, “for the advancement and economic development for the Congo.” The company would be financed by Congolese gold and diamonds and would remit 35 percent of profits to Wamba’s treasury, with a $16 million loan up front. The company’s owner was Van Arthur Brink,

“Someone had sold all the helicopter fuel to make a profit. We were the victims of our own ineptitude.”16

impunity and corruption were, to a certain extent, the glue holding the fragile peace together.

encouraged Nkunda to go into rebellion, the new rebellion was a means of keeping their influence in the eastern Congo in the case of electoral defeat.