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

by Jason K. Stearns

Laurent Kabila’s improvised army, the AFDL, arrived in Tingi-Tingi on February 28, 1997. Many sick or weak refugees did not manage to flee. Dozens were crushed to death or drowned following a stampede on a nearby bridge. Some 2,000 survived the attacks and were airlifted back to Rwanda by aid organizations. Others were killed. A worker for the local Red Cross, who, ten years later, was still too afraid to tell me his name, said he had returned several days afterward to find bodies bludgeoned to death in the camp’s tented health centers. Others had fallen, intravenous needles still in their arms, in the forests nearby. A local truck driver, who had been commandeered by the AFDL to help clean up the town after the attack, told me there were dead bodies everywhere, refugees who had been too weak to flee and had then been bayoneted by the soldiers. “They didn’t use bullets on the refugees—they used knives,” he told me. His eyes glazed over as he remembered the image of an infant sucking on his dead mother’s breast, trying in vain to get some sustenance from her cold body. Reverend Kapala, who had fled into the forest for one night and then returned, told me, “They killed any male refugee over the age of twelve. They slit their throats. Not the women or children. Just the men.” However, when I separately asked the truck driver, the minister, and the Red Cross worker how each had felt about the AFDL, they all quickly responded, “It was a liberation! We were overjoyed.” I was ama...