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

by Jason K. Stearns

The Congolese war must be put among the other great human cataclysms of our time: the World Wars, the Great Leap Forward in China, the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides. And yet, despite its epic proportions, the war has received little sustained attention from the rest of the world. The mortality figures are so immense that they become absurd, almost meaningless. From the outside, the war seems to possess no overarching narrative or ideology to explain it, no easy tribal conflict or socialist revolution to use as a peg in a news piece. 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. Instead it is a war of the ordinary person, with many combatants unknown and unnamed, who fight for complex reasons that are difficult to distill in a few sentences—much to the frustration of the international media. How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective? How do you put a human face on a figure like “four million” when most of the casualties perish unsensationally, as a result of disease, far away from television cameras?

This book takes Arendt’s insight as its starting point. The Congo obviously does not have the anonymous bureaucracy that the Third Reich did. Most of the killing and rape have been carried out at short range, often with hatchets, knives, and machetes. It is difficult not to attribute personal responsibility to the killers and leaders of the wars. It is not, however, helpful to personalize the evil and suggest that somehow those involved in the war harbored a superhuman capacity for evil. It is more useful to ask what political system produced this kind of violence. 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. The answers to these questions lie deeply embedded in the region’s history. But instead of being a story of a brutal bureaucratic machine, the Congo is a story of the opposite: a country in which the state has been eroded over centuries and where once the fighting began, each community seemed to have its own militia, fighting brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies with each other. It was more like seventeenth-century Europe and the Thirty Years’ War than Nazi Germany.

Etienne Tshisekedi, the country’s former prime minister, insisted so doggedly that the government had to respect the constitutional order before he stepped back into politics and stood for election that he briefly moralized himself out of politics. Wamba dia Wamba, a former rebel leader who features in this book, was so idealistic about what a rebellion should be that he marginalized himself to irrelevance. It would have been an interesting experiment to drop a young, relatively unknown Mahatma Gandhi into the Congo and observe whether he, insisting on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, would have been able to change anything, either. The Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara spent almost a year in the Congo in 1965 fighting with rebels in the east before he abandoned the struggle. Malnourished and depressed, he concluded they “weren’t ready for the revolution.” The Congo has always defied the idealists.

In southwestern Rwanda, the Hutu flight was stalled by the deployment of a UN-mandated French military mission, dubbed Operation Turquoise, intended to protect the few remaining Tutsi in that region as well as aid workers. It was one of the many absurdities of the Rwandan crisis: The French government and its contractors had made thirty-six shipments of weapons to Habyarimana’s government between 1990 and 1994, worth $11 million, and had deployed seven hundred fifty French troops, who helped with military training, planning, and even interrogation of RPF prisoners.12 Just months after they had finished helping to train the Interahamwe, the French, wolves turned shepherds, announced a humanitarian intervention to bring an end to the killing. The French troops did save Tutsi lives. They also, however, refused to arrest the Habyarimana government and army officials in their territory who were known to have organized massacres. Hate radio continued broadcasting unhindered from the area controlled by the French, exhorting the population to continue the extermination of Tutsi. Meanwhile, across the Zairian border in Goma, the base of French operations, at least five shipments of weapons from France were delivered to the ex-FAR leadership who had fled from Kigali.13 To add insult to injury, French president François Mitterrand personally authorized a donation of $40,000 to Habyarimana’s wife, one of the most extremist members of the president’s inner circle, when she arrived in P...

can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “Tutsi aggression” invoked as the reason for the war in the Congo, but it is not the origin of the conflict, as the quote from the BBC at the beginning of this chapter might have you believe. By limiting ourselves to the simplistic “Hutu militia killed half a million Tutsi,” we are suggesting that there is a reason for that violence implicit in those identities, that something about being Hutu and Tutsi caused the violence. While ethnicity is probably the strongest form of social organization in the region, we need to scratch behind that surface, to see what its history is, who is using it or being used by it, and for what reasons.

It is easy to forget, now that greed and plunder claim the headlines as the main motives for conflict in the region, that its beginnings were steeped in ideology. The Rwandan-backed invasion was perhaps the heyday of the African Renaissance, riding on the groundswell of the liberation of South Africa from apartheid, and of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Rwanda from dictatorships. It was an alliance motivated in part by the strategic interests of individual governments, but also by a larger spirit of pan-Africanism. Not since the heyday of apartheid in South Africa had the continent seen this sort of mobilization behind a cause. For the leaders of the movement, it was a proud moment in African history, when Africans were doing it for themselves in face of prevarication from the west and United Nations. Zimbabwe provided tens of millions of dollars in military equipment and cash to the rebellion. Eritrea sent a battalion from its navy to conduct covert speedboat operations on Lake Kivu. Ethiopia and Tanzania sent military advisors. President Museveni recalled: “Progressive African opinion was galvanised.”

Within several years, the Congo was to become the graveyard for this lofty rhetoric of new African leadership as preached by Mbeki, Albright, and many others. Freedom fighters were downgraded to mere marauding rebels; self-defense looked ever more like an excuse for self-enrichment. Leaders who had denounced the big men of Africa who stayed in power for decades began appearing more and more like the very creatures they had fought against for so many decades.

The beginnings of his military career were bittersweet. He was elated, surrounded by like-minded youths, all humming with purpose and ideals. He had studied and could read and write, gaining him preferential treatment among the other youngsters. But the hard side of war also became apparent. He learned of the death of two of his older brothers, who had died in the RPF’s final push to take Kigali in 1994. 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. It was a world full of fury and pain; there didn’t seem to be anything pure left.

Bugera had a construction company, and with the influx of aid organizations, he managed to win several lucrative contracts. Beginning in August 1994, when the RPF took control of the last ex-FAR holdout in northwestern Rwanda, Bugera used his company as a front to set up an elaborate network of RPF spies. “As soon as the RPF conquered Rwanda,” he told me, “they set their sights on invading Zaire, much sooner than most people realize.” Overnight, he replaced thirty of his bricklayers with Hutu RPF soldiers. Other RPF officers took up jobs as motorcycle taxi drivers, ferrying ex-FAR officers and exiled politicians around the province and collecting intelligence, or worked in the markets in the refugee camps. Bugera remembered one of his friends exclaiming in disbelief when she saw her brother, an officer in the Rwandan army, on TV posing as a trader in a refugee camp. “The RPF could tell you with topographical precision where all of their enemy’s troops were located,” he said with admiration. “It was like having GPS.” By 1995, young Tutsi soldiers had started infiltrating Goma, armed with maps on which they drew ex-FAR positions and strategic targets. “It was like Mossad,” Bugera said, smiling proudly. “These guys were good.”

The Congolese imagination, flailing around for clarity and trying to understand the violent upheaval the country has experienced, has latched onto the most basic building block of society: ethnicity. Instead of disabusing it of these stereotypes, successive leaders on both sides of the ethnic divide have only cynically fanned these flames.

Laurent Kabila emerged as an accidental leader of the AFDL movement and eventually as the president of a liberated Congo. In an example of Rwandan hubris, the RPF planners desperately tried to foist ideology and sincerity upon the Congolese they had handpicked. As ingenious as Kagame’s military planners were, their political strategy ended up being simplistic and short-sighted. For many Congolese who had labored long—and ultimately unsuccessfully—to overthrow Mobutu peacefully, Kabila was a living symbol of foreign meddling in their country. It is one of the Congo’s historical ironies that the same man came to be seen as a bulwark of patriotism and resistance against Rwandan aggression.

I asked Alex where the bodies of the Banyamulenge were buried, and he shook his head again. “Who knows? They didn’t give us time to bury our dead.” He had heard that Mariam had a tomb in Rwanda, but he didn’t know where it was. His voice cracked slightly, and he looked at his feet. “We don’t even have tombs to go and mourn our dead, we carry the grief around with us.”

None of the killings has led to prosecutions or even a truth commission that could ease the heavy burden of the past. Skeletons can still be found, stuffed into septic tanks, water cisterns, and toilets, reminders of the various tragedies. In Bukavu, mass graves dating back to this period are now covered with the cement of shopping centers. Every new bout of violence summons these spirits up and manipulates the past into a story of victimization, ignoring the wounds of the other communities. Peace, many diplomats and locals say, is more important than justice, especially when the government is full of yesterday’s military leaders. Prosecute those leaders, and they will start the war again, the prevailing wisdom goes. Plus, some Congolese leaders say, war is nasty, and people die. One erudite politician reminded me: “Didn’t General Ulysses Grant give an amnesty for Confederate soldiers after the American Civil War? Didn’t the Spanish do the same for crimes committed under Franco? Why should it be different for us?” Unfortunately, the impunity has thus far brought little peace, and the criminals of yesterday become the recidivists of tomorrow.

After decades of nepotism and mismanagement, it was clear that the only loyalty most commanders felt was to their own pocketbooks. General Tembele, Mobutu’s commander on the eastern front, met regularly with RPF commanders across the border to brief them on the military situation.16 Patrick Karegeya, the Rwandan external intelligence chief, spoke with Mobutu officers in Kinshasa and in the east in the run-up to the war. “We had extensive infiltration, we used money, we used friends. It wasn’t hard.”

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...

Anyone who has spent much time in the Congo can understand Wamba’s desire to bring about radical change through armed rebellion, given the lack of viable options. But his gravest sin was to have remained in the rebellion for so long despite its glaring flaws. A former colleague of his quoted a Swahili proverb to me: “Don’t get into a ship with a hole in the bottom; it will eventually sink.” He said of Wamba, “I don’t think he raped or killed or stole, but he was part of a machine that did. He is guilty of that at least.”

Under Mobutu, the price of resistance was so great that few ever dared to stand up and be counted for fear of being chopped down. Resistance to dictatorship in other countries has been most successful when it can call on strong, well-organized structures of like-minded supporters, such as labor unions, churches, or student groups. In the Congo, where in any case only 4 percent of the working-age population had jobs in the formal sector, there were few labor unions to speak of. In the early 1990s, fewer than 100,000 students in higher education were dispersed among dozens of universities and training centers across the country. Mobutu had tamed these institutions, consolidating all labor and student unions and forcefully integrating them into his ruling party. The country’s biggest institute of higher learning, Lovanium University, previously run by the Catholic Church, was nationalized along with several Protestant universities. Mobutu even forced the Catholic Church to accept the establishment of cells of his political party within religious seminaries.

If the fiercest ideology or ethics that can be found in the country is ethnic, that is because no other institution has been strong enough for the people to rally around. Unfortunately, ethnic mobilization is usually exclusive in nature and does not form an equitable or truly democratic basis for the distribution of state resources; also, given the manipulation of customary chiefs, even this vessel has been corrupted. It will take generations to rebuild institutions or social organizations that can challenge the current predatory state without resorting to ethnicity.

Wamba came to power alone and isolated. He didn’t have a political power base and had few allies in the rebellion he had joined. Most importantly, the organization was fractured into different interest groups and dominated by Rwandan interference. For a political scientist, Wamba had grossly underestimated the necessity of having a strong organization to implement the lofty reforms he dreamt of. Instead of leaving, however, Wamba retreated into the cocoon of his ideas and theories, writing letters and giving interviews to leftist American and African journals. He became a victim of his own idealism, reduced to irrelevance.

As always in the Congo, the myth reveals a bit of the man, but not much. Bemba is certainly endowed with a bloated ego and an overly keen business acumen. But he also managed to do something that no other rebel leader in the Congo had done: He built a rebel movement that was able to control a large part of the country while maintaining popular support, all without excessive outside interference.

The heavy Rwandan presence in the security services stirred resentment among Ugandans, and land conflicts involving the 200,000 Tutsi refugees living in southern Uganda were becoming a nuisance for President Museveni. Under pressure from his domestic constituencies, he was forced to backpedal on promises of resettlement and citizenship for these refugees, and many Rwandans in the army were demobilized. This rejection was tantamount to betrayal for Tutsi officers who had risked their lives liberating Uganda, only to be dismissed as foreigners. As one officer put it: “You stake your life and at the end of the day you recognize that no amount of contribution can make you what you are not. You can’t buy it, not even with blood.”

It was clear to Hrvoje that the Rwandans were better organized than their enemies. “They were motivated and followed orders. The Ugandans didn’t seem to know why they were fighting.” The Rwandans were cut off from their base at the airport but quickly organized an air bridge with helicopters and infiltrated their soldiers through the jungle. The Rwandans, used to years of guerrilla warfare, fought their way from house to house with their AK-47s, dodging bullets. After battles, the Rwandans would always make sure to gather their dead and bury them, whereas the Ugandans often left their soldiers on the streets, leaving the impression that hundreds of Ugandans had died and almost no Rwandans. The Ugandans, for the most part, stayed in their trenches and in their armored personnel carriers. “The Rwandans won the battle with guts,” Hrvoje said.

Mass violence does not just affect the families of the dead. It tears at the fabric of society and lodges in the minds of the witnesses and perpetrators alike. A decade after the violence, it seemed that the villagers were still living in its aftershocks.

Social life was deeply affected as well. The death of their traditional chief, along with the only priest, left the community without any leaders. “They killed our father and our mother,” one villager told me. The church closed down, and the chief’s family was embroiled in a succession battle that the RCD finally put an end to by imposing someone of their choice, much to the chagrin of many community members. Again and again, the villagers told me how the chief’s death had affected them much more than anything else. The well-being of the community was vested in the chief; he presided over harvest ceremonies, gave out land, and blessed weddings. Who would call for salongo, the weekly communal labor, to be performed? Who would reconcile feuding families and solve land conflicts?

While Kasika featured in thousands of speeches that lambasted Rwanda and the RCD, no investigation was ever launched, and no compensation was ever offered for any of the victims. The lack of justice had allowed the villagers to stew in their resentment and had made their anger fester into more hatred. “I hate the Tutsi,” Patrice told me. “If I see a Tutsi face, I feel fear.” I ask them if they could ever forgive the soldiers for what they did. “Forgive whom? We don’t even know who did it,” someone outside Patrice’s house said.

They launched their challenge early in the morning. Thousands of young soldiers clambered up the steep slopes toward the fortifications above. There was little brush for cover; this was cattle country, and all the trees had been chopped down for pasture. “It was a massacre,” Colonel Gateretse remembered. Kabila’s army “sat at the top with their heavy machine guns and just mowed the kids down. You would hear the mortars thunder, the rat-tat-tat of the machine guns and screams as our boys fell.” One by one, the walkie-talkies of their officers trying to scale the hill went dead. After two days and hundreds of casualties, the Rwandans and Burundians sat together to rethink. They decided to send a light, mobile battalion around Kabila’s position to attack from the rear, while the bulk of the troops continued their frontal offensive to distract their adversaries. The flanking maneuver, however, was risky, as the terrain was difficult and the Congolese had patrols throughout the surrounding areas. The soldiers would have to cover forty miles by foot in one night to catch them by surprise, a tough feat even by their standards. They forced some unlucky locals at gunpoint to serve as guides for them and set out at nightfall at a light trot with little equipment other than their AK-47s, several clips of ammunition, and a few rocket-propelled grenade launchers. It worked. After a morning of catfights up the mountain, incurring even more casualties, suddenly the machine guns at the to...

With the Rwandans just a few miles away, the army high command, including General Joseph Kabila, tried to board a helicopter to flee back to Lubumbashi, only to find that there was no fuel for that either. “It was like Mobutu all over again,” a presidential aide told me. “Someone had sold all the helicopter fuel to make a profit. We were the victims of our own ineptitude.”

So who ordered the killing of Mzee? Congolese imagination is knotted around Kabila’s death, entangled in multiple narratives and histories that compete to explain why the scrawny bodyguard shot the president. Part of the problem is that there were too many people who had a reason, who stood to benefit from his death. As the Economist quipped, fifty million people—the country’s entire population—had a motive. By the time of his death, Kabila had managed to offend or alienate not only his enemies but also most of his allies.

Sometimes it seems that by crossing the border into the Congo one abandons any sort of Archimedean perspective on truth and becomes caught up in a web of rumors and allegations, as if the country itself were the stuff of some postmodern fiction. This is, in part, due to a structural deficit; institutions that could dig deep and scrutinize information—such as a free press, an independent judiciary, and an inquisitive parliament—do not exist. But it has also become a matter of cultural pride. People weave rumors and myths together over drinks or while waiting for taxis to help give meaning to their lives. It may, for example, be easier to believe that Joseph Kabila’s real name is Hippolyte Kanambé and that he is a Rwandan, acting in the interests of Paul Kagame, or to believe that the conflict in the Congo was all an American corporate conspiracy to extract minerals from the country. Either might be easier to swallow than the complex, tangled reality. Doesn’t it give more meaning to the Congolese’s grim everyday existence?

If there is one thing the Congolese will remember Mzee for, it is the war. It consumed both Kabila and his government and pushed them into a frenzy of patriotism and, at times, xenophobia. He became obsessed with winning. After all, he had grown up a rebel and felt much more at ease in trying to win a war than to rule a country. But when he became a martyr to his most dear cause, the country heaved a sigh of relief.

The notion that the war was fueled by international mining capital eager to get its hands on the Congo’s wealth does not hold water; the war slowed down privatization of the sector by a decade, as insecurity and administrative chaos prevented large corporations from investing. It was not until 2005 that major new contracts in Katanga were approved and investors began to invest significant funds.

The coltan price stayed high between June 2000 and July 2001, producing record profits for the RCD, the Rwandan government, and their business associates. Some researchers estimate that net profits made by Rwandan companies could have been as high as $150 million for this period for coltan alone, while other researchers calculate total profits made off the minerals trade at $250 million per annum throughout their occupation.46 For Rwanda, whose entire annual budget was $380 million at the time, this income made its expensive involvement in the Congo possible. President Kagame himself described their involvement in the Congo as “self-sustaining.”47 He was more than right. Rwanda’s official military budget was $55 million in 2001, almost a third of total spending, but the London-based International Institute for Security Studies put the real amount at $135 million.

“It would be a mistake to see this just as personal greed,” the former high-ranking RCD officer told me. “They were very organized; they provided military escorts to mineral shipments so that we couldn’t stop them at the border; they decided which businessmen could do business. But I also saw Rwandan officers jailed and beaten for having stolen money!”49 Indeed, according to one human rights report, despite the profits coming out of the Congo, civil servants in Rwanda were asked to give up to one month’s salary per annum as contribution to the war effort.50 For many Rwandans, from the presidency down to the school teacher, the war in the Congo was an ideological project, not just an opportunity to plunder.

According to a World Bank study, if you paid all of your taxes in the Congo—a full thirty-two different payments—you would be dishing out 230 percent of your profits.53 In other words, you can only survive by cutting corners. The tax system had lost its overall coherence, as revenue-collecting agencies had proliferated over the years, each using exorbitant tax rates as blackmail to obtain bribes. The tax code was never intended to be followed; the state had created regulations that begged to be broken and had dreamt up its own subversion, pushing a large part of the economy into the informal sector so that individuals could profit.

Business in the Congo required a healthy dose of pragmatism. For many, cut-and-dry morality was out of place here. This conundrum became clear to international charities, as well, which set up their bases in Goma to provide food and health care to victims of the violence. Many rented the houses of businessmen close to the rebels, as they, of course, had the nicest compounds with sumptuous gardens, often overlooking the lake. Humanitarian groups also used trucking companies and shopped for groceries in stores linked to the military enterprise. It was almost impossible to avoid.

The new Kabila was no pacifist. He did not stop fighting with his enemies; he just changed tactics. He largely respected the front line cease-fire but provided weapons and supplies to fuel the Mai-Mai insurgency on his enemies’ turf. It was as brilliant in its logic as it was brutal. The ramshackle Mai-Mai were little military threat to the RCD and their Rwandan allies, who had much greater firepower, but they provoked ruthless counterinsurgency operations by Rwanda and its allies, making them even more unpopular. It was typical guerrilla warfare, as practiced by Mao Tsetung and Che Guevara: Keep the enemy swinging with nine-pound sledgehammers at flies.

Diplomats who met him regularly were often impressed by his knowledge of world affairs and understanding of the region. A favorite rhetorical tool he liked to use was to defend his record by comparing the Congo with western countries. “You criticize democracy here, but our elections turnout was over 80 percent—in the U.S., barely half of the voters show up,” he told an American diplomat.20 When confronted with allegations of corruption, he countered with the Enron scandal in the United States and Silvio Berlusconi’s manipulation of laws to protect himself from prosecution.

Journalists have a responsibility to report on these atrocities, and people are often jolted awake by such horrors. In addition, millions of dollars have gone to dedicated organizations and health centers in the region that are helping survivors cope and restart their lives. These advocacy efforts have also, however, had unintended effects. They reinforce the impression that the Congo is filled with wanton savages, crazed by power and greed. This view, by focusing on the utter horror of the violence, distracts from the politics that gave rise to the conflict and from the reasons behind the bloodshed. If all we see is black men raping and killing in the most outlandish ways imaginable, we might find it hard to believe that there is any logic to this conflict. We are returned to Joseph Conrad’s notion that the Congo takes you to the heart of darkness, an inscrutable and unimprovable mess. If we want to change the political dynamics in the country, we have above all to understand the conflict on its own terms. That starts with understanding how political power is managed.

But the Congo does not have a Leviathan, a state that can protect its citizens or even impose a monopoly of violence. In contrast with the Thirty Years’ War, which helped produce the European system of nation-states, it is unlikely that the Congo wars will forge a strong state. As these pages have made clear, the story of the Congo wars is one of state weakness and failure, which has made possible the ceaseless proliferation of insurgent groups, still numbering around twenty-nine in late 2010. These armed groups fight brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies that, as the United States discovered in Vietnam and Iraq, are not so much about controlling territory as about controlling civilians, who are brutalized in order to obtain resources and as retaliation for attacks by their rivals.

The biggest fear of Mobutu’s and Kabila’s regimes has not been a foreign invasion—Mobutu was incredulous to the end that a neighboring country could oust him—but internal collapse. They feared even their own bodyguards and ministers would stab them in the back. The Congo of today is in some ways more similar to the sixteenth-century Italy of Machiavelli—and its court intrigues comparable—than to any modern twenty-first-century state.

The only viable means of popular mobilization remains ethnicity, although even that has been gutted of much of its moral content by generations of customary rulers co-opted and repressed by the state. These ethnicity-based organizations, whether political parties or armed groups, mobilize for greater resources for their own narrow community, not for the public good. This in turn fuels corrupt systems of patronage, whereby ethnic leaders embezzle public funds in order to reward their supporters.

No one factor has produced the kleptocratic, venal political elite. Certainly social and educational issues also play a role. But it is clear that political elites react to incentives and that no meaningful reform will result as long as these incentives are skewed against the creation of strong institutions. Buoyed by foreign support and revenues from copper, oil, and diamonds, the government feels little need to serve its citizens and promote sustainable development. Why empower nettlesome parliaments, courts, and auditing bodies if they will just turn around and harass you?

This state of affairs should force foreign donors to think more carefully about contributing billions of dollars to development in the Congo without pondering the long-term repercussions. The donors—mainly the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom—usually insist that this money is politically neutral, that it does not directly benefit the political elite. This is true, as most of the money is for schools, roads, health care, and water projects. But all development is deeply political. By taking over the financing of most public services, donors take pressure off the Congolese government to respond to the needs of its citizens. Ultimately, the rule of law will be created not through a capacity-building project in the ministry of finance but through a power struggle between the government, local elites, and business circles. Donors need to figure out how to most responsibly insert themselves in this dynamic and not just pave roads, build hospitals, and reform fiscal systems.

This is not to say that the war has been fueled by western governments eager to get their hands on Congolese riches. There is little evidence for that. It is certainly true that many companies, Congolese and foreign, have benefited enormously from the conflict. Nevertheless, for the most part it was small, junior outfits that made a fortune—the conflict postponed major industrial mining and investment for over a decade. Similarly, while some western diplomats flourished through their corrupt dealings in the Congo, it would be wrong to flip causality on its head and say that western businesses and diplomats caused the war. For the most part, the mining companies go where profit margins take them, and the embassies in Kinshasa do their mandated job of helping them. The problem has been one of regulatory failure; of mining cowboys allowed to get away with mass fraud, hiding behind shell companies registered in Caribbean islands and working the corrupt stratosphere of Congolese politics; and of western governments not caring about the behavior of their companies once they leave their borders.

A key fallacy of international engagement has been the idea that justice is an impediment to peace in the region. Time and time again, diplomats have actively shied away from creating an international court to prosecute those responsible for the many atrocities committed during the war. One of the most disheartening moments in my research, repeated countless times, was hearing survivors explain that they didn’t have anything to help them address their loss—the killers hadn’t been brought to justice, and often they didn’t even know where their loved ones were buried. The Congo is something of an outlier in this sense: Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia have all had tribunals to deal with the past. Yet in the Congo, where many of the perpetrators are still in power, the victims are left to stew in their frustration.

In large part, however, our sins have been of omission. We simply do not care enough. Contrary to what some Congolese believe, President Obama does not wake up to a security briefing on the Congo with his morning scone. Generally, we do not care about a strange war fought by black people somewhere in the middle of Africa. This sad hypocrisy is easy to see—NATO sent 50,000 troops from some of the best armies to Kosovo in 1999, a country one-fifth the size of South Kivu. In the Congo, the UN peacekeeping mission plateaued at 20,000 troops, mostly from South Asia, ill-equipped and with little will to carry out risky military operations. In exchange, the Congo has received plentiful humanitarian aid—a short-term solution to a big problem.

Throughout the conflict, donor aid made up for over half of the budget of Rwanda and over a third of that of Uganda. The largest providers were the European Commission, the United Kingdom, and the United States, governments that felt understandably guilty for not having come to Rwanda’s aid during the genocide.

The donors were, however, myopic. They clearly recognized the relatively positive developments taking place within Rwanda’s borders but were generally indifferent toward the conflict next door. When Rwanda reinvaded the Congo in August 1998, Washington and London protested but did not use their mighty diplomatic and financial leverage on Congo’s neighbors. “We did the right thing with Rwanda,” Sue Hogwood, a former UK ambassador to Rwanda, said. “We needed to help them rebuild after the genocide. We engaged and challenged them over human rights abuses, but they also had genuine security concerns.”

We cannot do peacemaking on the cheap, with few diplomats and no resources. It will not only fail but also lead to simplistic policies that can do more harm than good.

The Congo war had no one cause, no clear conceptual essence that can be easily distilled in a couple of paragraphs. Like an ancient Greek epic, it is a mess of different narrative strands—some heroic, some venal, all combined in a narrative that is not straightforward but layered, shifting, and incomplete. It is not a war of great mechanical precision but of ragged human edges.