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

by Jason K. Stearns

There will be long-term repercussions of the Banyamulenge’s participation in the two rebellions. In 2002, a opinion poll asked people whether they thought Banyamulenge were Congolese. Only 26 percent thought so.15 In 2004, when a Munyamulenge commander led a mutiny against the Congolese army in the eastern border town of Bukavu, the population there reacted by launching a vicious witch hunt against Tutsi in town. The United Nations had to evacuate the entire Tutsi population, around 3,000 women, men, and children with mattresses and bags piled high on UN cars, from town. In 2007, when rumors spread in the southern town of Moba that a convoy of Banyamulenge refugees might be returning home from Zambia, local politicians provoked riots, protesting the “return of foreigners to our country.” These resentments are in part bred by opportunist demagogues but are also grounded in the brutal rule by the AFDL and RCD in the eastern Congo between 1996 and 2003.