/ 15 July 2011

Dancing with demons

Dancing With Demons

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters — The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War in Africa (Public Affairs) by Jason K Stearns

If there is one thing I can say unequivocally about the Democratic Republic of Congo after 15 years of living and working there, it is that everything is large-scale — from former president Mobutu Sese Seko’s legendary corruption and lavish lifestyle to the size of the country; from the great Congolese musicians and people’s appetite for beer, fashion, dancing and a good time to its role at the heart of what has been dubbed Africa’s “first World War”.

So it is appropriate that Jason Stearns has written an ambitious book. In an attempt to understand the dynamics that led to successive regional and internal wars in the Congo since the 1996-1997 war that overthrew Mobutu, Stearns takes as his departure point that the evil underpinning the tremendous brutality of these wars is not the result of a “superhuman capacity for evil”.

The aim of the book, he says, is to try to “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”. I can well understand Stearns’s desire to find some sense in the devastating poverty, corruption, violence and everyday brutality most Congolese have to endure. If you can start to understand it, perhaps you can also try to fix it.

Doomed to destruction

For outsiders who know the conflict only through the occasional newspaper headline, it seems that the problem is innate, that the Congo should perhaps be written off as a region doomed to a vicious cycle of poverty and war.

Close observers baulk at such suggestions and insist that history is key to understanding — and perhaps solving — this great country’s woes.

Stearns takes us back to the origins of the international coalition that overthrew Mobutu in May 1997 and provides important background for the motivations of each member of the grouping, the unifying force of which was a distaste for the ailing dictator and his errant policies, especially his support for a hodgepodge of rebel groups fighting in countries such as Rwanda, Uganda
and Angola.

Rwanda — the main concern of which was the presence across the poorly controlled Congo border of more than a million Rwandan Hutu refugees, many of whom had been part of the Hutu militia responsible for the 1994 genocide — played the co-ordinating role and did most of the fighting.

Stearns traces the changing agendas and shifting alliances — former Congo president Laurent Kabila fell out with his allies within a year of coming to power and then, backed by Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola, faced them in a second war that lasted until the formation of a ­transition government in 2003.

But even today the eastern Congo remains the scene of violence — countless armed groups continue to operate there. This is both a legacy of the unfinished business of past wars and of new animosities stoked by these larger conflicts.
Stearns focuses in particular on the hostility between the Congolese Tutsi and the Banyamulenge (Rwandan Tutsis who emigrated to the eastern Congo during the previous century) and other Congolese ethnic groups, which was fuelled by politicised land ownership, Mobutu’s political games over citizenship and the arrival in the eastern Congo of more than one million Rwandan Hutu refugees after the 1994 genocide.

Perpetrated by both sides

Although the Congolese Tutsi and Banyamulenge communities are tiny compared with the country’s total population, they have played a disproportionately visible role in the conflicts of the past two decades. Stearns’s accounts of the violence, which has been perpetrated by both sides and frequently orchestrated by self-interested leaders, and of the absence of sympathy or even factual knowledge of one another and what they have endured, are particularly striking and effective.

Similarly, the real-life characters Stearns chooses as co-narrators in this history of violence help to personalise and contextualise the litany of names, dates and atrocities, and it is in these moments that Stearns comes closest to reaching his goal of demonstrating how the dynamics of evil played themselves out in these wars. There is Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, a lifelong academic familiar with the lecture halls of American universities and the first leader of the Rwandan-backed Rally for Congolese Democracy. He knew that Rwanda, and not he, really controlled the rebel movement he was leading, but he still believed he was doing a good thing. And there is Beatrice, a Rwandan Hutu refugee, whom we first meet in a refugee camp in the eastern Congo, where she adopts several orphaned children, and with whom we part ways after she has spent many months fleeing across the country, hunted down by the Rwandan Tutsi army.

Stearns touches on many other important issues in less detail, such as the financing of the wars, the role of Western powers and the overall fragility of the Congolese state. The subject he has tackled is vast and impossible to cover in one book. But for anyone interested in the Congo and the Great Lakes region this is a great read — one I highly ­recommend.