The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

This is a very well-researched and well-written account of the complex Congo wars. Stearns clearly knows the country well and marshals interviews with many important players to weave a complex narrative, attentive to both the domestic and regional politics and the human dimensions of the Congo's wars.

Although Stearns' writing is accessible, there are two things about the book that distract from the broader narrative. First, Stearns tells the story largely through a series of personal biographies of some of the important actors in the region. These are important stories to tell, and reveal the human side of the country's recent history. But the long list of characters, as well as the biographical detail Stearns devotes to some of them, can cause one to lose track of the broader storyline. Second, the book is not strictly chronological, with some jumping forward and backward between chapters. Perhaps this was a necessary device to tell such a complicated and multifaceted story, but it too can make it harder to keep track of the story's main thread.

I was hoping for a bit more compact and detailed account of the domestic, regional, and international politics of the Congo wars, the peace process, and the political economy of the conflict, but Dancing in the Glory of Monsters succeeds on its own terms in presenting an informed and humanized account of Africa's World War.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns, is an account of the political and military unrest in the Congo for much of the 1990s onward. Stearns does a remarkable job considering the complexity of the war, and the ignorance of people about the Congo.

What we get is an account of how the Congo works, or fails to work, as a political and social entity. This makes for sober reading. If a culture can develop, or evolve, into such an utterly corrupt entity where any contact with it comprises a person’s moral sense, we should all be very troubled. For if it happens in the Congo, it could happen here.

Many history books are unable to straddle the difficult border of "informative" and "readable." Jason Stearns' account of the Congo Wars of the late 90's and early 2000's rests comfortably in the middle and the result is a highly readable and tremendously informative work. "Dancing In The Glory of Monsters" is a must read for anyone interested in African history or one of the greater tragedies of recent times.

Stearns begins the book by discussing why the Congo Wars are misunderstood and even ignored by Western media and cultures. For example, he compares the conflict with the crisis in Darfur, in which an Arab government supported an Arab militia to exterminate black Africans. The Congo Wars had dozens of rebel groups with shifting allegiances and nine different nations with any number of proxy militias doing battle with one another. Instead of the climatic air and chemical strikes taking place across Syria, there were jungle gun battles and scattered massacres, often with edged weapons. The Congo Wars, with the inaccessibility of the nation (Congo is the size of Western Europe) and the shifting allegiances of hard to understand rebel groups, was not easily dissected or digested by Western observers. It's not like these rebel groups had websites or even Twitter, like al Shabab. There was no Auschwitz; the majority of dead was from disease and starvation among refugees.

The root of the conflict comes from Rwanda. In 1994, as a Tutsi rebel army led by General Paul Kagame closed in on the capital, Hutu militias murdered over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As Kagame and his rebel army closed in the Hutus fled across the border to the eastern Congo, and under the protection of Mobutu Sese Seko. The safety of the "genocidaires" across the border, the instability caused by the massive refugee camps, and repeated attacks across the border led Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni to say "okay, enough with this Mobutu dude." Well versed in the power of an internal insurgency, Kagame and Museveni found an exiled Congolese dissenter, Laurent Kabila, and staffed a rebel forced that invaded and quickly conquered the beleaguered Mobutu administration.

First off - shout out to Kagame and Museveni. Two of the more enigmatic characters in recent African history, they are both captivating, highly successful, and - in some corners - reviled. Both climbed from rebel generals to the leaders of their respective nations, and have matured from the touted leaders of "New Africa" in the early 1990's to autocratic dictators who have abused their power, intimidated opposition, and funded and fought illegitimate wars in neighboring countries. Anyone interested in the machinations of Kagame should Google and read the New York Times profile of Kagame "The Global Elite's Favorite New Strongman."

The Second Congo War began when Kabila decided that he was the President of the Congo and refused to listen to his kingmakers. Proxy rebel forces on behalf of Uganda and Rwanda came within a few days of conquering Congo. During the opening stages of this war there was a daring Rwandan plot that landed hijacked planes on a Congo military base and took the base from within, which is pretty much the craziest thing someone can attempt or do. However, Kabila successfully offered himself to other regional powers - notably Angola and Zimbabwe - and was able to turn back the invasion with the help of foreign fighters. Uganda and Rwanda stayed in control of parts of the country, and that alliance eventually descended into violence over the resource rich Northeast corner of the Congo. Though Rwanda and Uganda have left the Congo, fighting continues to this day between militia groups in the Wild Wild East of Congo.

These wars were an impersonal affair - there were no televised cruise missile strikes or sniper battles - but Stearns does an admirable job attaching faces and personalities to the brutalities. In particular we meet Papy Kamanzi, a militiaman turned murderer who tearfully admits to massacring "dissidents" which is loosely defined as anyone who is a Hutu. Still, this book is long on political intrigues and short on descriptions of battle or tactics. If this is what you are looking for - which you might be, since this was the deadliest conflict since World War II - it really was not that type of war. The majority of death was from disease, the battles were scattered across a huge terrain, and there was not much strategy or tactical decisions. The rebels sort of just walked across the country and shot everybody they didn't like. So Stearns, although he does spend some time with the actual combatants and refugees, does not devote a ton of the book to the actual battleground.

Still, Stearns has constructed a masterful account that is readable, informative, and understandable to any African layman. The horrors are real, the tragedy is huge, and it all took place in the country immortalized by Conrad as the "Heart of Darkness." Something about those Congo jungles brings the madness out in men. Pick up this book, no matter how tough parts of it might be, to learn about the Congo, the place where mass rapes and massacres take place so rebel groups can gain notoriety, where street battles are fought over diamond mines, and where the legacy of a terrible genocide still lingers. Stearns does a remarkable job as a tour guide to the Congo, a place where, as Papy Kamanzi says, "...killing comes easy. It has become a part of life." Tragedy, indeed.

Jason Stearns set a formidable task for himself in the Introduction to his excellent "Dancing in the Glory of Monsters", taking Hannah Arendt memorable "the banality of evil" as the starting point for his investigation into the decades long war in the Congo. He doesn't personalize the murderous violence and the evil behind it but tries to define the political system that allowed or encouraged such perversions of "normal" humanity. Instead of the faceless bureaucratic machine of the Third Reich he compares the Congo to seventeenth century Europe during the Thirty Years War in which marauding armies fought back and forth across what is now Germany leaving privation, disease and death in their wake.

"Dancing in the Glory of Monsters" is a brilliant combination of reporting, current history, political advocacy and ethnography. Jason Stearns has spent much of the past decade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has met many of the key actors in Africa's Great War and has seen the horror they have wreaked on the people and land in the Congo. A keen analyst of the politico-military affairs of the region--the DRC and the nine nations surrounding it, particularly Rwanda and Uganda--he looks at the political elites and militia commanders of the area (often the same people) to try and figure out why the war happened, if it "had" to happen and why the conflict has been so unrelenting and merciless.

He compares the situation in central Africa since 1996 to the Thirty Years War, a continent wide cataclysm of death, disease, destruction and collapse of society brought on the by the constant marching and countermarching of mercenary armies deployed from the nations that surround what is now Germany and finds a parallel between Adolph Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt, and Paul Rwarakabije, a general in the Rwandan Army whose forces operated in what was then Zaire as well as Rwanda. Eichmann was an important cog in a machine while Rwarakabije was a policy maker (to the extent anyone could be called that) but both were convinced of the inevitability of mass slaughter.

The Thirty Years War and the Holocaust are among the defining events of modern Europe. Both caused insupportable suffering; the Holocaust is the closest thing to absolute and incomparable evil that I can think of--those who might need a refresher on its horrors would want to consult "The Third Reich at War" by Richard Evans--it is an astonishing book but one I was too daunted by its sweep and detail to finish. Stearns set a formidable task for himself.

He accomplishes it, giving the reader a real (and horrifying) sense of what life was like for internal displaced persons, conscripted soldiers and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi. "Dancing in the Glory of Monsters" captures the everydayness, the granularity of life in the Congo during what must seem to be an endless war although he concentrates largely on the perpetrators of violence one of the real strengths of the book is Stearns' refusal to make permanent categories of good or bad, oppressors or oppressed since many of his sources have been both during the past ten years. The best example of this might be Paul Rwarakabije, mentioned above; he fled from Rwanda with nothing, saved most of his family, and was stuck in a refugee camp, subject to the whims of his guards/captors. Later after political exoneration he led a unit of the Rwandan armed forces in the DRC. Another is the way the AFDL (Laurent Kabila's improvised army) that was welcomed as liberators in the first Congo war even though they slaughtered Hutu refugees since they didn't kill any Congolese.

It is a cliche to say there are no simple answers in the Congo since there are no simple answers anywhere but Strearns illustrates the complexity of the situation while showing the human side of (almost) all the players.

An overview of a complex and little-known (in the West at least) war. In that sense the book might be required reading (I haven't read Africa's World War, which appears to be more scholarly). The book is slightly marred by chronological jumps, a journalistic weakness for character sketches, the the author's insertion of himself into the story. There are constant reminders that this is about all of sub-saharan africa, not just Congo (most clearly with Rwandan invasion and Mandela's mediation attempt) but very little analysis of the political context of post-Cold War and post-Apartheid Africa. Stearns's repeated point that everyone had to be a little corrupt in order to survive may be true, but without that political context this point ends up perpetuating the idea of innate "dark continent" irrationality that he claims to be arguing against.

Jason K. Stearns, DANCING IN THE GLORY OF MONSTERS: THE COLLAPSE OF THE CONGO AND THE GREAT WAR OF AFRICA. NY: Public Affairs, 2011.
A fine and rather long (380 pp.) history of the Congo Wars based in part on extensive interviews with many of the principal participants. Stearns attempts to get to the causes, emphasizing the horrors less, although there is plenty of that. He starts with the Rwanda genocide of 1994, and ends for the most part five years ago in 2006, with details getting thinner as that year approaches. There is nothing much on the elections then, and only four pages on the period afterwards, until 2010 when this was written. It is well researched, with lots of footnotes to good sources. Personal experiences are woven in but less intrusively than many similar tomes. For those who have been following Congo events there are really no surprises about basic events, but there is an in-depth narration of how all these wars came about, who was involved, and what the consequences of their actions were. The first war is the one that toppled Mobutu 1996-1997. The second began in 1998 with the conflict between Kabila and his erstwhile allies, lasting until the peace deal of 2003. The fighting continued however until now, and is considered a third war. There are several maps and a long index. The title actually comes from the mouth of Laurent Kabila in a speech chastising the Congolese for going along with Mobutu, and referring to the "animation" of the period, "We saw you all dancing in the glory of the monster", Mobutu. Since then the monsters have become many. The concluding chapter gives an overview of the wars, their causes, and sage advice on bringing about change in the Congo

I strongly recommend this book to anyone with even a glancing understanding of central Africa. I also recommend King Leopold's Ghost. Between these two books, you will gain something of an understanding of the issues and challenges of the Congolese. I listened to this while driving, and wished that I had bought the book so I could have a map of the regions discussed. The sheer scope of the human misery was also difficult to comprehend, but we cannot shy away from things just because they are challenging; instead we must gain an understanding do we can attack the problem.

Wow, this is a great book. Although it is simplistic, it covers the War in the Congo. It also shows a clear balance in objectivity. This is Stearns first book and it is impressive.

I have read many books about Zaire or the Congo. This shows the ethnic fighting between the various tribes including the Hutu and Tutsi. When the genocide occurred in Rwanda, the RPF decided to topple Mobutu. They formed an alliance with Uganda, Angola, and Zimbawee. All were eager to get Mobutu out of power. A quick succession of battles defanged the Zairain Army, and Kabila entered Kinshasha. Kabila made enemies of the Rwanda and Uganda governments, which led them to support their own men to replace him as leader of the nation. All of these countries-Rwanda,Uganda, Zimbawee, Angola and Chad plundered the Congo. The result was 5 million dead between 1998-2003.

This is a good book because it is well written and balanced. The RPF come off as killers in their own right, after having suffered the genocide in Rwanda. They may have only killed 80,000 but these were defenseless people in refugee camps. The Congolese government is a bumbling organization that does not have the interests of its people at heart. Both Mobutu and Kabila were dictators. The foreign armies plundered the Congo, much like the Belgians did earlier, except they were in it for quick profits.

This is a good read and is highly recommended.

This book provides clarity to the quagmire of wars that have been happening in the Congo since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Mr. Stearns explains well the personalities involved and also brings us face to face with the brutality undergone by ordinary people in the many shattered villages and cities. The Tutsi-Hutu animosities are a recurring theme - but in the Congo, nothing is so simple and Mr. Stearns always qualifies his explanations.

The Congo is a land blessed with many natural resources. It is also surrounded by states that quickly recognize and exploit weakness. The author uses the apt analogy of a small country like Japan dominating and invading China during the 1930's - and similarly the super-powers of the time looked on with little interest. In the Congo's case there are several states participating in this invasion - Rwanda, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe. Also the long and corrupt reign of Mobutu came to an end during this time. Mobutu did little to develop or maintain any of the infrastructures of his country - for instance the army became a ragtag group of competing forces that were unable to stop the invasion of its much smaller neighbours. The Congo was inundated with Hutu refugees after the Rwandan genocide. After the Rwandan invasion of 1996 these hundreds of thousands of people literally kept walking westward through the Congo to seek sanctuary - often they did not find it.

The author weaves us through the complexities of problems. Another persistent theme is that of "omission". Most of us (including myself) know little of the Congo. More people died (and most died of curable diseases) than in Darfur. But yet the devastation and the arduous journeys of the refugees hardly made air time on major news outlets. As Romeo Dallaire wrote in his book "Shake Hands with the Devil" it would appear that the life of an African is worth little to the West.

The only quibble I have is at the beginning, where Mr. Stearns cites as a reference point Hannah Arendt's famous quote on the "banality of evil" which is an outlook I have strong reservations on - particularly with regards to the violence that the Congolese people experienced. Fortunately this viewpoint does not unduly influence the author's writing.

The future for the Congo, even with the signing of a peace accord of the countries involved in this long war, is still rather grim. Are there the makings of another "strong man" in Joseph Kabila? This is definitely a worthwhile book that does much to disentangle the recent history of this tortured country.

The subtitle of this book is an apt comparison of Congo Wars to World War I. Both resulted from regional conditions which had been brewing for years. The length time and the breadth of destruction of each could not have been envisioned at their beginnings and their peace treaties do not fully address their causes.

Besides laying out the steps leading to and the prosecution of the war, Stearns gives portraits of its key participants, many for which there are personal interviews. There are stories of survivors, both perpetrators and victims (many are both) be they refugees, businessmen, politicians, soldiers, military officers and the many caught up in this ongoing tragedy that has taken the lives of over 5 million people. I skipped over some descriptions of brutality that were too horrible to read.

While it may be the richest country in the world in natural resources the Congo is among the poorest. The wars are not only a cause of this poverty; they are a symptom of all that is wanting. Stearns's achievement is in bringing this all together in a readable way.

For those who are interested in that it is like to actually be in the Congo, I suggest Blood River: The Terrifying Journey Through The World's Most Dangerous Country which defines the hardships of traveling or living in the wake of all this destruction.

If you want to understand the tragedy that is the Congo, put aside the mythology and read Dancing In The Glory of Monsters. Jason Stearns has untangled the snarling mess that is the history of this sad nation.

As someone who's researched and written about the Congo myself (Heart Of Diamonds: A novel of scandal, love, and death in the Congo), I found new insights into the interminable conflicts that have wracked the country for it's entire modern history. Stearns delineates the players, putting them into context and showing how they interacted to make the Congo what it is today. He clearly explains the role of Rwanda's Paul Kagame and other outsiders in the turmoil, but also delineates the power hunger and shortcomings of the Congo's own leaders, including current President Joseph Kabila.

Most importantly, Stearns demonstrates that there is no one single cause of the Congo's troubles. He calmly shows how tribal rivalries fuel the strife just as much as the struggle to control the country's mineral wealth. He explains how the internal politics of Zimbabwe, Uganda, Angola, and other countries in addition to Rwanda led to their deep involvement in the DRC's wars. While he rightfully deplores the epidemic of rape in the Congo, he puts it in context and doesn't dwell on it--not because it's not important, but because there's more to the story.

I found it refreshing that Stearns resists the impulse to blame rapacious multinational corporations for much of anything except trying to find a way to do business in the Congo. He doesn't ignore the many shortcomings of most of the deals to exploit the Congo's riches, but correctly points out that most of them were struck by Congolese leaders eager to fund their own ambitions. He leaves the conspiracy theories to other, less informed writers.

Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters is an objective, clear-eyed look at one of the greatest ongoing tragedies in modern history.

This book is an excellent overview of the Congolese Civil War. It covers the background to the fall of Mobutu, starting with the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and the subsequent Rwandan invasion of the Congo and the rise of the Rwandan backed Laurent Kabila, through the subsequent falling out of Kabila and his Rwandan backers, and the death of the elder Kabila and ends with the rise of his son Joseph. The author is very knowledgeable of the subject, having lived and worked in the Congo for many years. What has been happening in Congo is very sad. They should be one of the richest nations in the world, but is among the poorest. I wish for the best for Congo's future.

How best to make sense of Congo's enduring crisis, a tale of daunting political complexity and extraordinary cruelty? Many writers have tried, for no other African country captivates the western literary imagination as much as Congo. This fascination long precedes Joseph Conrad, who indelibly described King Leopold's Congo Free State over a century ago. But faithful subjects do not good art make, and most western writing on Congo is unreadable or, at best, unbearable.

The sheer complexity of Congo's dramatic history is one contributing factor behind all the dreadful writing. Many an author sacrifices compelling narrative for rigorous scholarship, resulting in a turgid swamp of acronyms for all the armed groups, the Security Council Resolutions and the doomed peace deals. Epic chronicles like Africa's World War (Gérard Prunier) may be valuable to scholars but are so microscopically detailed as to be opaque to non-specialists.

Adventure writing, the other main genre of Congo literature, is equally abundant and can carry a plot, but the stories glorify the exploits of the author and ignore the Congolese. "Watch me as I commune with gentle pygmies, wrestle crocodiles on the great Congo River, escape beheading by a throng of stoned child soldiers"-- setting the bar for unbearable reading. Common to both schools is the absence of Congolese voice; for both, Congo is a neutral, muted stage for the author's performance (scholarship, "survival"). Faced with such output, one thinks, the trampling of Congo just goes on and on.
Jason Stearns shares this lament. A recognized scholar and field analyst with years of human rights reporting from the country's most remote zones of conflict , he tackles Congo's complexity head-on, unpeeling the onion of its myriad wars within wars. But Stearns is after larger game than demystifying Congo's "inscrutable chaos" for a western audience. By capturing the political rationales and individual motives as voiced by key players themselves, abhorrent though they may be, he personalizes Congo's tumultuous ups and downs. Taming this wooly complexity with character-driven narrative and firsthand experience, the book is ultimately a challenge to the reigning stereotype of Congo as an inchoate mêlée of raw power devouring the meek and innocent. Recalling the reductive lens that framed colonialism's "civilizing mission" (humanity over barbarism, reason vs. unreason), it's not hard to discern an unbroken line between western perceptions of Congo in Conrad's time and our own elitist, arguably racist, comprehension today.

The result is a visceral, compelling weave of major events in Congo's recent history recounted by actors whose candor, intimacy and humor color all manner of uncanny situations. Capturing these stories demands a level of trust and degree of access rarely available to foreigners. To his credit, Stearns does not dwell on this feat, huge though it is. We see only a procession of scenes in which prolonged political collapse is punctuated by wholesale slaughter and the bleakest comedy of errors, leaving a Breugelesque afterimage. Many of the actors are cold killers, to be sure, but as one militiaman reminds the author, "Are you absolutely sure you would act differently in my situation?" By this point in the story, the answer is clear.

When there are no protagonists on hand to carry the plot, Stearns fills in with troves of intriguing detail about the formative years and gargantuan egos of, for instance, Jean-Pierre Bemba, former rebel leader turned vice-president under Joseph Kabila and now facing trial in The Hague. There is much fascinating discussion of Kabila père (Laurent Désiré), his failure to impress Che Guevara in the early 1960s and his recruitment by Paul Kagame to front a rag-tag insurgency against Mobutu in 1996. Both fig-leaf and cannon-fodder, Kabila provided cover for the Rwandan infiltration of Eastern Congo to hunt down Hutu militia opposing Kagame's regime. To the surprise of all, backed by Rwanda's crack military, Kabila crossed thousands of miles of bush on foot and reached Kinshasa in record time, ousting Mobutu and ending decades of single-party rule in Zaire. The days of heady optimism did not last long, for reasons that led to Congo's infamous "second war," concluded with a shaky peace deal in 2003.

Readers will come away with a keener grasp of the various political sub-cultures and ethnic force fields that have shaped the country's landscape since independence. Here's an illustrative paragraph on the failed "rebel professor", Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, the appointed leader of the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), an eastern rebel group that ruled viciously, with little popular support, in the "second war" against Kabila père:

"Many others with similarly high ideals made the same deal with the devil as Wamba. After all, being a leader takes vision and charisma, but it also requires propitious circumstances. Hadn't Che Guevara tried and failed, limping away malnourished and dejected? Hadn't Tshisekedi, who had marched with tens of thousands against Mobutu in 1992, also been reduced to a marginal figure, with only a handful of diehard supporters heeding calls for protest marches? They had failed because the circumstances had not been ripe for them, whereas Wamba and his new comrades now did have the right circumstances: a formidable, time-tested military machine that could undoubtedly take them to the summit of the state. Change and power were being offered on a silver platter."

To help situate these portraits the author reflects on Congo's inability to gain altitude since independence, how its leaders can be rational and heartless at the same time, and the failings of international development assistance in country. While these asides do not comprise a dedicated argument, they gradually come into relief and define the thrust of the book. The salutary, if politically correct, attempt to rescue the Congolese from our received ideas and prejudice certainly adds nuance and depth to Congo's roving, rancorous band of political elites. As a friend once said of Congo's conflicted East: "If it looks like anarchy, then you don't understand what you're seeing." In other words, for the lazy or elitist mind, it's natural to dismiss Congo as "inscrutable chaos." Stearns reveals the patterns and deciphers the logics credibly and coherently. Congo's leaders are not insane, far from it.

On balance the book's deep digging yields rich dividends, particularly for those of us working in country. Its only minor flaw is a tendency to deflect responsibility for Congo's failings away from the Congolese themselves. One example is worth citing; it is also commonly heard in Congo, where the decades of crisis are always someone else's fault. Stearns is always careful to connect today's problems to their historical precedents and conditions at independence. But this emphasis on historical causation risks bleeding contemporary history of any agency, and with it individual culpability. Blaming history, or others, robs victims of the power to reverse their fate.

Stearns is doubtless aware of this dilemma, but his account of the security sector is fatalistic, as though its predatory existence were pre-programmed and inevitable. "The roots of the army's weakness lie in the Belgian colonial state," he writes. True, Congolese had no direct experience of running any of the country's military or civilian institutions at the time of independence. Paradoxically, Mobutu's fear of dissent meant ethnic loyalty trumped an effective army and police, who turned on an already impoverished population to meet their survival needs. "Like the rest of the state apparatus, [the army] was present everywhere, harassing and taxing the population, but effective nowhere." The current state of affairs is unchanged; are we to blame the men or their non-existent institutions?

Stearns knows the answer, but shies from criticizing the Congolese. Understandable, perhaps, since he has relationships to maintain. But the book's countless vignettes reveal a culture whose norms dictate a ruthless will-to-power that mocks any formalized, regulatory environment. Given the awful brutality and loss of human potential in Congo, polite silence implies `they know not what they do'--tantamount to infantilizing criminal actors ensconced in a cozy bubble of near-total impunity. Who then should denounce this open wound on the face of humanity; who is best placed to demand change? Not outsiders: our history there is too compromised to offer credible change. Next to the shrill wailing of celebrity-driven advocacy to "bring change" to Congo, Stearns' silence is one of refreshing humility.

By listening to key dramatis personae--perverse and misanthropic in parts, tragicomic and ludicrous in others--Stearns unpacks the multiple, hidden layers of motivation and incentive driving events of the last twenty years. Perhaps more than any Congo book I know, this one succeeds in revealing why "war [has made] more sense than peace."

Easy recommendation to the govt. put this author in charge somewhere in how western govt money is spent in the area.

1st read the last chapter. then set aside an evening to read the whole thing. then give it to a friend to read.

why?
because people matter. their pain and suffering matter. killing people is wrong, killing lots of people is evil and must to fought.

it's first an examination of the history of the rwandan tutsi genocide and it's effects on the congo from 1990 to the present. it's second a journalist interviews and talks to people involved, telling their stories and putting it all together into a narrative that the rest of us can identify with. lastly it's a call to the world to engage with the issues because the world has a hand in causing and continuing the suffering there.

cons:
the first part is confusing. mostly because we need to get the names and background straight. my advice to the author is a few pictures of the major participants so we can see them as they are discussing.

how to integrate stories with historical narrative, it's generally well done, introducing the people through the interview process and then telling their stories is a good technic.

pros:
how to motivate people to care and to get involved? i don't know, but this book is potentially a good answer to the question. thanks.

This is by far the most informative, and level-headed book on this most complicated country I have ever read. The bonus is that it reads like a long history novel filled with action and human drama even though the contents of this book would easily beat any academic books ever written on the country.

This is a book to be read, and reread by all those interested in the region.

I just wish that this book was published earlier so that I could understand the situation of the DRC before going there to work.

The so-called Great War of Africa is an important subject calling out for good books to be written about it. But unfortunately, very little good material in the way of history has been written. Many of the books, including this one, are good source material for a *real* history of the conflict, but are themselves not effective history.

The problem with Stearns is that he is too philosophical and too analitical in looking at the conflict. He doesn't let the events and people tell their own story. He is far too interested in drawing "meaning" or putting "reason" on the human suffering of the war that he fails to often see what is right in front of him.

Worse yet, he falls back on all the old cliches about Africa. Everything in Africa is explained by "deep history", "systems" and "institutions". He often sounds like someone with a sociology degree working at the UN in the 1960s. He talks about "good" and "evil". Worst of all, he invokes an argument that sounds a whole lot like "white man's burden" in that he says that somehow *we* "owe" the Congo a solution to its problems ("Why help? We owe it to them"). He fails to understand that those sorts of paternalistic attitudes toward Africa are part of the problem rather than part of any solution.

"Evil" is a concept that keeps coming up in the book. He reaches for Hanna Ardnt at one point which is about as far off the mark as one can get. He comes very close to a working analogy when he compares the conflict to the 30 years war in Europe but for all intents abandons it quickly after. There are certainly acts of evil described in the book, but they don't end up serving much purpose in telling the history of the war (or wars).

His ultimate conclusion that there is neither cause nor essense to be found in the war is equal parts useless and frustrating. He wants often to wallow in the history of a century ago or to endlessly go through the individual suffering associated with the war. While he does these things, he neglects the big picture of the war and the era in which it happened. All of the things he brings up are very sad, but often not enlightening. Brutality and inhumanity are the consequences of war in these sorts of places. Far more interesting is to ask the question "why" of the people beyond the battlefield. That includes all of Congo's neighbors and that includes the international community as well. The people who arm and fund the militias. The people who kept the war going. He doesn't go far enough in that direction in my opinion.

In my opinion, one of the author's problems is that he is too close to the story. His book will certainly be of use to those authors who follow him looking to tell a better history of the war. The interviews and the oral history he has captured in the book is useful as raw source material. But he can't seem to bring it together to tell a story of the war.

He has the problem common to many who deal with Africa which is that interview subjects are constantly engaged in what Orwell called "doublethink". Rather than saying what they mean, they speak in a language of code-words and phrases that the sociologists, athropologists and the western media accept. They throw out words like democracy, freedom and tell tales of their own victimhood that often are simply meaningless echos back of what journalists and western academics think about them. It would be more honest to hear ethnic killers talk about being ethnic killers rather than hearing them talk about building democracy. Language is failing us in these situations as a means of communication. The media poisons the well so totally that all we hear back from these people is what we ourselves have said about them. They give us what we want to hear.

The author wants more attention if not direct intervention in the Congo. But he fails to understand that Western Troops and American money can't solve whats wrong. It didn't work in Somalia. It didn't work Iraq. Its not working in afghanistan. In Kosovo over a decade later, the entire economy is based around the international mission to Kosovo. There is also a failure to see the full irony in blaming colonialism for the problem and seeing a return of pseudo-colonialism to Congo as the solution.

In my opinion, the problems of Congo can't be solved within the Congo. The problems can only be solved when countries like Rwanda are told once and for all to get out of Congo. When countries outside of Africa stop listening to nonsense from cynical leaders of criminal regimes. When people put a higher premimum on stopping a war than wallowing in historical guilt over things that happened long before anyone involved was born. Its the people who fund the warlords who matter, not the warlords themselves.

In the end, maybe the book works unintentionally as a social snapshot of the attitudes of those directly involved in the war and nothing (including the attitudes of the author) should be taken at face value. Within those limitations, its an interesting read. Not a history nor a book with a case to make. But more of an impression of a time and place. Maybe ultimately its a testiment to the ways that language has started to fail us in provinding understanding in regards to a war like this one.

After reading this book, I really feel that I now have a much more complete understanding of the conflict in the Congo. It is a messy and confusing conflict, and before reading this book I had felt somewhat confused about the whole thing- it was clear that the goal of the first war was to remove Mobutu, but the reasons behind the later wars were murky. This book really illuminates why these wars were fought and who the major players are. It is clearly very well-researched and informative, and is also written in an interesting and engaging manner- I loved it.

Great inside look at the Congo and there is appreciation for the remarkable resiliency of it's people! The only drawback is in the conclusion in which Stearns reveals an understandably weak grasp of the international realities. Because he was inside the Congo he naturally sees it from the inside. Though recently (November 2013) in the face of a firm challenge he did finally admit that there was a need for international law to control the multinational interests operating in the Congo. If he really cares about the Congolese people I don't think he can continue to deny that they need the protection of international laws.

This book is a wonderful, exhaustive introduction to the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Stearns has years of experience in the country and writes a brilliant text while weaving personal stories into it. Overall, it is a great introduction to the topic of both Congolese civil wars.

This book gives you an incredible look at the geopolitics of the Great Lakes Region. It provides institutional explanations for the continuing violence without glossing over its horrors. An incredible, well-researched read.

This book has been called the "best" current nonfiction about the violence in the DRC - which I think says far more about the dearth of good books on the subject than on this one's merits.

While the book is a useful primer on the facts and political history of the violence in the DRC, I frankly disagree with most reviewers (and the author himself) that it somehow manages to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the country, the actors, or their motivations.

Stearns claims to be weary of the Congo-as-Heart-of-Darkness motif, but routinely resorts to shorthand that he chides others for. One example: "Sometimes it seems that by crossing the border into the Congo one abandons any sort of Archimedean perspective on truth..."

Moreover, I simply disagree that this book lays bare the motivations of actors in the violence. Numerous chapters end, after having barraged the reader with 10,000 words of rebel movements, acronyms, and alliances, with exceedingly superficial analysis of higher-order questions. A typical paragraph might read like this: "What would prompt someone to do x, y, and z awful things? . . . Well I don't know, but what I can say is that it is not because they are evil." Obviously true and worth repeating, but this is really only the beginning of the analysis, whereas Stearns generally feels content making it the end.

What's perhaps most disappointing is the author's failure to translate the enormous quantity of interviews he has conducted into a truly human perspective on the violence. Perhaps it is simply because Stearns is a rather dry and uninventive writer, but none of the protagonists in this violence ever became human for me. Ironically, their depictions in this book tended to reinforce, rather than overturn, the stereotypes I had of opportunistic, morally bankrupt leaders.

Finally, there is a concluding chapter full of lazy policy recommendations like "strengthening institutions" and "thinking about incentives" and "recognizing our moral debt to the Congo" - without even a token effort at delving into specifics.

Everyone else loved this book - I just don't get the hype.

this book is full of contradiction. how can the author say for example that Joseph Kabila attended the french school in Tanzania and later say that he was learning french when he was already president of D.R.Congo? Can he explain us how someone who attended a french school was unable to speak french?or how is name is not the record of the mentioned school? This is just one example of the lies in this book. The author is trying to justify the occupation of D.R.Congo by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi with US, UK and European back up.

That this conflict is "too complex" is just a cop-out.....Also that the West has been "indifferent" is another cop-out and bold faced lie. This is what the author seems to have us think. It is good in documenting horrible atrocities, but it fails to give the appropriate background, geo-political and economic reasons behind this conflict. Of course, he repeats the standard accepted history taken as gospel in the west- that (paraphrasing) poor Paul Kagame and his RPF freedom fighters invaded Rwanda from Uganda to come to the aid of his oppressed Tutsis, which led to the implementation of a "planned" genocide which killed over 800,000 Tutsis and "moderate" Hutus, heroically, Paul Kagame this African Abraham Lincoln stopped the genocide, and the "genocidaire" militias left to the Eastern Congo to probably plan another genocide, leading Kagame with no choice but to invade the DRC to round up the villains. This is the standard account repeated as gospel in the West. What actually happened was that Kagame and the RPF were trained and financed by the US, and they invaded Rwanda in 1990 without any consequence (Iraq, on the other hand, faced severe consequences for its invasion of Kuwait around the same time), at the time there was a power-sharing government under Habyarimana, who was later assassinated by RPF forces. Predictable this led to more conflict. In 1994 things culminated and Tutsi forces were killing 10,000 or more Hutus a month, which generally led to a backlash, of Hutus killing Tutsis, but all in all, the majority of the 1 million victims were Hutus, not Tutsis. Anyway, this war led to many Hutu refugees to flee to the Eastern Congo. In 1996 Rwanda and Uganda, backed and armed by the US government, invaded the Eastern Congo, slaughtering scores of civilians, and set up an illegal resource stealing scheme in which they extracted resources from the Eastern Congo and sold them to the West (at bargain prices) as their own resources. Rwanda is backing the M23 rebels in the Congo, this is well-documented by the UN and others, the US keeps protecting Rwanda and Uganda in the UN, while continuing to support their crimes, Kagame just got $50 million dollars from the World Bank as he was visiting the US. To sum it up, since the 1996 invasions, about 6 million people have died, hundreds of thousands of women and children raped, numerous children taken as child soldiers, etc.....if an official enemy of the West was doing this, they'd be condemned, but since these killers are doing the West's bidding, their crimes are downplayed or denied....This is the world we live in, when the world's most deadliest crisis since World War 2 doesn't get the attention it deserves