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Dancing in the Glory of Monsters
Jan. 15th, 2018 10:19 pmDancing in the Glory of Monsters, Jason K Stearns, ISBN 978-1-61039-107-8.
The Congo war is sometimes compared to World War I, and the destructiveness and numerous actors do make the comparison somewhat attractive. But what it reminded me of was the US invasion of Iraq and its sequelae: a rapid and successful invasion with a clear goal of toppling an unmitigatedly unpleasant dictator who at first barely apprehended a genuine threat, but unsupported by any realistic planning for the day after victory, and followed by years of conflict raging from terrorism to open warfare drawing in multiple neighbouring countries.
The origins of the conflict can be read back along a number of lines. The Rwandan invasion of 1996 essentially represented the continuation of the Rwandan civil war subsequent to regime change, with the new government going after still-militarized génocidaires camped out in eastern Zaire (as Congo was called at the time); the victors of that civil war had in turn learned their craft as exiles fighting in Uganda’s previous internal conflict, something that explains Ugandan cooperation (Kagame spent a while as the head of Ugandan military intelligence for instance). Laurent Kabila, used by the Rwandans as a front-man to give the invasion the superficial air of an endogenous rebellion and chosen more because he was available than because he was well-suited to the role, on the other hand, was a classic cold-war superpower cats-paw, temporarily embarrassed by the end of the struggle that created him. But it’s also necessary to consider the ridiculously high corruption, fragility and long-neglected infrastructure of Mobutu’s Zaire, without which the Rwandan invasion might have been repulsed, or at least contained, or even completely avoided (a greater willingness to engage with the situation on the part of the West might also have had some impact at this stage too). And while it would certainly be wrong to let the kleptocratic Mobutu escape blame for the parlous state of the country he ruled for more than three decades, his Belgian colonial predecessors had left the country in an appalling institutional state, meaning that no good outcome was very likely in any case. And none of this is to mention the ethnic divisions in and near Rwanda which drove both its own civil war and much of the brutality in Congo itself, which although pre-existing were exacerbated by colonial meddling. At any rate, this was a complex situation and Stearns analyses it in exhaustive detail.
Stearns also traces the progress of the conflict, spending more time on interviews with and character studies of key protagonists than marches-and-battles history. In combination with analysis of the prevailing political system it’s clear that a lot of these actors were not acting particularly irrationally for the situations they found themselves in and the assumptions they had available. Within Congolese politics, for instance, anyone failing to play the game of corruption and patronage would simply lose out to those who did. Others were simply incompetent though: nothing in Kabila’s background had prepared him to run a country and he did a terrible job of it when he had the opportunity.
Those assumptions were lethal. The invading Rwandans plainly considered their initial targets to be an existential threat and accepted no obstacles to their destruction. Mass killing bred not only mass killing, but also total disregard for the welfare of Rwandan civilians either fleeing with the génocidaires or locals who got in the way. This negligence towards civilians repeated through the war; another repeating pattern is that many of the books interviewees appear to be convinced (whether through denial, or mendacity, or poor transparency) that the war’s numerous atrocities were entirely one-sided, something the testimony of survivors shows to be false. For all that hugely many of the deaths were not directly military in cause but rather less direct consequences of the war - hunger and illness that could not be mitigated due to the destruction of infrastructure, the terrible security situation, the pressing need to flee fighting, and so on.
A common analysis of the war starts from the looting of Congo’s mineral wealth, both through corruptly awarded contracts from the Congo government and by the country’s various invaders. There is indeed a sense in which it prolonged the war since much of it was simply a means to pay for continued military expenditure; but it seems to be a mistake to see it as a cause of the war. What is was not, though, was efficient; it was associated with no real investment (and sensibly so: it was a warzone) and Stearns estimates that it put back the development of Congo’s mineral resources by a decade.
This was an interesting read; I’d been loosely aware of the war in its later phases but it was not well-reported in the western media, so the book was an education. But it is also rather depressing. Congo was already in a terrible state in terms of infrastructure and institutions. The war took its toll on the former and did little to improve the latter. With Mobutu out of the way the country could have reversed its long-term decline from 1997 but instead the war meant it had to wait half a decade more. Millions of people died and many of those directly and indirectly responsible have complete impunity. On the smaller scale, the book does not shy away from documenting both detailed violence and the lethal privations suffered by fleeing refugees.
The Congo war is sometimes compared to World War I, and the destructiveness and numerous actors do make the comparison somewhat attractive. But what it reminded me of was the US invasion of Iraq and its sequelae: a rapid and successful invasion with a clear goal of toppling an unmitigatedly unpleasant dictator who at first barely apprehended a genuine threat, but unsupported by any realistic planning for the day after victory, and followed by years of conflict raging from terrorism to open warfare drawing in multiple neighbouring countries.
The origins of the conflict can be read back along a number of lines. The Rwandan invasion of 1996 essentially represented the continuation of the Rwandan civil war subsequent to regime change, with the new government going after still-militarized génocidaires camped out in eastern Zaire (as Congo was called at the time); the victors of that civil war had in turn learned their craft as exiles fighting in Uganda’s previous internal conflict, something that explains Ugandan cooperation (Kagame spent a while as the head of Ugandan military intelligence for instance). Laurent Kabila, used by the Rwandans as a front-man to give the invasion the superficial air of an endogenous rebellion and chosen more because he was available than because he was well-suited to the role, on the other hand, was a classic cold-war superpower cats-paw, temporarily embarrassed by the end of the struggle that created him. But it’s also necessary to consider the ridiculously high corruption, fragility and long-neglected infrastructure of Mobutu’s Zaire, without which the Rwandan invasion might have been repulsed, or at least contained, or even completely avoided (a greater willingness to engage with the situation on the part of the West might also have had some impact at this stage too). And while it would certainly be wrong to let the kleptocratic Mobutu escape blame for the parlous state of the country he ruled for more than three decades, his Belgian colonial predecessors had left the country in an appalling institutional state, meaning that no good outcome was very likely in any case. And none of this is to mention the ethnic divisions in and near Rwanda which drove both its own civil war and much of the brutality in Congo itself, which although pre-existing were exacerbated by colonial meddling. At any rate, this was a complex situation and Stearns analyses it in exhaustive detail.
Stearns also traces the progress of the conflict, spending more time on interviews with and character studies of key protagonists than marches-and-battles history. In combination with analysis of the prevailing political system it’s clear that a lot of these actors were not acting particularly irrationally for the situations they found themselves in and the assumptions they had available. Within Congolese politics, for instance, anyone failing to play the game of corruption and patronage would simply lose out to those who did. Others were simply incompetent though: nothing in Kabila’s background had prepared him to run a country and he did a terrible job of it when he had the opportunity.
Those assumptions were lethal. The invading Rwandans plainly considered their initial targets to be an existential threat and accepted no obstacles to their destruction. Mass killing bred not only mass killing, but also total disregard for the welfare of Rwandan civilians either fleeing with the génocidaires or locals who got in the way. This negligence towards civilians repeated through the war; another repeating pattern is that many of the books interviewees appear to be convinced (whether through denial, or mendacity, or poor transparency) that the war’s numerous atrocities were entirely one-sided, something the testimony of survivors shows to be false. For all that hugely many of the deaths were not directly military in cause but rather less direct consequences of the war - hunger and illness that could not be mitigated due to the destruction of infrastructure, the terrible security situation, the pressing need to flee fighting, and so on.
A common analysis of the war starts from the looting of Congo’s mineral wealth, both through corruptly awarded contracts from the Congo government and by the country’s various invaders. There is indeed a sense in which it prolonged the war since much of it was simply a means to pay for continued military expenditure; but it seems to be a mistake to see it as a cause of the war. What is was not, though, was efficient; it was associated with no real investment (and sensibly so: it was a warzone) and Stearns estimates that it put back the development of Congo’s mineral resources by a decade.
This was an interesting read; I’d been loosely aware of the war in its later phases but it was not well-reported in the western media, so the book was an education. But it is also rather depressing. Congo was already in a terrible state in terms of infrastructure and institutions. The war took its toll on the former and did little to improve the latter. With Mobutu out of the way the country could have reversed its long-term decline from 1997 but instead the war meant it had to wait half a decade more. Millions of people died and many of those directly and indirectly responsible have complete impunity. On the smaller scale, the book does not shy away from documenting both detailed violence and the lethal privations suffered by fleeing refugees.
