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From Genocide to Continental War: The…
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From Genocide to Continental War: The Congolese Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa (original 2009; edition 2008)

by Gerard Prunier

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2365113,084 (4.47)5
Following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the largely Tutsi RPF government built a repressive regime after a short pretence at national reconciliation, while hundreds of thousands of Hutu, many of whom had perpetrated the genocide, fled to Zaire. The two parties clashed when the Rwandan government attacked the refugee camps in September 1996, forcing some of the refugees back home and killing others. Their military success led the victorious Rwandan forces to push their advantage and overthrow President Mobutu with the help of several African allies and the discreet support of the United States. The collapse of the Zairian regime marked the passing of an era and the implosion of the Cold War postcolonial order in Africa. As a result the heart of the African continent has been engulfed in a low intensity but high civilian casualty conflict involving seven countries directly and another seven indirectly. The international community has shown little interest, yet this massive conflict will probably play a key role in reshaping the continent's future in terms of border definition, governance and economic change, all of which are addressed in this work. ( )
  HurstPub | Jan 4, 2011 |
Showing 5 of 5
Gérard Prunier’s Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe is a masterful study of the causes and consequences of the Rwandan Genocide (1994) and the First and Second Congo Wars (1996-1997, 1998-2003).

The Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994) began when Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda from Uganda. After the assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, Hutu extremists, both inside and outside of the Rwandan regime, massacred in door-to-door violence 500,000 to 1,000,000 people between April and July 1994. The RPF resumed the civil war and overthrew the regime, which fled with hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighbouring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The flight of the former Rwandan regime and génocidaires and hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees into Zaire transformed the conflict between a rebel movement and an African regime into an ethnopolitical quagmire that is almost impossible to understand. This is not to deny the ethnic complexities of the Rwandan Civil War. As René Lemarchand writes in Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, the terms Hutu and Tutsi are not mutually exclusive, and an individual can identify as both Hutu and Tutsi. “In Kirundi, the term [Hutu] has two separate meanings: one refers to its cultural or ethnic underpinnings, the other to its social connotations. In the latter sense, Hutu refers to a ‘social subordinate’ in relation to somebody higher up in the pecking order. […] Thus a Tutsi cast in the role of a client vis-à-vis a wealthier patron would be referred to as ‘Hutu,’ even though his cultural identity remained Tutsi. Similarly, a [Tutsi] prince was a Hutu in relation to the [Tutsi] king, and a high-ranking Tutsi was a Hutu in relation to a [Tutsi] prince.” (pp. 9-10). This ambiguity regarding the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” made it impossible to accurately distinguish a person’s ethnic identity during the Rwandan or Burundian genocides. Often a victim was massacred with a machete or bludgeoned to death by their neighbour for no other reason than to steal the victim’s belongings or house. “Other genocides have been committed by strangers killing other strangers, and their violence was often engulfed in the wider violence of large international wars or revolutions,” Prunier writes. In Rwanda, the genocide “was a hill-by-hill and a home-by-home thing. And it is this neighborly quality, this grisly homespun flavor, that contaminated the world of the survivors after the killing had stopped.” The Rwandan Genocide “was so intertwined with everyday life that it could be used at every turn to secure an economic advantage, to settle an old grudge or to cover one’s tracks. Many people were killed by former Interahamwe simply because they might give evidence against them. Other people quickly found out that having survived the genocide could be a profitable business. They created ‘accusation cooperatives,’ which would sell their denunciations of real or supposed Interahamwe activities to those who could use such testimonies for economic or political benefit.” Tutsis survivors “were caught in nightmarish world between their Hutu neighbors, some of whom had been their saviors and some who had tried to murder them, and strange returnees from abroad who often accused them of compromising with the killers in order to save their lives. As for Hutu survivors, they were looked on as génocidaires by the returnee Tutsi and as traitors by the sympathizers of the old regime. Nobody was automatically innocent, and suspicion was everywhere.” (pp. 1-3).

When the former Rwandan regime, the génocidaires, and hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Zaire, this created additional ethnic, social, economic, and political factors to the already complex Rwandan conflict.

Before the Rwandan Genocide, the corrupt Mobuto regime in Zaire was already on its last legs. The end of the Cold War transformed Mobuto from an anti-communist freedom fighter into an anachronistic African dictator in the eyes of the West. Mobuto’s support for, tolerance of, or simple incapacity to deal with foreign rebel movements active in Zaire — including UNITA fighting the MPLA regime in Angola; the génocidaires and former Rwandan regime fighting Kagame’s Rwandan regime; and various Ugandan rebels supported by Sudan and fighting the new Ugandan regime of Yoweri Museveni; the CNDD–FDD fighting against the Burundian regime — alienated many of the West’s new African allies. Many of these states, in turn, supported anti-Mobuto rebels in Zaire. Adding to this social, economic, ethnic, and political quagmire, the massive influx of foreigners — including the heavily armed forces of a former African regime — into the impoverished and ethnically volatile Zaire, especially its Kivu region, added further pressure on the land and environment the populace depended on for its subsistence. This created conflicts between the multitude of different peoples in the eastern Congo: the autochthonous peoples in the Kivus and Ituri, the Tutsi in South Kivu (Banyamulenge), the Hutu and Tutsi in North Kivu (Banyarwanda), the Rwandan and Burundi refugees that arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, the recent Rwandan and Burundian refugees, and the génocidaires and former Rwandan regime, which continued the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus within the refugee camps in eastern Zaire.

“Does the reader at this point want to throw in the towel and give up on the ethnopolitical complexities of the region? I would not blame him,” writes Prunier (p. 201). YES — at least that’s what I thought.

In 1994, although for entirely different reasons, multiple African countries invaded or deployed troops in Zaire, including Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Angola, and Eritrea, and supported Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s rebel movement to overthrow Mobuto. After Kabila toppled Mobuto in 1997, he turned against his African masters, and multiple African countries again invaded Zaire, newly renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to Prunier, there were four layers of this second conflict (pp. 201-202):

The Core Conflict. This involved the Rwandan RPF regime, with Ugandan support, trying to overthrow Kabila.
The Second Layer. This involved several powerful African neighbours, including Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, who were not involved and did not care about the Hutu-Tutsi conflict but wanted Kabila to remain in power for their own reasons.
The Third Layer. This involved countries such as Libya, Sudan, and Chad that got involved for reasons related to each other (ex. Chadian-Libyan conflict, the Chadian-Sudanese conflict) and their relations with other states involved in the Congo.
The Fourth Layer. This involved countries such as Burundi and the Central African Republic that were geographically close to the Congo and that were entangled with other countries active in the Congo

Added to this were the economic interests of the belligerents. Rwanda and Uganda were trying to wage war on the cheap, which involved the self-financing of troops and allied militias in the Congo. At the same time, Zimbabwean mining companies wanted to block South African mining interests in mineral-rich Katanga. Thus, Rwandan and Ugandan troops, while nominally fighting for the same objective — the overthrow of Kabila — engaged in brutal street fighting with each other in the Congo’s third-largest city, Kisangani, to control the airport and the diamond trade in August 1999, May 2000, and June 2000. What began as a “rational” war, Prunier writes, thus degenerated into “myriad ‘privatized,’ socially and economically motivated subconflicts.” (p. 225).

Prunier is a brilliant scholar of Africa and an excellent writer. His ‘tell-like-it-is’ manner of writing is both comical and to the point and makes understanding African complexities easier. After reading this book, I cannot honestly say that I understand Africa’s so-called World War, the deadliest conflict since WWII, with 5.8 million deaths. Still, Prunier’s analysis helped shed much-needed light on the conflict, one that I was not adequately acquainted with before. ( )
  TJ_Petrowski | Jun 26, 2022 |
Following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the largely Tutsi RPF government built a repressive regime after a short pretence at national reconciliation, while hundreds of thousands of Hutu, many of whom had perpetrated the genocide, fled to Zaire. The two parties clashed when the Rwandan government attacked the refugee camps in September 1996, forcing some of the refugees back home and killing others. Their military success led the victorious Rwandan forces to push their advantage and overthrow President Mobutu with the help of several African allies and the discreet support of the United States. The collapse of the Zairian regime marked the passing of an era and the implosion of the Cold War postcolonial order in Africa. As a result the heart of the African continent has been engulfed in a low intensity but high civilian casualty conflict involving seven countries directly and another seven indirectly. The international community has shown little interest, yet this massive conflict will probably play a key role in reshaping the continent's future in terms of border definition, governance and economic change, all of which are addressed in this work. ( )
  HurstPub | Jan 4, 2011 |
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1344506.html

It is a tremendously detailed account of how, in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the new Rwandan government invaded its neighbour Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) kicking off a conflict that sucked in military interventions from Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, Chad, Sudan and Namibia, and which also entangled Libya, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Zambia and South Africa before it ended in 2002. Roughly four million people were killed. The conflict was complex and remote, and got almost no coverage in international media. The Rwandans essentially got a free pass from the rest of the world because of the genocide, and because nobody like the Zairean/DRC rulers. Prunier details the horror that resulted, and does not spare his criticism of the local and international actors who made it possible. He even criticises his own earlier book on Rwanda, where he admits having believed the government when he should not have. (Interesting to note that his Rwanda book is quoted several times by Jared Diamond in Collapse.)

An excellent final chapter reflects that probably there will not be another African conflict that is as far-reaching geographically, although the basic conditions for future smaller wars remain. Prunier also analyses the failure of international policy-makers to get to grips with the realities of African political life. I found this point particularly compelling (it should be read as if all in the present tense):

'These states were universally weak because they lacked both legitimacy and money. Legitimacy was the biggest problem because even those states that did or could have money, such as the mining states, were also weak. Loyalty to the state is not an internalised feeling in today's Africa... Internally states are seen as cows to be milked. But because there is little milk and the cow can go dry at any time, it would perhaps be better to say that the state is a cow to be bled quickly before it slips into somebody else's hands. The state is an asset for the group in power, but that asset is fragile, there are no commonly accepted rules for future devolution of power, and things have to be grabbed while they last... The state is always somebody's state, never the State in the legal abstract form beloved of Western constitutional law. It is the Museveni dictatorship for the Acholi [Uganda], the Arab state for th southern Sudanese, the mestiço state for UNITA [Angola], or the Tutsi state for the Hutu [Rwanda]. When tribes are not the main problem, pseudo-tribes or other groupings will do.'

There is nothing deterministic about conflict: these wars begin because of rational choices made by individuals in leadership positions, reacting to the set of circumstances they find themselves in. Ending them, however, is much more difficult. ( )
1 vote nwhyte | Nov 8, 2009 |
What lifts this “ethno-political” history above being a digest of journalistic accounts covering the ultimate culmination point of the Cold War in Africa is Prunier’s combination of wit and cool analysis; which he even brings to bear on his past errors of understanding. One is also given a good background briefing on the swirl of personalities, social factions, and political organizations that were sucked into the maelstrom created by Rwandan drive for power. As for the import of it all, Prunier suggests that the “transcontinental” war probably doesn’t count as Africa’s Great War, in that outside of Rwanda and Zaire there was no great emotional involvement in the general populations of the warring states, but that the Thirty Years War makes a better point of comparison. This is between the conduct of the war under ‘broken back’ conditions, where war had to support itself, and how this conflict has cleared the deck of obsolete intellectual impediments in understanding how Africa’s problems need to be understood in terms of the underlying structural problems of the continent. ( )
  Shrike58 | Aug 21, 2009 |
As a more-than-interested observer of events in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I found Gerard Prunier's Africa's World War a worthwhile if dense expression of one man's opinions about an incredibly complex chapter in the continent's history. Is it rife with supposition, self-serving sources, and subjective interpretation of events? Certainly. But that's the nature of the conflict, so readers expecting a black-hat-white-hat cast of good guys and bad guys are going to be dismissive of the work if not outraged at the author's audacity to present it as history. I suspect this is as close to an actual history of this period as we're ever going to see.

What I found particularly useful was Prunier's run down of the multitude of nations involved in the two wars. The roles played by everyone from Libya to South Africa are examined in sometimes mind-numbing detail. The whys and wherefores of each player's participation are by necessity speculative; the Angolan military doesn't have much in the way of neat regimental histories posted on the Web to use as sources and neither Yoweri Museveni or Paul Kagame are known for giving lengthy confessional interviews. Still, if you approach the material with patience and several grains of salt, you can come away with a better understanding of how the conflict in Congo was shaped by numerous outside forces.

It should be noted that this isn't light, recreational reading. I studied the DRC for five years as I was researching my novel Heart of Diamonds and I still found it essential to refer to Prunier's list of abbreviations and glossary time and time again. The sheer number of acronyms is enough to slow comprehension to a crawl, but again, this is no more than an accurate portrait of a 15-year conflict where six men with an RPG can declare themselves a rebel militia, take over a village, and eventually sit down at the negotiating table with representatives from several sovereign countries and the United Nations before splitting up to join opposing armies where they start the process all over again. Any account of alliances in Congo reads like alphabet soup in a blender.

Prunier could have provided a little more specficity and clarity about two big topics. One was the role the United States played (and plays) in the Congo wars. With his somewhat fragmented organizational approach, it was difficult to piece together what we did to whom and who did what to us. America's hands have come away soiled every time we lay them on Congo (dating to our rush to be the first country in the world to endorse King Leopold's bold claim to own the nation), and I would have liked a more detailed account of what happened and when we did it during the period covered by the book.

The other is Rwanda's major involvement in the game. Prunier certainly provides an exhaustive account of the genocide's aftermath and how it played out in the eastern provinces of the DRC, but the big picture seemed to have been obscured by the details. Maybe my mind was dulled by slogging through account after account of what was happening to the refugees and which ones were the good Tutsis and which ones where the bad Tutsis, but I have to say I didn't come away from the book with a clear understanding of what Prunier thinks Kagame really hopes to accomplish.

Those looking for a simple definitive account of war in Congo had best look elsewhere, but readers who are sophisticated enough to take one man's observations and opinions and weigh them accordingly will find Africa's World War a useful addition to the shelf. ( )
2 vote davedonelson | Apr 21, 2009 |
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