From: Charles V. Reed <cvreed@mail.ecsu.edu<mailto:cvreed@mail.ecsu.edu>>
List Editor: "Charles V. Reed" <cvreed@MAIL.ECSU.EDU>
Editor's Subject: REVIEW: Stanard on Stearns, 'Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa'
Author's Subject: REVIEW: Stanard on Stearns, 'Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa'
Date Written: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:26:22 +0000
Date Posted: Tue, 25 Jun 2012 18:26:22 -0400
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Jason Stearns. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. New York PublicAffairs, 2012. 417 pp. $16.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-61039-107-8. Reviewed by Matthew G. Stanard (Berry College) Published on H-Empire (June, 2012) Commissioned by Charles V. Reed "Where elephants fight the grass is trampled" For many who grew up during the Cold War, the competition between capitalism and communism seemed to determine the unfolding of history. Then 1989 happened, and communism collapsed spectacularly. Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the end of history, that is, the end of ideological competition and the triumph of Western liberal democracy.[1] Of course history did not end, ideological battles continued, and the decade that followed witnessed a dizzying array of complex developments. Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Kuwait and was expelled. Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime collapsed in Ethiopia and Eritrea gained its independence, which led to an extraordinarily rare border change in postindependence Africa. Sierra Leone and Liberia plunged into civil conflicts without apparent end. Somalia failed and Yugoslavia disintegrated. Russia both fulfilled and dashed hopes in its transmogrification into a political and economic system that defies categorization. The Maastricht Treaty created another sui generis entity, the European Union. South Africa held its first democratic elections, setting the African National Congress on a path toward one-party dominance. Japanese economic growth was followed by a crash and the so-called lost decade. India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons. Multiple terrorist strikes in and outside the United States presaged the 2001 attacks. Considering all this, it is unsurprising that anyone who lived through the 1990s had trouble keeping track of the multitude of developments also unfolding in Rwanda and Zaire (later rebaptized the Democratic Republic of the Congo). A century earlier, during the 1890s, news about atrocities in the Congo were hard to come by and it took dedicated efforts by individuals like E. D. Morel and Roger Casement to bring the violence affecting millions under Leopold II's abusive colonial regime to the attention of the wider world. By comparison, information was much easier to come by in the 1990s. Across the globe people knew a genocide had begun in Rwanda within days of its start. Diplomats at UN headquarters in New York City, such as U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, publicly debated the genocide, even if to their shame they refused to use the term itself for fear that doing so would commit them to actually do something about it. Scenes of immense refugee camps in central Africa hit the airwaves repeatedly, and journalists at the _New York Times_ and elsewhere regularly informed the world of the ongoing conflicts in the area: child soldiers, mass rapes, disease, humanitarian missions, exploitation of natural resources, foreign incursions, and attempts at peace. Such reporting has continued. But with all the information came little explanation. To redress this lack--to explain--is the task that Jason Stearns sets for himself in _Dancing in the Glory of Monsters_, his captivating if dreadful account of the wars in central Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Stearns begins with the genocide, an event similar to the Holocaust in the sense that we now know quite a bit about its causes even if it ultimately defies comprehension. For decades, Rwanda had witnessed competition for both resources and control over the state with competing sides divided along ethnic lines. As Tutsi insurgents advanced on Kigali in 1994, people inside and outside the Hutu-dominated government fought back and also attacked civilians, both Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Rebel leader Paul Kagame's victory, which also ended the genocide, thrust hundreds of thousands of refugees out of the country, most over the border into Zaire. In the months afterward, Kagame and others came to see Rwanda's security as dependent on the defeat of Hutu and other refugees in camps across the country's western frontier. Some neighboring governments, such as the one in Uganda, became involved to eliminate their own enemy rebel groups that had set up bases within Zaire during the late period of Mobutu Sese Seko's rule. In Zaire itself, people struggled under Mobutu's deteriorating rule. This led to the 1996-97 Congo war in which Congolese rebels took up arms against Mobutu's dictatorship, supported and at times led by Rwandan, Ugandan, and other armed powers. They fought across the country to Kinshasa, ostensibly under the leadership of the aged Congolese rebel Laurent Kabila. The successful assault on Kinshasa was a campaign of distances rivaling those of Napoleon's 1812 march on Moscow, with different results of course. Just months in power, Kabila was at war again. Although sparked by Rwandan military action, the ultimate causes of the second Congo conflict are much less clear. Perhaps it was that Kagame and his allies in Rwanda had become persuaded that Kabila was no longer trustworthy, or they simply had grown tired of him. Rwandan hubris, which built up after the successes of 1994 at home and 1997 in the Congo, also played a role. Divisions among the Congolese undoubtedly contributed to the renewed fighting, as did the stunning weaknesses of Kabila's government, which had been left no choice but to establish itself on the sometimes literally charred ruins of Mobutu's failed kleptocracy. On the ropes, Kabila's Democratic Republic of the Congo fought back with support from Angola, Zimbabwe, and others. Although the initial threat to Kabila's hold on power receded, the fighting did not. The expansive canvas Stearns paints of the second Congo conflict, where months of battles turned into years of fighting, is filled with portraits of all sorts of characters, from would-be revolutionary professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba to the "millionaire-turned-rebel leader" Jean-Pierre Bemba, today on trial before the International Criminal Court (p. 217). The war degenerated into smaller, sometimes sporadic but vicious offensives and counterattacks between proxy forces in various corners of the capacious Congo. A murky picture grew even darker following Kabila's 2001 assassination, the causes of which remain unclear to this day. The longer the war continued, the less sense it seemed to make. Stearns suggests a parallel with the Thirty Years' War: starting out as a local conflict, the war spiraled out of control as more and more outside powers got involved, each seeking to advance its own interests while the civilian population suffered all along. As Stearns heard from people several times during his multiple stays in the region, "Where elephants fight the grass is trampled." The picture improved significantly after Kabila's son Joseph Kabila succeeded him. Following peace talks, direct foreign intervention drew to a close in 2003, although fighting and atrocities continued, especially in the eastern part of the country where the wars had first begun. These conflicts taken together have been called Africa's Great War, but Stearns is clear that his book's title is not an analogy to World War I (p. 273). Consider one devastating Ugandan offensive on Kisangani in June 2000 that dropped 6,000 shells on the city over six days. By comparison, the Battle of Verdun saw, on average, some 125,000 artillery shells land every day for ten months. Whereas the various armed forces involved in the two Congo wars could at times be counted in the thousands, the armies that faced off during World War I numbered in the millions. The effects of Spanish influenza aside, most casualties of Europe's Great War were soldiers. The overwhelming majority of people who died as a result of the Congo wars were civilians. One comparison Stearns does make is between the killings of millions in central Africa and the deaths of millions in central Europe little more than half a century earlier. By contrasting events in Africa with those of twentieth-century Europe, Stearns suggests that the Congo wars are particularly hard to figure out because no single individual or group drove the killing; no Adolf Hitler, no Joseph Stalin, not even a "select group" who directed the carnage, as he suggests was the case for the Holocaust (pp. 5, 15). The contrast is not as great as Stearns would like us to believe. Countless thousands of people actively participated in the Holocaust and Stalin's Great Terror. Christopher Browning's _Ordinary Men_ (1992) and Jan Gross's _Neighbors_ (2001), among others, have shown how ordinary Europeans became killers who committed unspeakable acts against their fellow humans. Many people today think of Africa as a backward place of ethnic hatred, violence, warfare, and military coups d'?tat. The Rwandan genocide and wars in the Congo only feed those stereotypes. But as I tell students in my modern African history class, Africa compares favorably with twentieth-century Europe when considering the Balkan Wars, World War I, the Russian Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War, Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, Stalin's Great Terror, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, France's colonial wars from 1946 to 1962, Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, European terrorism, and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Perhaps historians ought to concern themselves less with why people become killers and more with what drives people not to kill. Although an admittedly bleak starting point, some have adopted a similar approach when considering the root causes of such conflicts as World War I: don't explain war, explain peace.[2] One example of European cruelty not mentioned above is the turn-of-the-century violence caused by Leopoldian imperialism in central Africa. Some might be surprised at the very small role played either by the legacy of the Belgian Empire or Belgium itself in the Great War of Africa. There were hangovers of the colonial era to be sure, and Stearns does look back to the colonial past, although not in any systematic way. He points out more than once that the independent Congo that emerged in 1960 was left wholly unprepared for a successful existence as an independent state, which of course fed into Mobutu's rule and its failures. Another colonial legacy is how the postindependence copper giant G?camines was for so many years and in so many ways just like its predecessor, the Union Mini?re du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) of the Belgian Congo. Just as UMHK provided workers with jobs and healthcare and the colonial state with revenue, so "G?camines remained the country's [Zaire's] largest source of employment and income, providing over 37,000 jobs at its peak, running thirteen hospitals and clinics, and contributing to between 20 and 30 percent of state revenues" (p. 289). A parallel with the colonial epoch can also be seen in how the inspiration behind Leopold II's and the Belgian Congo's armed forces, the Force publique, foreshadowed Mobutu and Kabila's fears of domestic instability as opposed to external threats (p. 330). Although the Force publique saw limited fighting outside the Congo during World Wars I and II, it was in essence a domestic policing force. Neither Leopold II nor the Belgians were afraid of neighboring colonial powers. What they feared was rebellion, just as Mobutu and Kabila did after them. While the relics of empire remained, what the book suggests is that the history of the colonial period mattered little to people caught up in a war. Unsurprisingly, people do not debate the past much when they are just trying to survive. Comparisons to contemporaneous developments in Belgium are telling on this point. The year that the second Congo war started, 1998, also witnessed the publication of one of the best-known books on the Congo, Adam Hochschild's _King Leopold's Ghost_. Hochschild's book created controversy in Belgium and contributed to an outpouring of research on Belgium's colonial past, what two scholars recently called "Congomania in Academia."[3] Among the most contentious of Hochschild's points was his reference to ten million deaths in the Congo during Leopold II's rule as well as an oblique likening of Congo atrocities under Leopold to the Holocaust. This all fed into an ongoing debate in the Western press and academia over the number and nature of deaths in the Congo under Leopold II. While accusations flew in newsprint and teeth gnashed at university conferences because of Belgium's horrific colonial past, literally millions of human lives were being lost in central Africa. Why care about millions killed a century ago when millions were dying today? In this light the 2004 re-erection of Leopold II's statue in Kinshasa, a seemingly bizarre and acrimonious move, appears less odd. Culture Minister Christophe Muzungu said the statue went up because the Congo needed to remember its history. Perhaps it was a way to symbolically claim lands that Leopold II had staked out as the borders of the Congo, since it was Leopold's reign, however dreadful, that had carved out the borders that had been violated by Congo's neighbors after 1998.[4] The motivations behind the brief return of Leopold's statue in 2004 remain unclear to this day, and Stearns does not mention the episode. His enviably level-headed accounting of the wars does, however, raise other useful questions in need of further investigation. Some of these include who assassinated Kabila; what his son Joseph's role in government has been since 2001; and what the exact roles were of the Rwandan, Ugandan, Zimbabwean, Angolan, and other neighboring governments in the Congo, especially after 1998. Stearns is less strong when it comes to addressing several critical issues, such as the availability of medicines, the medical infrastructure (or lack thereof) in the Congo, the international trade in weapons, and the effects of the Cold War's end on that trade. There is some discussion of mineral production and urban life, especially in Kinshasa, Kisangani, and Kigali, but virtually nothing is made of agricultural production and competition for land, an important issue considering that most people in central Africa remain agriculturalists (in Rwanda as much as 90 percent of the population). Another bigger picture issue about which Stearns says hardly anything is Western involvement or its absence. Of course it is unfair to criticize a book for not doing what its author did not set out to do, but it is nonetheless surprising to see so little about international passivity in the face of the Rwandan genocide and the killings in the Congo. It is not clear how international support bolstered or sapped Laurent Kabila's hold on power or how nongovernmental or other interventions furthered or hindered life-saving measures on the ground during the two wars. The author does accuse the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of hypocrisy for deploying fifty thousand troops in the comparatively tiny area of Kosovo in 1999 while UN peacekeepers numbered at most twenty thousand in central Africa (p. 334). Yet by 1999, NATO already had been involved for years in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, and the organization had by then expanded to include Hungary, which borders Serbia and lies just a few hundred kilometers from Kosovo. Moreover the accession of southeastern European states to NATO already was being discussed by 1999. Was it hypocritical for NATO to be deeply engaged in an ongoing area of conflict within Europe while simultaneously debating a course of action in central Africa? To question Stearns's accusation of hypocrisy and to highlight areas needing further study is not to pass a negative judgment on his book. The book's strengths far outweigh any weaknesses. The book is richly rewarding because it provides a broad overview that ties together many complex strands of the 1990s and early 2000s. Here we discover connections among the Rwanda genocide; refugee camps in the Congo; international aid; Mobutu's kleptocratic rule; individual leaders; everyday people; and the politics of nearby countries, including Angola, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Even better, this wide-ranging history is splendidly well written and supremely accessible. In short, this is a page turner that ought to engage a broad audience. Stearns is marvelously evenhanded in his general approach and in how he handles his sources, which brings up what is perhaps his book's greatest strength: the incorporation of numerous interviews that he conducted, on the ground, over the course of many years. Stearns is not a professional historian. He worked for various organizations in Africa before embarking on a PhD in political science at Yale. _Dancing in the Glory of Monsters_ plumbs the secondary literature, from Alison Des Forges on the Rwandan genocide to key works by G?rard Prunier, Isidore Ndaywel ? Nziem, Gauthier de Villers, Piero Gleijeses, and many others. He relies extensively on British papers and the _New York Times_ as well as newspapers in Uganda, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Other important sets of sources are government, UN, and nongovernmental organization reports. The real wonder of the book, however, are the interviews. He conducted dozens of interviews with players big and small in the Congo, Rwanda, and beyond. Many of the interviews are recent, some having taken place as late as 2010. His many dialogues allow him to put a human face on the broader conflict. In short, _Dancing in the Glory of Monsters_ is a fresh, impartial, well-researched, and highly engaging look at the conflict by someone who has spent considerable time in central Africa. Although the book ranges across the secondary literature in such a way as to make it much more than merely a firsthand account of the wars, it bears noting that some sources could have been used more carefully. Stearns claims that the CIA wrote in the 1990s that Mobutu was suffering from AIDS (p. 153). As evidence, he cites Michela Wrong's _In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz_ (2001), which is a journalistic account containing no citations. To help explain the economics behind the Congo wars, Stearns draws on Ludo de Witte's _The Assassination of Lumumba_ for figures on the Soci?t? G?n?rale's land concessions in Katanga in 1906, which set the stage for copper mining to dominate the colony and the independent Congo later on (p. 288). Although important, de Witte's narrowly focused work on Lumumba's death is far from an ideal source on the history and the economics of copper in the Congo. Stearns's reliance on de Witte's book is more than a quibble because in this specific case, the figures he cites from _The Assassination of Lumumba_ are not backed up by any references of their own in de Witte's book.[5] Despite Stearns's elegant history, by the end of the book the reader is left with an unclear account of what caused the wars, especially the second one, and who is to blame for them. What the reader is left with is deep heartache because it is clear that the Congo wars were horrifically destructive of human life. We still await a full accounting, both of how the wars' victims died and of how many. Population figures for the Congo are difficult to pin down, let alone war casualties. Recently revised casualty figures from the U.S. Civil War show that demographics for even the most studied of wars are tricky.[6] In the case of central Africa, for now the best we have are estimates. The second conflict alone, starting in 1998, left some 3.8 million dead, which when added to the dead from the 1996-97 war totals 5 million. Most died not in combat strictly speaking but because of hunger, disease, other illness, exposure, or smaller-scale attacks and killings. Such numbers are impossible to understand, although we can follow Timothy Snyder, who, when writing about an equally incomprehensibly vast number of dead, that of the 5.7 million victims of the Holocaust, proposed that "this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million _times one_."[7] Stearns's book edges us closer toward understanding 5 million times one. But in the end comprehension eludes us. It is fitting to conclude with one of Stearns's interviewees, Pastor Philippe of Kisangani. As a father Philippe suffered what is perhaps a parent's most dreaded fate: having to live on after the death of one's own young child. Pastor Philippe lost three. When Stearns asked Philippe who was to blame for his children's deaths, the father's response summed up the causes and agonizing consequences of the Congo wars: "There are too many people to blame. Mobutu for ruining our country. Rwanda and Uganda for invading it. Ourselves for letting them do so. None of that will help bring my children back" (p. 248). Notes [1]. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" _The National Interest_ (Summer 1989): 3-18. [2]. Paul W. Schroeder, "International Politics, Peace, and War, 1815-1914," in _The Nineteenth Century: Europe 1789-1914_, ed. T. C. W. Blanning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 158-209. [3]. Idesbald Goddeeris and Sindani E. Kiangu, "Congomania in Academia: Recent Historical Research on the Belgian Colonial Past," _BMGN Low Countries Historical Review_ 126, no. 4 (2011): 54-74. [4]. "DR Congo's Leopold Statue Removed," _BBC News_, February 4, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4235237.stm (accessed May 10, 2012). [5]. Ludo de Witte, _The Assassination of Lumumba_, trans. by Ann Wright and Ren?e Fenby (London: Verso, 2001), 31. [6]. J. David Hacker, "A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead," _Civil War History_ 57, no. 4 (2011): 307-348. [7]. Timothy Snyder, _Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin_ (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 407. Citation: Matthew G. Stanard. Review of Stearns, Jason, _Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa_. H-Empire, H-Net Reviews. June, 2012. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36185 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Public release date: 27-Jun-2012
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