Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason K. Stearns

In these conversations he found gold, bringing clarity-and humanity-to a place that usually seems inexplicable and barbaric.

Stearns has spoken to everyone-villagers, child soldiers, Mobutu's commanders, Kabila's ministers, Rwandan intelligence officers. 'He is a cracking writer, with a wry sense of understatement. An Economist and Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year.How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective? How do you put a human face on a figure like 'four million' when most of the casualties perish unsensationally, as a result of disease, far away from television cameras? Instead it is a war of the ordinary person, with many combatants unknown and unnamed, who fight for complex reasons that are difficult to distill in a few sentences-much to the frustration of the international media. There is no Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. In the Congo these roles are more difficult to fill. In Cambodia, there was the despotic Khmer Rouge in Rwanda one could cast the genocidal Hutu militias as the villains. From the outside, the war seems to possess no overarching narrative or ideology to explain it, no easy tribal conflict or socialist revolution to use as a peg in a news piece. The mortality figures are so immense that they become absurd, almost meaningless. And yet, despite its epic proportions, the war has received little sustained attention from the rest of the world.

The Congolese war must be put among the other great human cataclysms of our time: the World Wars, the Great Leap Forward in China, the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides. National Union for the Total Independence of Angola United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Rwandan Patriotic Army (the armed wing of the RPF) Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development National Army for the Liberation of Uganda Patriotic Resistance Forces of Ituri (Congo)Ĭatholic Institute of Higher Commercial Studies National and Integrationist Front (Congo)

Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo- Zaireįorces for the Defense of Democracy (Burundi)ĭemocratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwandaįront for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (Angola)

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason K. Stearns