Gérard Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwanda genocide, and the making of a continental catastrophe. New York: Oxford University Press (hb $29.95 – 978 0 19537 420 9). 2009, 576 pp.; also published as From Genocide to Continental War: the Congolese conflict and the crisis of contemporary Africa. London: Hurst. 2009

René Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press (pb £18.00 – 978 0 81222 090 3, hb £39.00 – 978 0 81224 120 4). 2009, 344 pp.

The widespread belief that nowhere in Africa has violence taken a heavier toll than the nearly one million deaths of the 1994 Rwandan genocide is, as René Lemarchand observes, ‘one of the most persistent and persistently misleading ideas’ about the continent (p. 4). Since 1998, the intractable conflict in the Democratic of Congo (DRC) has left over five times that number (approximately 5.4 million) dead, a toll which continues to mount unabated in the largely war-torn east, despite the formal cessation of hostilities in July 2003 and the much anticipated national elections in 2006. Yet the country which over a century ago captured global attention and sympathy, rousing one of its earliest human rights campaigners, George Washington Williams, to denounce Belgian King Leopold's rampant pillaging of its people and property as ‘crimes against humanity’ (the first use of a now ubiquitous term), has received scant scholarly and public attention (Butcher Reference Butcher2008: 308). The mantra ‘Never Again’ which so quickly became both a succinct epitaph for the Rwandan genocide and a plea to action has sooner galvanized the so-called international community over the conflict in Sudan – which, as horrific as it is, pales in comparison to unfolding events in its south-westerly neighbour, the DRC. The war in the DRC surprisingly remains under-reported, under-researched and, when remembered, largely misunderstood.

The two books under review are seminal contributions to the literature on the DRC and will undoubtedly become recommended reading for those seeking to understand the conflict and the dynamics of violence which have engulfed the broader Great Lakes region. Both authors aim to disprove fashionable and easily digestible hypotheses about the war and its causes, opting instead for a more nuanced and detailed analysis probing its inextricable link with the Rwandan genocide. Both books assist in explaining the historical construction of ethnic and national identities in the region, and in doing so the authors lay bare what they regard as the West's ‘abysmal ignorance’ of the region's ‘past and recent history’, and how these shortcomings in turn engender a response which they view as problematic (Lemarchand, p. x). Both authors demonstrate how the simplified narratives of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ and ‘Tutsi’ versus ‘Hutu’ widely adopted in the wake of the Rwandan genocide have impeded ‘hard analysis’ and ‘strong political resolve’ in the DRC (Prunier, p. 346). Taken together, these works have something salient to say about the causes and ways of understanding contemporary armed conflicts in Africa. However, their real contribution lies in the breadth and depth of the history they recount, reflecting decades of research and study on and in the DRC region – amidst a plague of violence which, as Prunier acerbically notes, ‘has left few of those who looked at it from up close completely intact’ (p. 358). For both authors, particularly Prunier, their latest work is the product of rigorous self-reflection and self-interrogation – a reappraisal of their own ‘objectivity’ and what they once viewed as the ‘right position’. Quoting Paul Ricoeur, Lemarchand (p. 102) rightly urges the necessity of this ‘travail de mémoire’ (labour of memory).

AFRICA'S WORLD WAR

Prunier's Africa's World War is a tour de force – a masterful history of both wars (First Congo War, September 1996–May 1997; Second Congo War, August 1998–July 2003). The book starts in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, which Prunier refers to in the title of his first substantive chapter as Rwanda's ‘mixed season of hope’ – a squandered moment when the newly seated government of national unity let the fear of losing power stand in the way of much needed justice as killings continued and the international community substituted open-chequebook humanitarianism for meaningful political engagement. In subsequent chapters, Prunier recounts in rich detail the causes, course and denouement of the first and then second, more lengthy and brutal war, meticulously analysing the interests and stakes of each of the involved countries and sub-national actors – the latter war drawing in no fewer than ten African states in what Prunier (pp. 201–2) helpfully describes in terms of gradations or layers of receding involvement (core conflict: Rwanda and Uganda; second layer: Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia; third layer: Libya, Chad and Sudan; and fourth layer: Burundi and Central African Republic). In doing so, Prunier delves into the recent and complicated histories of individual countries such as Uganda and Burundi, drawing out the complex historical, economic and political ties that bind these countries to the Congo. The book then recounts the various, and often failed, peace agreements, including the latest January 2008 Goma Agreement, aimed at addressing the continued instability in the east. Prunier concludes the book by exploring the pertinence of the Congolese case to the general paradigm of an ‘African crisis’.

Lemarchand's The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa is academically and analytically more rigorous than Prunier's history, incorporating the work of notable social scientists and philosophers from Paul Collier and Robert Putnam to Paul Ricoeur and Tzvetan Todorov. Unlike Prunier, who focuses primarily on the DRC and analyses the roles of other countries only in so far as they relate to the Congolese conflict, Lemarchand explores more fully the dynamics of violence in three former Belgian states (Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC), arguing that ‘only through a regional lens can one bring into focus the violent patterns of interaction that form the essential backdrop to the spread of bloodshed within and across boundaries’ (p. x). The book is divided into three parts. In Part One, ‘The Regional Context’, Lemarchand sketches the geopolitical base of the region and provides a detailed conceptual framework – emphasizing processes of exclusion, marginalization and political mobilization as driving forces of conflict – through which much of the rest of the book can be read. In Part Two, ‘Rwanda and Burundi: the Genocidal Twins’, he explores in comparative perspective the historical roots and circumstances of genocidal killings in these neighbouring countries, demonstrating the reciprocal impact of one upon the other. For example, he rightly argues that the Rwandan genocide cannot be understood without referring to the 1993 murder of Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu President of Burundi, and the ensuing slaughter of 50,000 Hutu in Burundi which caused a mass exodus into Rwandan territory months before the genocide. He then explores what are arguably understudied dimensions of the Rwanda genocide and the political transition in its aftermath. This is where Lemarchand is at his finest: exploring the politics of memory in Kagame's Rwanda and warning against the dangers of reducing the history to a narrative of good versus evil. However, it is also here that Lemarchand is most controversial, as he recounts events such as the shooting down of Habyarimana's plane by Paul Kagame as established and certain, when in fact it remains, along with the Rwandan-sponsored massacres after the genocide, fiercely contested by academics and lawyers. Lemarchand's provocations recently made it to the highest echelons of the political establishment, eliciting a lengthy response by President Kagame himself to one of the book's chapters reprinted in a separate volume (Clark and Kaufman 2009: xxxiii–xxxv). Part Three is devoted to the Congo and looks at the multiple crises which have afflicted the country, from Mobutu's reign up to the elections in 2006, but also exposing many of the grievances found in the legacy of Belgium's brutal and devastating rule. Unlike Prunier's, Lemarchand's book is a collection of about twelve journal articles and book chapters written, and already published, from as early as 1993. This compilation structure is only stated explicitly in the acknowledgements at the very end. This can be quite confusing for the non-specialist reader, as the various actors change and there is very little by way of continuous historical narrative, not to mention Lemarchand's misspelling of former Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana's name in numerous places. Despite these oversights, these two books are a complementary pair – what Lemarchand lacks in history he makes up for in a stimulating analysis, and Prunier more than amply fills the historical gaps.

MORE THAN CREED, GREED AND BOOTY

In their description and analysis of the Congolese wars both authors spend considerable time debunking widely accepted hypotheses which fit a simplified narrative, namely that the conflict was and continues to be about creed, greed or booty.

Drawing on Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's notion of ‘invented traditions’, Lemarchand describes ‘ethnicity as myth’ and demonstrates how, far from being incorruptible, ethnicity has the ‘capacity to be manipulated for the pursuit of preeminently immoral goals’, such as the production of exclusion by profoundly altering collective perceptions of the ‘other’. According to Lemarchand, ‘mythmaking … is what transforms social conflict into irreconcilable moral standoffs’ (p. 50). However, as Prunier demonstrates, these standoffs can be short-lived, not wedded to primordial tribal ties. The most recent change of alliances in January 2009 is a case in point: the largely Tutsi National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) went from fighting against the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) to fighting alongside them against the largely Hutu FDLR, on whom the FARDC has traditionally drawn for support in combat, mostly against the CNDP. In the DRC, ethnicity is not the primary source of conflict, but rather a powerful, mobilizing and malleable weapon. This dynamic is well captured by social anthropologist Vigdis Broch-Due:

In addition to revealing the poverty of ‘ethnic conflict’ as explanation and argument, both authors explore and then reject popular theories, grounded in neo-classical economic thinking, which tend to capture and reduce conflict to individual greed and economic feasibility.Footnote ¹ Fashionable in policy circles and the public realm, this narrative tends to view conflict as ‘Africa made, rooted in incorrigible greed of rival warlords’ and predictable when predation is feasible (p. 5). Both Lemarchand and Prunier argue that greed and financial viability matter, and undoubtedly have been a factor in sustaining and prolonging the conflict in the DRC. However, they both maintain that it is not the primary cause: differentiating between exclusion as the initial motive and greed as ‘a propelling force at a later stage of intergroup violence’ (Lemarchand, p. 30).Footnote ² In addition, Lemarchand problematizes what he views as Collier's simplistic reduction of rebel activity to criminal activity, noting that the alternative proposition, substantiated, for example, by the history of Rwanda under Habyarimana and Zaïre under Mobutu, that ‘the state might qualify as the criminal and the rebels as victims of state crimes’ is not considered (p. 42). Last, Prunier devotes considerable space to show the lack of evidence backing conspiracy theories which focus on Western imperialism as a cause and implicate mining companies, particularly American ones (see, for example, Renton, Seddon and Zeilig 2007).Footnote ³ Prunier carefully shows how America was involved in the overthrow of Mobutu but was not in the driver's seat, and how mining companies did not profit hugely from their contracts, most of which were signed once the war was well on its way. In critiquing ‘greed’ and ‘opportunity for enrichment’ as explanations for conflict, Prunier and Lemarchand align themselves with a growing body of scholars, such as Karen Ballentine (Ballentine and Sherman Reference Ballentine and J.2003; Ballentine and Nitzschke Reference Ballentine and H.2008) and Christopher Cramer (2007) who problematize ‘structural determinism by objective conditions of oppression or opportunities for greed’ and lay greater emphasis on social relations (policies and institutions which engender exclusion) and the interaction between economic and political agendas. The central pattern, according to Lemarchand, is as follows: ‘ethnic polarisation paves the way for political exclusion, exclusion eventually leading to insurrection, insurrection to repression, and repression to massive flows of refugees and internally displaced persons, which in turn become the vectors of further instability’ (p. 31). To put it simply: this argument encourages the reader to look beyond essentialist understandings of human motivations to consider how greed becomes more pronounced, more consequential, as people are excluded, shut out from their societies.

So, if creed, greed and Western imperialism are not the primary causes of the war, what, then, are? During the Rwandan genocide, roughly two million Hutus fled the country for fear of Tutsi retaliation. Many settled in the east of the Congo, a region over which President Mobutu, aptly nicknamed ‘the Mayor of Kinshasa’, had little control. For both authors the proximate cause for the war – what led the Rwandan leadership to attack Zaïre in September 1996 – was the legitimate fear of the presence of these large, partially militarized refugee camps festering on its border. Both Prunier and Lemarchand are sensitive about the threat this posed to Kigali, and focus their critique not on whether the camps needed to be dealt with, but rather how, what form the response took. They damningly show how first the international community replaced ‘mature political treatment’ with ‘humanitarian condescension and diplomatic bickering’ and then how the Rwandan government forcibly and brutally attacked the camps in the autumn of 1996, resulting in up to 300,000 deaths, mostly civilians (Prunier, p. 125). The pattern then was similar to today – the FDLR flees into the dense Congolese bush when attacked, leading to disproportionate casualties amongst the civilians who remain in the camps and villages, and then, once the attacking force withdraws, the FDLR emerges from hiding and often carries out reprisal attacks on the civilians. It was for this very reason that both during and after the January 2009 joint Rwandese-Congolese military operations against the FDLR, many local and international NGOs operating in the field were vocal about their concerns over civilian protection.Footnote ⁴ Fears that the Rwandese-Congolese operations would lead to new mass killings of civilians were borne out by events. And yet these operations were lauded by many as a ‘success’; and resulted in the UN subsequently deciding to conduct similar operations with the FARDC to ‘root out’ the FDLR in South Kivu.⁵

For both authors, Rwanda's policy towards the camps is inextricably linked to its early post-genocide domestic policy. According to Lemarchand, the prospects of national unity, reconciliation and peaceful transition quickly receded as the government adopted a policy of ‘political control through terror’ (p. 20). Attempted UN investigations into the human rights abuses committed by the Rwandan state, first in the Gersony and then in the Garreton report, were frustrated and then swept aside with little resistance from the UN. Indeed, according to Prunier with corroboration from the late Rwandan scholar Alison DesForges in Leave None to Tell the Story, members of the Gersony investigation team were told by the UN to remain silent about their findings (p. 147). The international community, cowed by Rwandan government reminders of its failure to stop the genocide, was reluctant to interfere with the ‘victims’, ‘the Tutsis’, and with what it claimed was a process of restoring order. Indeed both authors recount how any critical examination of the RPF's human rights violations was met, then and now, with accusations of ‘revisionist ideology’, ‘genocide denial’ and ‘apologism’, rebuffs which also led to the temporary blacklisting of such reputable organizations as the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, not to mention the difficulties both authors continue to encounter doing research in the field.

Rwanda's security concerns were, however, only part of the rationale for invading and only go so far in explaining what ensued after the camps were attacked and the problem was widely purported to have been ‘solved’ (Prunier, pp. 116–19).Footnote ⁶ Decades of Mobutu's ‘Zaïreanization’ campaign, bolstered by the willingness of successive US governments to fill his coffers during the Cold War, meant that by the late 1980s the country was in total economic collapse and the government's authority extended little further than the outskirts of Kinshasa. By 1996, as Prunier writes, ‘the Zaïrean core of the continent had become a hologram flickering on the brink of its own destruction’ (p. 359). For those at the helm of what they hoped would be an African Renaissance, Mobutu's kleptocratic rule personified the worst of the Cold War leadership.Footnote ⁷ Thus the march on Kinshasa, the overthrow of Mobutu and the resulting slide into yet another war in 1998 was, as Prunier shows, the design of several African leaders who had begun their Machiavellian scheming in November 1994 at a meeting called by Museveni in Kampala for the ‘serious enemies’ of Mobutu (p. 67).

Doing away with the decrepit and ruthless Mobutu came to be seen, as Prunier explains, as Africa's kulembeka (meaning ‘our duty, our task’). The installation of Laurent Kabila, whose foreign-backed Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaïre (ADFL) had overthrown Mobutu in a matter of months, was lauded as the harbinger of a new era, of a new Democratic Republic of Congo, as it was now named. However, fearful of losing favour in the east, where people were alarmed by the number of Rwandan strongmen around the President, and by what they saw as their neighbour's potentially expansionist aims, Kabila made the fateful move of expelling the Rwandans from the country, thereby turning the ‘kingmakers’, as Lemarchand calls them, against their newly crowned king. Days later, in an event which marked the start of the second Congolese war, Rwanda re-entered the country, hijacked a plane to the western city of Kitona and began encroaching on the capital and what they viewed as Kabila's unworthy regime. The war dragged on in numerous other states and, in the making and unmaking of alliances, eventually even pitted Rwanda against Uganda, as the former allies fought largely over control of minerals in the east. Congo's vast resources became a way for foreign armies to finance, or at the very least subsidize, their occupation of the neighbouring country. As the December 2008 UN Report by the Group of Experts on the DRC reveals, these economic ties of profit and plunder are maintained, particularly by Rwanda, despite the various peace treaties.Footnote ⁸ Much to the chagrin of Kagame's government, the report provided detailed evidence of direct financial and material support and profiting between Rwandan authorities and the CNDP in eastern Congo. In response, Sweden and the Netherlands suspended their aid to Rwanda, and in hindsight many now view the subsequent renewal of diplomatic ties with Kinshasa and the surrender of the CNDP to FARDC partly as an effort by Kagame to regain favour with the international community and yet still maintain a sphere of influence in the east.

By the time Joseph Kabila took over after his father's assassination in 2001, the country-wide war, which by then had claimed some 3–4 million lives, had begun to run out of steam, ending in 2003 not with a bang, as Prunier describes, but with a whimper.

CONCLUSION

What emerges from this history – implicitly in Prunier's narrative and explicitly in Lemarchand's analysis – is the centrality of political and social exclusion in explaining and understanding ‘the dynamics of domestic and inter-state violence in the Great Lakes’ (p. 31). This is not to say that either author minimizes the importance or significance of power projection capacity, but rather that to understand external aggression in the broader historical context, processes and policies of exclusion must be articulated. For both authors, exclusion is not a given, inherent or organic; it does not, as Lemarchand writes, ‘materialize out of the primeval fissures of plural society’, but rather it gains much of its force from the mobilization and polarization of ethnic identities unleashed by ‘the democratization of societies built on the “premise of inequality” ’ (p. 34). Inseparable here, as Crawford Young and others have noted, is the impact of the colonial state in the construction of such societies (see, for example, Young Reference Young1994; Cooper Reference Cooper2002; Mamdani 1996). Seen this way, the reluctance of many in the CNDP to integrate into the FARDC, a step which most analysts recognize as critical to the long-term stability of the east, cannot be understood without recalling the numerous ways Tutsis (Congolese Tutsis, banyamulenge, who date back to the pre-colonial period, the ‘1959ers’ and more recent immigrants) have been systematically persecuted, marginalized and denied what to many are arguably just claims to citizenship in Congo. Similarly, we cannot fully grasp the difficulties in disarming and reintegrating the FDLR and more recent Rwandese refugees back into Rwandan society without fully comprehending the socio-political environment in Rwanda, which many argue is highly unequal and oppressive despite a veneer of normalcy and order.

The strength of these two books lies in their emphasis on both domestic and regional history, and their own resistance to, and indeed denunciation of, over-simplification. For both authors a workable long-term solution is predicated on an understanding of the conflict's historical causes in their full complexity. Mis-diagnosis, misunderstanding and failed policy emerge in part from amnesia and lack of interest, and in part from what Prunier – citing Gary Wills – calls ‘abusive simplification’. The problem, as Prunier aptly reminds us ‘was (and remains) rooted in history, an element the West looks upon as irrelevant and tries to evacuate through the abstract bureaucratic language of “peace” and “security” ’ (pp. 357, 336). In the absence of historical specificity and depth, major conflicts run the risk, Prunier argues, of being ‘reduced to a comic book atmosphere in which absolute horror alternates with periods of almost complete disinterest from the non-specialists’. With this reductionism, the ‘desperate African struggle for survival’ is euphemized beyond recognition, such that ‘at times the participant-observer has the feeling of being caught between a Shakespearean tragedy and a hiccupping computer’ (p. xxxvi). Implicit in this critique of a widespread historical amnesia is the tendency towards sound-bite simplification. To the outside world, to the international community, conflict becomes a question of greed or ethnicity, reflecting a human tendency to seek out coherence, to ‘abusively simplify’. The conflict is about the unquenchable thirst for diamonds, coltan and gold. Moreover, it is easier to understand and engage when problems are cast in stark contrast between ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, and ‘evil’ and ‘good’. There is a search for, and then siding with, victims. And there is confusion when they appear on both – or all – sides.

Given this predilection for simplification, the Holocaust becomes the basis for comparison. Events, in order to be processed, must be made to ‘fit within the parameters of a ‘filtered’ experience, preferably Western’ (p. 358). In the case of Rwanda, both authors argue that the reduction of the Rwandan genocide to a succinct and unquestionable equation between ‘Hutu murders and Tutsi victims’ defies a more complex reality and obscures a deeper understanding. Yes, Tutsis were overwhelmingly targeted and slaughtered in horrific numbers. But Hutus also suffered in Burundi, Rwanda and eastern Congo. This history – their stories and grievances – has little place in the dominant narrative or, as both authors maintain, in contemporary Rwanda where ethnicity and ‘difference’ are outlawed – a way of preserving the narrative and not opening history's Pandora's box. In addition, the widespread failure to see the genocide as more than just ‘Hutu – bad’ and ‘Tutsi – good’ has hindered the ability to understand the conflict in the DRC. The DRC defies this mould and yet so much of the recent conflict has its roots in the Rwandan tale.

The situation in the DRC is, as Prunier writes, so complex and so contradictory that one can see why the outside observer falls victim ‘to the syndrome of desperately wanting to find “good guys” and “bad guys” who could restore meaning and clarity to such moral gloom’ (p. 357). As a result, there is vacillation between a complete lack of interest while the conflict rages on un-noticed, and flashes of attention when glimmers of phenomena are seen through the prism of Rwanda (or other equally immediately emotive narratives) so that the outside world can understand and process what seems otherwise completely incomprehensible. At a practical policy level, abusive simplification results in misguided action – humanitarianism or increased military protection is seen as a temporary solution that too often becomes a long-term strategy and substitution for meaningful political action. The response, for example, to the October and November 2008 North Kivu crisis was to augment the UN's military presence so that they can better ‘do protection’ in an operational environment in which all sides have been implicated in atrocities to varying degrees. As such, the underlying grievances, the manifestations of political and social exclusion, which are at the root of the conflict, go and continue to go largely unaddressed.

Today, the conflict in the DRC has, once again, disappeared from the pages of newspapers. The interest of the world, captured briefly, has moved on to other things. But in the Congo the conflict continues.