Despite the fact that the rebellion was essentially engineered by outsiders (while the invasion involved an amalgam of Ugandan, Eritrean, Tanzanian, Rwandan and Congolese assets, the Rwandans largely called the shots), many Congolese greeted the rebels as liberators from the corrupt and aging Mobutu regime (indeed, Congolese usually refer to the 1996 war as “the War of Liberation”) (94).  At the same time, Stearns notes, the rebels often became embroiled in local feuds over identity and land, including anti-Tutsi demagoguery, leading to cyclical massacres and counter-massacres of civilians.

Stearns bravely explores the political hot-potato of a hypothesis that the massacres conducted by Rwandan troops against Hutus constituted a systematic genocide, a kind of counter-genocide to the events of 1994.  While numbers are extremely difficult to pin down, he cites a report that says at least 60,000 refugees were killed, with a further 180,000 missing.  A second report by a UN team found that Rwandan and AFDL troops massacred refugees, often in brutal ways using hatchets, stones and knives, and that the majority of victims were women, children, the elderly and sick (137).  The killings were most likely systematic because “the Rwandan army…was known for its strict discipline and tight command and control.  It is very unlikely that soldiers would have been able to carry out such large-scale executions… without an order from commanders” (138).  Stearns deserves praise for tackling this controversial issue, in a context where pushback against the narrative of Rwanda’s Tutsis as solely the passive victims of genocide is often labelled an attempt to re-write history

The Rwandan army might be described as the precipitating cause of the first war, but the decay of the Mobutu-led state was also an important factor.  By the time of the 1996 invasion, Zaire was essentially a failed state, with an army propped up by foreign allies and mercenaries, a weakness rooted in the historical Belgian colonial state (113).  The corruption and decay of the Zairian army and economy was also based upon Mobutu’s paranoid fear of dissent- as he sidelined or eliminated competent officers who were deemed a threat to his own power, Mobutu corroded the institutions of his own state , ironically allowing the invading troops to complete an astonishing thousand mile trek through the jungle almost unchallenged.  In May 1997, President Laurent Kabila entered the capital Kinshasa, the leader of the newly named Congo.

The Second War

 Despite (or perhaps because of) the effort and carnage that it took to place Kabila in power, he was destined to reside over a peaceful Congo for just fifteen months, until August 1998.  Stearns’ expertly-painted portrait of the eccentric leader helps illustrate why.  The reader encounters a Kabila who maintained a strict schedule of meetings with advisers throughout the day, but allowed himself a few hours each evening to read books on philosophy and history, including biographies of de Gaulle, Mao and Napoleon (166).  Stearns points out with wry understatement that, “Kabila’s idiosyncratic style extended to his personalized management of state funds,” as he was “known to keep large stashes of money at his residence, where he would dole out stacks of bills to visitors,” including shocked visiting heads of state (175). Within just a few months of reaching power, Kabila’s relationship with Rwanda began to sour, driven both by Kabila’s acute paranoia and the Rwandan government’s obsession with control (191).  Rwanda’s security situation at home had deteriorated, as the offensive actions in Congo left a security vacuum.  In the months following the invasion, tens of thousands of enemy soldiers re-entered northwestern Rwanda, fuelling concern that Kabila  was unable to control the territory of his country (182).  Meanwhile, by 1998, concerned that the Rwandans and Congolese Tutsi would attempt to remove him from power, Kabila had begun recruiting ex-FAR troops to his army, the very troops that his AFDL rebellion had fought against.  The Rwandans were further antagonized by arrests and attacks against Tutsi civilians by Congolese soldiers, prompted by anti-Tutsi sentiments (184).

Desperate to contain the situation and replace Kabila with a more amenable leader, Rwanda invaded in 1998, and within hours had taken control of most of eastern Congo, with the help of defected Congolese soldiers, lead by the former commander of the Congolese Army.  However, regional battle lines were again quickly drawn, but this time they did not line up with the 1996 war, when the region sided overwhelmingly with Rwanda.  Instead, the region split down with the middle, as Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi squared off on one side with Angola, Namibia, Chad and Zimbabwe on the other (192).  This re-alignment can be explained by the fact that states were also pursuing new motivations: Zimbabwe, for example, wanted repayment for hundreds of millions of dollars loaned to Kabila during the first war, while Angola looked to tamp down its own ongoing civil war with the UNITA rebels (192).  This new assessment of national interest would ensure that the second phase of the war was even more gruelling than the first.

Despite the Rwandan army’s rapid progress into the Congo, the tide began to turn once other international actors became directly involved.  A meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) security committee, chaired by Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe, hurriedly approved a military intervention to support Kabila against “foreign aggression,” followed up by an invasion of Zimbabwean and Angolan troops over the border (197).

To maintain the façade that a homegrown Congolese rebellion was leading their military efforts, Rwanda assembled a political front to the rebellion, a motley bunch of leaders that encompassed everyone from former Mobutuist ministers to former AFDL rebels, under the banner of the RCD (Congolese Rally for Democracy).  Predictably, while the RCD and Rwandan army made military gains, the RCD was a political disaster, continually at odds with itself and unable to convince the Congolese population that it was anything but a Rwandan proxy.  Its struggle for legitimacy was certainly not helped by the RCD’s tendency to target civilians in counter-attacks, conducting several massacres in which over 1,000 civilians were killed (211).

The second war continued to splinter into more complex fighting factions when the Ugandan and Rwandan armies, until then staunch allies, began to fight one another in the city of Kisangani in 1999, launching a particularly brutal urban battle.  Amongst its many causes, the split was propelled by differences over the diamond trade, which helped finance both armies.

The trade and mismanagement of natural resource assets, including diamonds and rare earth minerals, has become a kind of trademark of the second war in the Congo, and Stearns devotes an entire chapter to it (“Paying for the War”) which is well worth reading in full to capture the nuances of how trade was used to finance the fighting.  Interestingly, in a departure from  many accounts, Stearns argues that “the notion that the war was fuelled by international mining capital eager to get its hands on the Congo’s wealth does not hold water; the war slowed down privatization of the sector by a decade, as insecurity and administrative chaos prevented large corporations from investing” (289-290).   The often devastating trade in Congo’s mineral wealth was more of a byproduct, rather than a central cause, of the second war, although later on it did become an important motivating factor for many factions to continue fighting.

One important shortfall of  Stearns’ account of The Second War is the scant coverage of the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war.  By my count, he devotes precisely one paragraph to the issue, noting a UN report that found more than 200,000 women have been raped in eastern Congo since 1998, and up to 39% of women have experienced some form of sexual violence (263).  Considering the pervasive nature of such violence in this conflict, the lack of an attempt to trace its roots is deeply disappointing.

—

The book concludes with Joseph Kabila’s rise to power after his father, Laurent Kabila’s, assassination.  Much more of a pragmatist than his warrior father, Joseph brokered peace talks with his enemies within the country as well as outside army factions, reaching a peace deal in Sun City in South Africa in February 2002.  Stearns denotes the final chapter of the story of this war as “Neither War Nor Peace,” because although fighting has officially concluded, the legacies of this war, including a deeply corrupt, failed state and a poverty-stricken populace persist.

Stearns reflects in the conclusion that many attempts to write about the Congo have been dominated by shocking descriptions of the brutal atrocities that occurred during the conflict rather than attempting to trace the causes of such atrocities and the conflict itself.  He says that “they reinforce the impression that the Congo is filled with wanton savages, crazed by power and greed.  This view, focusing on the utter horror of the violence, distracts from the politics that gave rise to the conflict and the reasons behind the bloodshed.  If all we see is black men raping and killing in the most outlandish ways imaginable, we might find it hard to believe that there is any logic to this conflict” (328).  Stearns’ book is successful in shifting the paradigm to a new, and more productive, area of focus.

Perhaps the most perceptive aspect of Stearns’ book is not his analysis, but his acknowledgement that the war (or wars) in the Congo belies straight-forward analysis: “like layers of an onion, the Congo war contains wars within wars.  There was not one Congo war, or even two, but at least forty or fifty different, interlocking wars.”  Stearns’ contribution to unravelling these interlocking wars is a fascinating and important read for any international relations scholar interested in the history-or the future-of the war in the Congo.

Alex Stark is an Assistant Editor of e-IR.