While we can all agree that war is a hellish and barbaric business that has few peers as measured by sheer destructive power, there is, at least, an opportunity for some good to come of it. The conclusion of World War II begot the Martial Plan which quite literally paved the roads for a united Europe. Stretching farther back into history, the colonial Americans earning their independence from the British in their revolutionary war laid the philosophical and political foundation for a nation that would become the most dominant force here-to-for witnessed by human civilization. However, as often as these bloody and costly conflicts might lead to a brighter tomorrow, they can just as easily leave behind festering wounds in the bodies and the minds of the belligerents who prosecute them, wounds that must be answered and then answered in turn in what swiftly becomes a loop of mutual annihilation. Though it is perhaps too early to decide which camp the Great War of Africa belongs to, the early returns, based on the observations of Mr. Stearns, favor the devastation of the latter over the hope of the former.
For the 30 years following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected president of an independent Congo, this enormous and geographically diverse country in Africa was ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, a murderous and self-indulgent tyrant who systematically plundered his nations resources, oversaw the decay of the national infrastructure, violently suppressed any form of opposition by dividing and conquering his enemies, and sold out what was left to foreign interests that looked the other way while he languished at the head of his own private fiefdom. It will come as no surprise then to learn that when the Mobutu government did nothing to prevent his country from sheltering the instigators and the implementors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, his house of cards finally collapsed when the vengeful Rwandans poured into his country and backed his enemy, Laurent Kabila, all the way to Kinshasa, the Congolese capital, where he seized power in the name of a new Congo.
Any hope, however, that the Kabila government might open the doors to the cleansing winds of democracy for the Congo was short-lived. Having been profoundly and irreversibly shaped by his decades in exile, Kabila demonstrated a shocking inability to govern and an unwillingness to allow anyone else to do it for him. This destructive combination crippled the new Congo and, in 2001, Kabila was assassinated, to be replaced by his only marginally more successful son. Ultimately, the crisis which grew out of the attempt to transform the Congo into a democratic state drew in eight African nations and authored countless rebel groups which ground out a five-year conflict from 1998 to 2003 that claimed the lives of upwards of seven million souls, many of whom were extinguished by disease and starvation, the handmaidens of war. This is one reporter's reconstruction of those terrifying years and the uneasy peace which has followed them to the present day.
Mr. Stearns, a Yale-educated writer and reporter, has, here, chillingly captured the costliest conflict since World War II. Marked by the chaos of shifting alliances and complicated rivalries, the author condenses a war that almost defies narrative into a dense but coherent series of events so tragic that they cause Mr. Stearns himself to wonder if the Congo is simply cursed, a country blessed with natural resources that must, nonetheless endure the corrosive caress of greed and rapaciousness. Yes, the work, at times, requires one to pause and consult Wikipedia as a means of digesting so many bloody events, but the portrait the author paints, of numerous, barely democratic governments clashing over both spilled blood and the riches of the Congo, is exquisite. He has clearly depicted the multitude of selfish ends that drove the instigators of this conflict and their failings which prevent it from being brought to anything like a fair and democratic conclusion.
Rarely has the Paradox of Plenty been more devastatingly exemplified. At times overwhelming, but otherwise a powerful reconstruction of what must surely be one of the most chaotic and despotic wars of recent memory. (4/5 Stars)
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