For the Western world as a whole, East Congo has also attracted attention for a very different crime: Sexual violence as a weapon of war. While the phenomenon is as old as war itself, the scale of violence and the exposure it has gathered has shocked us all.
But for the average observer, both the murder trial and the rape victims are very difficult to make sense of in relation to their underlying causes and their place in the history of this part of the world. While most of us had looked to the Great Lakes region in horror during the Rwandan genocide and the resulting refugee crisis in the mid-1990s, the region returned to its status as a blank spot on the map for a good decade, until sexual warfare really caught CNN headlines and the said Norwegians suddenly found themselves in a jail in Kisangani.
The point, of course, is that everybody with opinions about DR Congo should read Prunier’s book. Needless to say, this won’t happen. In part, the author himself is to blame for producing a wordy book with too many pages. But for a writer like Prunier, who has followed every political development in East and Central Africa for most of his life, truth is in the details and he has made every effort to put 15 years of this region’s history into words and numbers. He even describes alternative versions of events in details, only to discredit the account and give his own.
One of the things which immediately strike you as a reader is Prunier’s writing style. He traces intrigues, rumours and political manoeuvres like a war journalist. By doing so, he writes a book about Africa’s World Wars which in many ways resembles the books on the First and Second World War that you end up buying your grandfather for Christmas. Personal agendas and military tactics are vividly drawn up, and the movements and positions of troops are depicted in great detail. There is a certain element of suspense in the writing. There is also an element of ironical distance, nowhere better exemplified than in his caricatured summary of the year 2005: “Three million Africans have died. This is unfortunate.”
His account stretches from the aftermath of the Tutsi takeover and the Hutu exodus in the summer of 1994 until Laurent Nkunda’s ascent in the Kivu regions in the late 2000s. The book provides a historical verdict which benefits from hindsight, and Prunier confesses that his own interpretation of events he observed have been revised several times since.
The perhaps most interesting part of the book relates to the atrocities against Hutu refugees in Zaire. Prunier shows how the silencing of the Robert Gersony’s UNHCR report of 1994, which documented mass killings by the RPF in Rwanda, and the similar manner in which Roberto Garreton’s 1998 UN commission in East Congo was effectively blocked by state leaders. Garreton’s commission also sought to investigate killings of Hutu refugees by AFDL and RPF-aligned forces.
This collective denial on part of the international community has only been possible due to a mixture of guilt feelings and a lack of political will. Important truths about the events in the wake of the 1994 genocide would have remained unvoiced if it was not for people like Gerard Prunier.
“From genocide to continental war” has contributed to an openness which has made possible the recent UN report “DRC: Mapping human rights violations 1993-2003”, where actions by Rwandese-backed forces against their fellow countrymen have been labelled as war crimes and possible genocide.