Dancing with monsters in the Congo

What makes a great story in both fiction and journalism? (Aside from melodrama and disaster, natural and human.) One thing we in the storytelling business look for is a certain moral clarity.

Good versus evil, bad versus good, us or them - pick your binaries, philosophical and practical, theyre all useful.

We especially like top dog and underdog categories (to borrow some breezy terms from Gestalt therapy). Especially useful is victim and perpetrator (that fills many newscasts). Or, if you like the Bible as a font of wisdom, how about David and Goliath, the seemingly weak boy with only a sling shot versus the giant Goliath, king of the mount.

Crowds throwing rocks at police and a heavily armed occupation force are an updated version of the David-and-Goliath myth, as presented on the TV screen.

Yes, sometimes David and Goliath can change over the years. The plucky state of Israel, once the underdog David, for all media purposes has been turned into Goliath against the Palestinians - even if a deeper analysis is, as they say, more complicated.

What we, as journalists, dont particularly like is a big mess we cant figure out.

What we, the storytellers, dont particularly like is a big mess we cant figure out. Put a messy story like that in some inhospitable, hard-to-reach place with horrible hotels and poor communications and youve got a recipe for chronic avoidance.

In other words, the Congo.

There, a vast war has raged since the mid 1990s. An estimated five million people have died. And thousands of women have been brutally raped as the spoils of war and pillage.

These rapes have received media attention, as they should (CBC has provided its fair share). It certainly helps that these dreadful, malicious acts fit into the category of victim and perpetrator. Whats not to understand? A woman is raped by some rampaging soldier, as a crime or as a deliberate weapon of war, to terrorize and subjugate a population (something that also happened in the former Yugoslavia).

But the rest of the war? The millions of men, women and children? Whats going on with them? Thats the focus of Jason Stearns book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa.

Stearns has worked for the UN in the Congo for a decade and is completing a doctorate in history at Yale. His book is a compelling, at times overwhelming, even confusing account of a largely unknown war (or more properly, a series of wars within wars).

I say confusing not because the book isnt well written. It is very graphic and often brilliant. But there are so many layers and players - up to 10 armies battling against each other, adding to a host of tribal rivalries. While reading it, I would find myself turning the pages back to figure out who was doing what to whom.

And as far as figuring out who the good guys and bad guys are - our favourite blame game - well, forget it.

The immediate trigger for the war was the genocide in Rwanda, where Hutus slaughtered Tutsis, along with so-called "moderate" Hutus; 800,000 people were murdered in 100 days in 1994. As Stearns points out, paradoxically, it was the Hutus who fled the violence when the Rwandan police and army fell apart under assault by Tutsi rebels. A million Hutus streamed across the border into the Congo.

As a result, the Congo became a battleground of various competing groups too numerous to cite in a short column - its a daunting enough task in a book.

However, Stearns does point to an overarching theme. Democratic Republic of the Congo was never really a nation state. In the 19th century, it was the private fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium, and it was exploited by its subsequent colonial government. As a weak, independent state in the early 90s, it could not cope with the onslaught of armies, the warlords, the competing claims, the greed, the fear, the sheer chaos. Stearns compares the situation in the Congo to the destruction and misery that ravaged Europe during the Thirty Years War in the 17th century.

This is a conflict straight out of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes playbook a brutal war of all against all. And Stearns book asks us, How would you inhabit such a universe? How would you keep your "moral compass?"

The Congo has become a battleground of various competing groups too numerous to cite in a short column - its a daunting enough task in a book.

In this way, Stearns does something quite telling - and unnerving. He doesnt focus on the victims but the perpetrators.

Through Stearns, we meet Papy Kamanzi, a 30-year-old mid-level army commander from the minority Tutsi community who fought for four different armed groups in Rwanda and the Congo. Over two years and a dozen interviews, Stearns got to know Papy, who took him home to meet his wife and two young children. They even got to be friends.

In one of Stearns interviews with Papy, his African friend broke down and confessed he had worked for a death squad in 1997 in the eastern Congo border town of Goma after the genocide. The unit was "tasked" with rounding up Hutu "dissidents" frankly, pretty much any Hutu refugee. Papy and his soldiers would kill up to 100 people a day including old women and young children "usually using a rope to crush their windpipes and strangle them."

"Why did he do it?" Stearns asks. And Papy replies, "I had to. If I hadnt, it would have been suspicious."

Killing becomes so easy, the Papys of the Congo and Rwanda feel they have to participate, or else. Papy tells Stearns his miserable story, recounts the deaths in his own family, his repeated humiliations, then asks the young UN worker to understand him. "Then you can judge me."

As another soldier told Stearns, "In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless." Then the soldier winks at Stearns and adds, "Even you, if you were thrown into this system, you would do the same. Or sink."

Is this the facile, slippery reasoning of an affable "monster?" No doubt. Thats why we have war crimes trials. But furthermore, thats why we should feel lucky we were not born in some place where mass murder was a routine practice (though, in fact, some of us may have been born in such places).

Stearns wants to explain the Congo and the killings, as best he can thats his mandate. But he knows its hard. Easy explanations are readily at hand: the sorry, brutal role of Belgian imperialism, the looting of a country, as well as Western mining companies. But in Stearns account, tribal fighting and individual greed seem paramount. Yes, theres enough blame to go around, white and black.

But the Congo is also a story in which the victims become perpetrators and vice versa. In a way, thats the most resonant theme, besides the sheer brutality.

The war in the Congo is what Stearns calls a "conceptual mess," where Davids turn into Goliaths and back again. And did I mention its hard to reach? Thats why the tragic story of the Congo will rarely appear on our TV screens and in our media.