Critical Review

Critical review
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Critical review
Introduction
Several authors have attempted to give witness accounts of Congo war, its causes and implications. Jason Stearns is one of the authors whose witness accounts standout. He has written acclaimed critical account based on 10 years of reporting from and living in the region: Congo. His book gives witness account of to the non-narrated stories of millions of citizens of Congo. This paper seeks to give a critical review on Jason Stearns’ “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Great Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa”.
In his critical account on the untold stories, Jason Stearns tells a vivid story of a misunderstood conflict via the experiences of people who perpetrated and engineered it. In his book, Stearns displays key architects of the disastrous war, village pastors who were the survivors of massacres, Hutu female activists who relieve the methodological and hunting extermination of refuges, the President Kabila’s child soldier assassin as direct implication of the genocide in Rwanda. (Prentzas, 2013) Jason Stearns tries to make his readers understand the reason why a mass violence such as this made sense, and why regional stability has continually eluded people.
I agree with the angle taken by Jason Stearns in giving his account of the nature and history of war in Congo. He details this war as a war within a war that was solely out of political ideologies and retaliation and self defense. He goes ahead and explains the role of economic plunder of the natural resources of Congo such as cobalt, copper, and diamonds in enriching unscrupulous companies, especially Rwanda and Uganda (Congo Democratic Republic, 2001). This threatened Congo’s only means of paying for its endless wars. Conflicting interests were exacerbated by the regional politics of the neighboring states. The deep hostilities of the ethnic groups could easily be criticized concerning their alleged role in the war. However, Stearns comes up and assert in his book that ethnicity was the strongest and last institutional and personal identity left in the nation after it was nearly eroded. I support his account. In deed ethnicity remained as the only pillar supporting the divided state of Congo. Jason Stearns concluded in his book that that there was no one particular cause of war in Congo, or a clear conceptual quintessence that can be noted as the cause of Congo war (Stearns, 2011 p. 336).
According to me, Jason Stearns wrote a good history of the Congo war up to some extent. However, looking at his work critically, I think his account of the Congo war lacks a careful assessment of fundamental sources of ethno-cultural conflict of René Lemarchand's The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa, and has no historical accounts of Gérard Prunier's Africa's World War. We can clearly see from his book that Jason is mostly concerned with the motivations, perceptions, and actions of a diverse mix of conflict actors. This can be seen in the way he tells the story of a Tutsi warlord who violated several human rights and later became a refugee in the eastern Congo forests and camps. Stearns narrates this story with a sensible mix of distance and empathy. He links them to a much wider story of a conflict that took two decades and involved several countries and left behind six million victims.
Even though majority of people may share the idea that the regime of Paul Kagame, Rwandan President was responsible for the initiation of the war in the early 1994, many witnesses refute this claim (Baldo & Bouckaert, (2002). The observers disagree about the nature of blame that Rwanda should bear for humanity crimes that formed the basis of the continuous northern Congo conflict. Jason Stearns comes out in his book as one of the people who believe that the conflict and war against Congolese civilians was an unswerving policy of the regime of Rwandan and the agents representing the interest of the country. I disagree with this base of argument given the struggles shown by Kagame for African revolution.
According to Stearns (2011), history is significant just as the testimonies of key individual witnesses to the Congo war and events. Jason Stearns takes citizens of Congo seriously in giving accounts of the meltdown that came after the conflict spilled over between the Hutu extremists’ genocidal regime and the Rwandan Patriotic Front from Rwanda to Zaire. On his account, Stearns asserts that the conflict between these two regimes triggered two wars that plunged the GDP of Congo below what it had during its independence, and prevailed in nine nations (Bates, 2008). However, I think Jason Stearns gives a thrilling account of Congo war that will be the most important quality of ...