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  • The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2006
  • Guy Martin
Reyntjens, Filip. 2009. The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2006. New York: Cambridge University Press. 327 pp. $90.00 (cloth).

For those seeking to understand the causes, political dynamics, and socioeconomic consequences of the “genocide by attrition” (p. 41) that has plagued the Great Lakes region of Africa—particularly the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, and Burundi—which has so far claimed more than 6 million lives, 2009 was a good year, which provided an abundance of riches. After remarkable books by two of the best experts on the region—René Lemarchand’s The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa and Gérard Prunier’s Africa’s World War, both reviewed by the present author in Africa Today 56.2 (Winter 2009): 92–97 and after Thomas Turner’s perceptive Congo Wars (Zed Books, 2007), Filip Reyntjens gives us, in The Great African War, the benefit of his own insights on this regional conundrum. Like Lemarchand, whose assistance he gratefully acknowledges (p. ix), and Prunier, he boasts impeccable credentials. A professor of law and politics at the University of Antwerp, he brings to the subject more than thirty years of research and publishing on the region—including the editorship of L’Afrique des grands lacs, a major yearbook, as well as acting as an international consultant for, and expert witness before, several U.N. agencies.

In The Great African War, Reyntjens chronicles a decade of instability, violence, war, and extreme human suffering in the Great Lakes region of Africa from 1996, when the war started, to 2006, when elections formally ended the political transition in the DRC. Lamenting the dearth of studies that attempt a global overview (p. 1), he seeks to provide a synthetic overview and in-depth analysis of concurrent developments in the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda in regional and international contexts, with particular focus on the “small” Great Lakes region (Rwanda, Burundi, and North and South Kivu, in eastern DRC). By adopting a “macro-perspective” (p. 4) and a “non-chronological approach,” he attempts to show the dynamics of the local interrelationships: “this allows the discussion of developments in different places and at different levels and times not as being peripheral to the war(s), but as a consistent and concurrent whole” (p. 7). In brief, he offers a toolkit for understanding the past and future of the region.

Reyntjens begins with an intriguing question: how is it that such a “Lilliputian state” as Rwanda—only 10,169 square miles, slightly smaller than Maryland, with a population of about 10 million—has attained “the status of regional superpower,” developed “a formidable intelligence, security and military apparatus, which became the most effective in the region” (p. 280), has become “an army [70,000-strong] with a state, rather than a state with [End Page 103] an army,” is considered the “master player” of the region (p. 141), and has “emerged as a major factor of regional instability” (p. 4)? Part of the explanation lies in what he calls the “genocide credit” or “genocide dividend,” namely “the tolerance inspired by international feelings of guilt after the genocide” (p. 4)—a reference to the murders of about one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus from April to June 1994 in Rwanda, which elicited no immediate international reaction or intervention. Another factor explaining the regional wars is that, following the exodus of about 2 million Rwandan Hutu refugees in eastern Congo (Kivu) as a result of that genocide, the “unfinished Rwandan civil war [was] exported in 1996, and again in 1998, to the DRC” (p. 6). In fact, the victorious, Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) proved “incapable of managing its victory” (p. 3) and, as Lemarchand also remarked, deliberately chose the politics of ethnic exclusion and “enforced ethnic amnesia” (Lemarchand 2009: 30–31, 106), which became the greatest obstacle to reconciliation in Rwanda. Other recurrent themes of The Great African War are the politics of identity in Rwanda, Burundi, and the eastern DRC; the prominence of subregional actors, notably Angola, Uganda, and South Africa; and constantly shifting alliances and realignments among...

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