This looks like a very interesting book. Probably depressing at times, but also revealing. The link is to the NYT book review about it.
AFRICA’S WORLD WAR “Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe” by Gérard Prunier is one of the first books to lay bare the complex dynamic between Rwanda and Congo that has been driving this disaster. According to Gérard Prunier, everything conspired to turn Congo into a kill zone: a dying dictator; the end of the cold war; Western guilt; and a tough, suspicious, postgenocide, Israel-like Rwanda, whose national ethos, simply stated, was Never Again…..
But what is never lost in Prunier’s sweeping narrative is the sense of scale. Several years ago, a humanitarian group made the following headline-grabbing statement: More people had died in Congo than in any conflict since World War II. Many people were skeptical at first. There had been the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Iran-Iraq war, all cases where the fighting was much heavier than in Congo’s bush battles. But because the Congo war has been waged mostly against civilians, driving millions of people into malaria-infested jungles and cutting them off from desperately needed aid, the current estimate of four to five million dead seems chillingly plausible.
