- Hardcover: 576 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0195374207
- ISBN-13: 978-0195374209
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 4.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 953 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#209,006 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #44 in Books > History > Africa > Central Africa
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
it's a slog but well worth the effort,
By
This review is from: Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Hardcover)
I'll make no excuses (and neither does the author as in one passage halfway through the book) that this is a hard book to keep things straight in your mind as to who is fighting who over what and where. That is how convoluted this Central African war, the West pretty much ignored, was.The author was smart enough to put the 159 acronyms right at the front of the book so you can easily flip as you read to differentiate between all these different militia and regular army units in the war. I will give you a quick tip if you do start to read this book and get frustrated--skip straight to the last chapter (Groping for Meaning) as the author does shed the clearest light I've ever read on this entire period of history. His comparison of this war to Europe's Thirty Years' War is spot on rather than the idea it was the African equivalent of WWI or WWII. His ability to frame the war in the context of Cold War ideology still in the minds of many of these lunatic leaders in Africa (whether elected or otherwise) does help in some part explain what happened. But if you're looking for "why," like the author himself alludes to, the whys are very hard to discern and cannot really be explained from a 21st century Western mindset of "good" vs. "evil." Those interested parties in the West did try to frame it as thus but easy labels do not work when we're talking about close to four million who died from the mid-'90s to the early '00s in central Africa. Even so, this book should be required reading for every leader in the West to examine how they both blew the opportunity to help (i.e., number of foreign peacekeeping troops deployed in a region of 86 million in 1999 at the height of the war--zero; number in the three-million strong Kosovo region in the Balkans--30,000) and misread the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda and continued to support the Tutsi-led government despite its military forays into the Congo that exacerbated the situation. It is very detailed getting into what seems like every single specific attack and, if you're so inclined, you might want to keep a large map handy to figure out where the fighting is going on. You might also want to jot down who's who as that list is sadly missing in the book. Although the acronym list is fantastic, there needed to be a list of the main protagonists to refer to as, let's face facts, African names do not easily roll off the tongue and it's hard to tell what the difference is between Banyarwanda, Banyabwisha and Banyamulenge (all "tribal" groups).
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most important war story of the decade,
By
This review is from: Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Hardcover)
Prunier gives central Africa's horrible 1996-2002 war the attention it deserves. He treats each ethnic group, nation, business interest, or foreign power involved to the same scathingly critical examination. Where each party claims itself a victim seeking justice, Prunier judges all actors by their own deeds: the genocidal Hutu refugees, the avenging Tutsi army, the old U.S.-backed defenders of private enrichment (as opposed to socialism) such as Mobutu or Savimbi, the manipulating French government, or the rebel militias of unemployed kids taking pay to undercut neighboring states. Prunier's account moves at an observant pace -- through the aftermath of Rwanda's genocide, the implosion of Mobutu's Zaire, the quagmire of conflicting security interests, and the morphing of war into vampire-like private enterprise. Each effort to simply eliminate rivals generates greater blowback, till the chaos resembles central Europe in the Thirty Years War (of 1618 to 1648). Then, with the perspective of several years' hindsight, Prunier examines the slowly growing factors which brought the war to a formal close, leaving "illegitimate" non-state groups to be somehow included in a mutually-accountable future.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
At last a detailed book on the Second Congo War,
By
This review is from: Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Hardcover)
One of the most obscure wars in recent history in the Second Congo War which was Africa's World War as it involved not only the Congolese but also the armies of Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namimbia, Chad, Sudan. Also one of Africa's bloodiest wars with a million or so dead.Also some very interesting insight on the Rwandan genocide, while the Hutus are probably the cause of worst commitor and instigator of the genocide, the Tutsis aren't angels themselves. Very insightful with many details unknown in past books.
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