The War That Doesn't Say Its Name

The Unending Conflict in the Congo

Jason K. Stearns

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780691224510, 9780691194080
• eBook ISBN: 9780691224527
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why violence in the Congo has continued despite decades of international intervention

Well into its third decade, the military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been dubbed a "forever war"—a perpetual cycle of war, civil unrest, and local feuds over power and identity. Millions have died in one of the worst humanitarian calamities of our time. The War That Doesn't Say Its Name investigates the most recent phase of this conflict, asking why the peace deal of 2003—accompanied by the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world and tens of billions in international aid—has failed to stop the violence. Jason Stearns argues that the fighting has become an end in itself, carried forward in substantial part through the apathy and complicity of local and international actors.

Stearns shows that regardless of the suffering, there has emerged a narrow military bourgeoisie of commanders and politicians for whom the conflict is a source of survival, dignity, and profit. Foreign donors provide food and urgent health care for millions, preventing the Congolese state from collapsing, but this involvement has not yielded transformational change. Stearns gives a detailed historical account of this period, focusing on the main players—Congolese and Rwandan states and the main armed groups. He extrapolates from these dynamics to other conflicts across Africa and presents a theory of conflict that highlights the interests of the belligerents and the social structures from which they arise.

Exploring how violence in the Congo has become preoccupied with its own reproduction, The War That Doesn't Say Its Name sheds light on why certain military feuds persist without resolution.

1

Introduction

Die ich rief, die Geister, / Werd’ ich nun nicht los

(The spirits I called / I cannot drive away)

—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

IN EARLY 2008, I set up my research base at the VIP hotel in downtown Goma, a trade hub in the eastern Congo nestled between the Nyiragongo Volcano and the shores of Lake Kivu. A peace conference was being held close by, and many of its attendees were staying at the hotel, where they also dined. After a year and a half of fighting, the Congolese government had decided to sit down with several dozen armed groups to talk peace.

Expectations ran high. While the main Congo wars, which had lasted from 1996 to 2003, had ended in a comprehensive peace deal, the fighting had escalated to the north of where we sat, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. This time, the peace brokers wanted to go further than just elite pacts and deal with the root causes of the conflict. “For the first time, the sons and daughters of North and South Kivu have come together to speak about peace, security, and development,” announced the minister of the interior in his speech. Envoys from the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations rubbed shoulders with armed group commanders, NGO workers, and civil society leaders.

The peace conference was, in many aspects, a positive and cathartic experience. It situated conflict as the historical product of local tensions over land and identity; community leaders were given space and time to express their anger and grief over decades of war, voicing emotions they had never had a chance to put into words in front of their rivals. I met a preacher and peace activist from the Banyamulenge community of South Kivu province who carried in his briefcase a fifty-page-long list—handwritten, on yellowing paper—of all the people from his community who had been killed in the previous fifteen years. “This is why our youths are fighting,” he said. Jeannot Muhima, a combatant from just outside of Goma, described to me eloquently, calmly, how his sister had been raped and his younger brother killed by an armed group. He turned his head to show a shiny scar parting his hair on the back of his head. “I barely escaped,” he said. “That is why I fight. But it is also why, more than anything, I want peace.”¹

And yet, in the end, despite the best intentions of many of the participants, the Goma Peace Conference became a source of profiteering and accomplished little. Initially, six hundred people were sup...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Historical Background
• 3. Explaining the Congolese Conflict
• 4. The Role of the Congolese and Rwandan States
• 5. The Theory: Involution, Fragmentation, and a Military Bourgeoisie
• 6. The CNDP and the M23
• 7. The Raia Mutomboki
• 8. Ituri and the UPC
• 9. Peacemaking and the Congo
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index