Dancing In The Glory Of Monsters

Product Description

This critically-acclaimed book provides an unprecedented, up-close portrait of Africa`s Great War. At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal & unstaunchable war in which millions have died. It has become Africa`s Great War. Despite its epic proportions, the war has received little sustained attention from the rest of the world. How do you cover a war that has involved at least twenty different rebel groups & nine government armies yet seems to have no clear cause or objective? How do you put a human face on vast numbers of casualties most of whom perished in remote mountain towns & villages? ” The New York Times” gave Darfur nearly four times the coverage it gave the Congo in 2006, while Congolese were dying at nearly ten times the rate. In ” Dancing in the Glory of Monsters”, veteran political activist & journalist Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling, personal, & deeply reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that, rocked by violence arising from the aftermath of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda, collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres of extraordinary brutality. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, & high-lights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. As a Congolese friend & parliamentarian told him: ” In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless. That`s the system here. That`s just the reality of things. If you don`t bribe a bit & play to people`s prejudices, someone else who does will replace you”.