Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

Despite Presidents Paul Kagama of Rwanda, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s Joseph Kabila various peace meetings, including the recent one in the Lusaka, Zambia during the Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit, how should Africans and the world community bring peace to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)? This book reveals that despite the daunting, and the fearful nature of the task, there is the need for attempts to restore peace and security, and free Africa’s second largest country from decades of suffering. Reflections on the crisis in the Democratic of Congo, written by 11 African scholars, simultaneously reflects on obstacles on the path to peace in this long troubled country and appeal for peace and the hope for the restoration of the DRC.

The book is divided into three sections with sub-headings such as "Globalization and the Great Lakes Region," "Rwanda-Uganda Intervention in the Congo," "The Congo Crisis: A Reply of the Middle East?" and "Getting Lost in the Jungle of the DRC." In the first section, there is the "Background to the Conflict," "The Conflict," and "Hope for the Resolution of the Conflict." For the background to the conflict, George Nzongola-Ntalaja, a professor at USA’s Howard University, reveals that when the Mobutu regime was restored and the installation of the Kengo government in July 1994 came at the same time as the genocide in Rwanda and at the same time as France was intervening in Rwanda to erase "the traces of its own role as an accessory" to the genocide.

After supporting the Habyarimana regime and trained its militias and military machine, including the extremist Hutu Interahamwe, Paris was safe to have in Kinshasa a regime that would be manipulable enough to permit the Rwandan genocidal machine to cross into the DRC with all their weapons. Nzongola-Ntalaja offers that, "The fact that these killers were now free to use Zairean territory to launch raids into Rwanda, and to slaughter Tutsi citizens and residents of Zaire, is the immediate cause of the current fighting in eastern Zaire…The root of this violent conflict lie deep in the history of the Great Lakes region as well as in the political alignment of the Mobutu regime nationally, regionally and internationally."

Famous Africanist, Mahmood Mandani, director of the Centre for African Studies at South Africa’s University of Cape Town, argues that the overthrow of Mobutu followed a pattern in the Great Lakes Region. Uganda’s President Yuweri Museveni, whose army and that of the Rwandans helped topple Mobutu, had come to power by largely foreign army—the Tanzanians in 1979 intervened to remove President Idi Amin, and this created a domino effect in the region, seeing the installation of Laurent Kabila as president of Zaire. Thereafter, the center of power in Kinshasa was "defined by a twin reality." One was Kabila’s inability to reform the political forces and the other was Congolese seeing the Rwandans "as an army of occupation." No doubt Kabila rode on the popularity of the cry for the Rwandans to go home. But this reaped mixed results: for civilian support and armed rebellion. And President Laurent Kabila did not survive the result, as Mandani prophesied before Kabila’s assassination. Mandani doubts how the "Rwanda-Uganda intervention can come out at the winning end" in the DRC conflagration.

How does the DRC come out of its conflagration? Horace Campbell, a professor in the Institute of African American Studies of United States’ Syracuse University, notes that the solution to the DRC crisis rests on political, military and diplomatic pillars. The political solution lies in rooting out Mobutism, which is entrenched in the country. The diplomatic aspect is seen through Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, who Campbell says has stated that, "There is no military solution to the problem of dictatorship."

Before President Joseph Kabila’s recent diplomatic overtures, his father, Laurent, seeing opposition the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratic (RCD) as the puppets of Uganda and Rwanda, ruled out any diplomatic solution to the DRC crisis. Neither is the United Nations or Washington or European Union seen as solution to the DRC crisis since they appear either not to have understood or taken simplistic view of the DRC crisis. Campbell writes that, "In the USA, the Pan African forces are divided because they see the hand of the USA and the Pentagon in the war. Their instincts tell them, from years of US military activities in Africa, that there is no place where the Pentagon is simply an observer. This reality has brought charges that the RCD is simply an instrument of imperialism. This matches the political position of the representatives of the Kabila [Laurent] government."

For an end to the DRC crisis, Wamba dia Wamba, president of the RCD, reflects that all forces must be organized to strengthen the Congolais consciousness in order to cement cultural differences as a source of strength "rather than the basis for discriminatory practices and thus ethnic conflict."