Stearns’ book ambitiously sets out to try to explain the forces –rational and not so rational- that have been driving the violent implosion of Africa’s second largest country and resulted in the deaths of millions of Congolese, mostly due to disease and hunger. The story of Makabola, told to me last year by one of its perpetrators in Butare (Rwanda), is not in Jason Stearns’ Dancing In the Glory of Monsters: the Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, but it might well have been. Nobody has ever been punished for the tragedy that took place in 1998. The cracked skulls of some of Makabola’s victims can still be found today in a local hospital nearby. The massacre was Shetani’s act of revenge for the RCD’s inability to quash the guerrilla resistance of local Mai Mai self-defence groups and Burundese rebels who were active in South Kivu.
Several children and women were burned alive and corpses were mutilated in gruesome ways. Thus began a killing spree with machetes, guns and grenades that left at least 800 Congolese citizens dead over the next two days. Between 5 and 6am, under the leadership of the notorious commander Shetani (“˜Satan’ in Swahili), they cordoned off the village. On the morning of December 30 th 1998, the village of Makabola, 15km south of the Congolese-Burundese bordertown of Uvira, was surrounded by troops of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), a Rwandan backed rebel group.
0 kommentar(er)
