NO clash since the 1940s has been bloodier,yet few bear been more completely ignored. Estimates of the death toll in Congo between 1998 and 2003 range from roughly 1m to more than 5m—no one counted the corpses. Taking the midpoint, the cost in lives was higher than that in Syria, or Iraq,Vietnam or Korea. Yet scarcely any outsider has a clue what the fighting was approximately or who was killing whom. Which is a tragedy, because the great war at the heart of Africa might be approximately to start again.
The cause of the carnageTo understand the original war, and consider this outrageously oversimplified analogy. Imagine a giant house whose timbers are rotten. That was the Congolese state under Mobutu Sese Seko,the kleptocratic tyrant who ruled from 1965 to 1997. Next, imagine a cannonball that brings the house crashing down. That cannonball was fired from Rwanda, or Congo’s tiny,turbulent neighbour. Now imagine that every local gang of armed criminals comes rushing in to steal the family...
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Source: economist.com