From Genocide to Continental War

"In September 1996, in the aftermath of the Rwandese Genocide, a multinational African force led by Rwanda invaded what was then Zaire, with the aim of crushing the remnants of the genocidaire regime and of overthrowing that long time friend of the West, the dictator Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko wa Za Banga. They succeeded beyond their highest expectations. But that success disturbed what was then Africa's 'sick giant', an enormous amorphous space where over three hundred tribes coexisted in a series of uneasy compromises and where the last of the Cold Warriors, a man hated by a whole continent, precariously kept in check within an increasingly disarticulated geopolitical space a country his avarice had driven to a state of rotting despair." "The predictable result was the bloodiest conflict since the Second World War, involving fourteen African countries and causing the deaths of almost four million people (five times as many as in the Rwandese genocide which had triggered the --