According to Gérard Prunier, everything conspired to turn Congo into a kill zone: a dying dictator; the end of the cold war; Western guilt; and a tough, suspicious, postgenocide, Israel-like Rwanda, whose national ethos, simply stated, was Never Again.
The parallel goes further:
On the Rwandan side, immigration officers at a freshly painted cubicle-like border post peck away at computers, the smartly dressed worker bees of a regime that has made enormous strides fighting poverty, corruption and AIDS. The streets are safe. The street lights even work. It all adds up to a small miracle, especially remarkable because of Rwanda’s recent genocide, its overpopulation and its notable lack of resources. The drive to the border takes you past one denuded hillside after another, unmistakable proof that this packed little country is definitely not a land of plenty.
And on Rwanda's current aggressiveness:
His sharpest barbs are reserved for Rwanda’s current leaders, who in his pages lie, betray, plunder and kill, massacring tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, in vicious revenge attacks. He even asserts that Rwandan death squads were reputed to carry special little cobbler’s hammers in their backpacks to “silently and efficiently smash skulls.”
I have a theory about this.
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