ABSTRACT
There is no parallel anywhere in the continent for the scale of violence recently experienced by the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Sometimes referred to the continent’s ‘inter-lacustrine’ zone, comprising Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and eastern Congo, each has witnessed horrendous brutality, but nowhere has the bloodshed been more appalling than in the last three. The death toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in a decade of war (1998–2008) has been estimated by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) at roughly 5.4 million, although subsequent estimates by the Canada-based Human Security Report Project have downsized this figure by half. Still, when one adds the killings in Rwanda and Burundi since 1994, numbering, respectively, approximately one million and a half a million, the mind reels before the magnitude of the human losses.
