Bøger af Gerard Prunier

A historically grounded account, from de Gaulle onwards, of how France's neocolonial influence crumbled in Africa, with devastating and unforeseen consequences.

The Rwandan genocide sparked a horrific bloodbath that swept across sub-Saharan Africa, ultimately leading to the deaths of some four million people. In this extraordinary history of the recent wars in Central Africa, Gérard Prunier offers a gripping account of how one grisly episode laid the groundwork for a sweeping and disastrous upheaval. Prunier vividly describes the grisly aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when some two million refugees--a third of Rwanda's population--fled to exile in Zaire in 1996. The new Rwandan regime then crossed into Zaire and attacked the refugees, slaughtering upwards of 400,000 people. The Rwandan forces then turned on Zaire's despotic President Mobutu and, with the help of a number of allied African countries, overthrew him. But as Prunier shows, the collapse of the Mobutu regime and the ascension of the corrupt and erratic Laurent-Désiré Kabila created a power vacuum that drew Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other African nations into an extended and chaotic war. The heart of the book documents how the whole core of the African continent became engulfed in an intractible and bloody conflict after 1998, a devastating war that only wound down following the assassination of Kabila in 2001. Prunier not only captures all this in his riveting narrative, but he also indicts the international community for its utter lack of interest in what was then the largest conflict in the world. Africa's World War is a gripping eyewitness account of the most bloody upheaval of recent times, a book of passionate and unblinking intensity that is our best record to date of one of the great tragedies of the post-Cold War era.

Praise for the 2005 Edition: "A passionate and highly readable account of the current tragedy that combines intimate knowledge of the region's history, politics, and sociology with a telling cynicism about the polite but ineffectual diplomatic...

Conveys how one of the world's newest nations came into being and survived, against all odds.

Offering an up-to-date historical perspective which should enable readers to fathom how the brutal massacres of 800,000 Rwandese came to pass in 1994, this volume includes a new chapter that brings the analysis up to the end of 1996.