Michael Mann has stated in ‘The Dark Side of Democracy’ (2003) that ethnic and religious conflicts continue to simmer around the world and the death toll in the 20th century for them is somewhere over 70 million. Above 80% of people killed in wars during the 90s were civilians in civil wars, mostly ethnic in nature, which have taken over from interstate or conventional ideology based wars. Displacement, bloodshed and a very convoluted conflict are not new to Congo, which continues to reverberate from the violent aftershocks of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. After Hutu death squads exterminated hundreds of thousands of Tutsi in Rwanda, only to be stopped by the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s take over of the country in July the same year, many killers fled into eastern Congo in what became known as the Great Lakes refugee crisis. The Hutu militias have regrouped, and United Nations officials blame them for terrorizing civilians, especially women, although they claim to have no part in these atrocities (Gettlemen. J, 2007). Read more…