One of the most vexing moral challenges for journalists who cover war is how to find meaning amid the trauma. Bearing witness to the suffering of others is daunting enough. But how we convey that suffering through the filter of our own privilege and bias can be even more problematic.

Two decades ago, when I was a young journalist, I went to Congo to cover an unimaginable humanitarian crisis. Rwanda’s army, backed by military allies from Uganda, had invaded the country and attacked UN refugee camps housing Rwandan refugees inside its eastern border. These forces eventually toppled president Mobutu Sese Seko. When I arrived in the region in May 1997, just days after the overthrow, nearly a half a million Congolese were internally displaced by the civil war, and another 200,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees who had lived in the camps had gone missing and were presumed dead. At the time, Rwandan troops were firmly entrenched in a country roughly the size of Western Europe.

The chatter among Western elites far removed from the carnage was initially euphoric; Mobutu’s 32-year reign had long been synonymous with decay and the West now expected nothing short of a renaissance in the heart of Africa. The man tapped to lead this dramatic transformation was Paul Kagame, now Rwanda’s long-time president,* whose Rwandan Tutsi soldiers had then been credited with stopping a genocide committed by Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, where up to a million people had been killed, three years before.

I knew then that the talk of renaissance in central Africa was a lie, and I wasn’t alone in this assessment. Humanitarian workers and a cabal of journalists who had been in the forests of Congo had seen what Kagame’s troops had done, and what it presaged for the region’s future.

During search and rescue missions with aid workers south of Kisangani, in the Congolese jungle, I learned how Kagame’s soldiers had hunted hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees across a brutal terrain. I interviewed dozens of orphans ravaged by disease, their faces hollowed out with grief, fear and hunger. Countless men and women, their voices trembling, told me stories of how Tutsi troops machined gunned their camps and, in some instances, forced survivors at gunpoint to bury their loved ones. Some refugees showed me their bullet wounds; I could barely fathom how they had managed to live another day. Local aid workers told me soldiers brought in bundles of firewood and barrels of gasoline to burn corpses in late April and early May 1997, days before I’d arrived. The remains of victims initially buried were eventually dug up and brought to more remote areas.

My whole world view shattered when I realized how Canada had downplayed the crisis as it was happening, and eventually acquiesced to the position of the United States that Kagame’s forces should be allowed to proceed, whatever the human cost. And I have never quite recovered from the stupor of learning that multinationals, some of them Canadian, struck mining deals with the killers, in the very midst of the slaughter. For years I was frozen in horror at the cynicism and sheer inhumanity of it.