Verisoph story dossier
The deadliest conflict since the Second World War, fought over the ruins of Mobutu's Zaire: how the Rwandan genocide spilled east, the First Congo War that put Laurent Kabila in power, and the Second Congo War that drew in Angola, Zimbabwe, Rwanda...
The deadliest conflict since the Second World War, fought over the ruins of Mobutu's Zaire: how the Rwandan genocide spilled east, the First Congo War that put Laurent Kabila in power, and the Second Congo War that drew in Angola, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Uganda to plunder coltan, gold, and diamonds.
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As the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front took Kigali in July 1994, more than a million Hutu fled west into eastern Zaire, fearing reprisals for the genocide. Vast camps sprang up around Goma and Bukavu, where a cholera epidemic killed tens of thousands within weeks. The sudden mass of refugees on Mobutu's crumbling eastern frontier set the stage for a decade of war.
The defeated Rwandan army, the ex-FAR, and the Interahamwe militia that had carried out the genocide took control of the UN-supplied camps, using them as a rear base. From across the border they launched raids back into Rwanda and terrorized local Tutsi. Aid agencies warned that the camps had become a militarized sanctuary, but the fighters were never disarmed.
Zairean authorities in South Kivu ordered the Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsi long settled in the region, to leave the country within days, threatening them as foreigners. The order, coming amid cross-border raids, gave Rwanda a pretext to intervene in defense of a kindred population. Banyamulenge fighters, armed and trained by Kigali, rose in revolt.
Rwanda and Uganda assembled four small anti-Mobutu factions into the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, or AFDL. They chose Laurent-Desire Kabila, a veteran leftist rebel from the 1960s, as its public face and spokesman. The alliance gave a Congolese front to what was in large part a Rwandan and Ugandan military operation.
Rwandan forces and the AFDL attacked the refugee camps to destroy the ex-FAR and Interahamwe bases, citing the threat to Rwanda's security. The camps collapsed and around 600,000 refugees streamed back into Rwanda, while hundreds of thousands more fled deeper into the Zairean forest. The security pretext quickly turned into a campaign to topple Mobutu.
As the AFDL and Rwandan army pursued Hutu who had fled west, they attacked columns of refugees deep in the forest, killing large numbers of civilians alongside armed men. A later UN human rights mapping report catalogued these killings and said some, if proven in court, could amount to genocide against the Hutu, a characterization Rwanda rejects. The full death toll is unknown and disputed, with estimates ranging into the hundreds of thousands.
The rebel column advanced hundreds of miles across the country against Mobutu's demoralized and unpaid army, which often fled rather than fight. The capture of Kisangani, the third city and a diamond hub, in March 1997 showed the regime could not hold the interior. Foreign mercenaries hired by Mobutu failed to reverse the collapse.
Mobutu Sese Seko fled Kinshasa on 16 May 1997, ending more than three decades of rule, and died in exile months later. Laurent-Desire Kabila entered the capital, declared himself president, and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His victory owed almost everything to Rwandan and Ugandan arms, a debt that would soon turn poisonous.
Resented at home as a puppet of foreigners, Kabila publicly thanked and then expelled the Rwandan and Ugandan troops who had installed him, ordering all foreign forces to leave. The move cut him loose from his patrons but stripped away the military backbone of his new state. Within days his former allies moved to remove him.
Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia sent troops, aircraft, and armor to rescue Kabila and drive the invaders back from the capital. Angola wanted to deny its UNITA rebels a Congolese sanctuary, while Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe sought influence and mining wealth. Their intervention turned a rebel offensive into a war between states.
A mutiny in the east gave rise to the Rally for Congolese Democracy, or RCD, a rebel movement backed openly by Rwanda and Uganda. Kigali and Kampala again sent their armies into Congo, this time to overthrow the man they had made president a year earlier. The second war had begun barely fourteen months after the first ended.
In a bold stroke, Rwanda airlifted troops across the country to the Kitona base near the Atlantic coast, aiming to seize Kinshasa from the west. The force advanced to the city's edge and cut its power, nearly ending the war in weeks. The gamble failed only when other African states intervened to save Kabila.
Chad sent a contingent to help Kabila in the north, and Sudan lent support against Uganda, its regional rival. The Chadian force performed poorly and withdrew within months amid friction and losses. Their brief involvement showed how the war pulled in states from across the continent, each pursuing its own quarrels.
The six warring states signed a ceasefire in Lusaka calling for a halt to fighting, the withdrawal of foreign troops, and a Congolese national dialogue. The rebel movements signed weeks later, but the ceasefire was violated almost at once. It nonetheless set the framework for later peace talks and a UN deployment.
The Security Council created the United Nations mission in Congo, known by its French acronym MONUC, to observe the Lusaka ceasefire. It grew into one of the largest and most expensive peacekeeping operations in the world. For years it struggled to protect civilians across a country the size of Western Europe with few roads.
At its height the conflict drew in the armies of some nine African states and a shifting web of militias, earning the names Africa's World War and the Great War of Africa. Kabila's coalition of Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan faced Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and their proxy rebels. It became the widest interstate war in modern African history.
The war splintered into a mosaic of proxy forces: the RCD divided into a Rwandan-backed and a Ugandan-backed wing, Jean-Pierre Bemba's MLC fought in the north with Ugandan help, and local Mai-Mai militias resisted the foreign occupiers. Front lines froze while armed groups carved out fiefdoms and preyed on civilians. Control of territory increasingly tracked control of mines and trade routes.
In the gold-rich Ituri district, long-standing tension between Hema and Lendu communities exploded into massacres, inflamed and armed by the Ugandan occupation and rival commanders. Tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced over several years. The violence later produced some of the first cases at the International Criminal Court.
Once the front lines stalled, the occupying armies and their proxies financed themselves by stripping the territories they held of coltan, gold, diamonds, and timber. Soldiers ran mines, taxed traders, and shipped minerals out through Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Extraction became a reason to keep fighting rather than merely a means to fund it.
The two allied invaders fell out over control of the diamond city of Kisangani and fought several rounds of battle on Congolese soil. The Six-Day War of June 2000 flattened parts of the city and killed hundreds of civilians caught between their guns. The clash exposed how far the intervention had become a scramble for resources rather than security.
UN investigators described a Rwandan military structure, sometimes called the Congo desk, that channeled revenue from Congolese minerals to fund the army and the war effort. Rwanda, which produces little coltan of its own, became a major exporter of the mineral during the occupation. Kigali denied looting and framed its presence as a matter of national security.
The remnants of the ex-FAR and Interahamwe reorganized as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, and dug into the eastern forests. Their continued presence gave Rwanda a lasting reason, or pretext, to keep intervening in Congo. Disarming the FDLR became a central and unmet demand of every peace deal.
A spike in world demand for tantalum, refined from coltan and used in mobile phones and game consoles, sent prices soaring around 2000. Congolese coltan, dug by hand in the Kivus, was flown out through Rwanda and sold to global electronics supply chains. UN investigators estimated Rwanda earned on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars from Congolese coltan during the occupation.
Zimbabwean generals close to Mugabe secured diamond and timber concessions in exchange for propping up Kabila, through ventures with names like Osleg. On the other side, Uganda exported large quantities of gold and diamonds despite mining almost none itself, evidence of goods siphoned out of Congo. For elites on every side the war paid, which was part of why it dragged on.
Laurent-Desire Kabila was shot dead in his palace by one of his own bodyguards, in a plot whose full authorship was never established. His son Joseph Kabila, around thirty years old, was installed as president within days. The younger Kabila proved more open to negotiation and to the peace process than his father had been.
A UN Panel of Experts published the first of several reports documenting the systematic looting of Congo's natural resources by the warring states. It named Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe and detailed the networks of officers, front companies, and dealers involved. The reports linked the plunder directly to the continuation of the war and named foreign companies as buyers.
In July 2002 Congo and Rwanda signed a deal at Pretoria under which Rwanda would pull out its troops in return for the disarming of the ex-FAR and Interahamwe on Congolese soil. A parallel Luanda agreement in September arranged Uganda's withdrawal. The foreign armies began leaving, though their proxy militias and economic interests remained.
The Inter-Congolese Dialogue at Sun City produced the Global and All-Inclusive Agreement, ending the war on paper. It set up a transitional government under a formula that kept Joseph Kabila as president alongside four vice-presidents drawn from the rebel and opposition camps. A transitional constitution and a path to elections followed.
A power-sharing transitional government took office in mid-2003, marking the official close of the Second Congo War. Most foreign armies had withdrawn, and elections eventually followed in 2006, the country's first multiparty vote in decades. Yet the settlement never reached the eastern provinces, where armed groups fought on.
The renegade general Laurent Nkunda formed the CNDP, a mainly Tutsi movement that claimed to protect Congolese Tutsi from the FDLR and fought the national army in North Kivu. UN experts reported that Rwanda supported the group, which Kigali denied. The rebellion showed that the peace deals had failed to pacify the east.
The International Rescue Committee estimated that some 5.4 million people had died as a result of the conflict between 1998 and 2007, most from disease and starvation rather than direct violence, which would make it the deadliest war since 1945. The figure is contested: the Human Security Report Project argued the IRC's choice of baseline mortality rate inflated the total, suggesting a much lower number. Even critics agree the death toll ran into the millions and was overwhelmingly caused by the collapse of health, food, and shelter.
The UN mission was renamed MONUSCO to reflect a shift toward stabilization, and later gained an offensive Force Intervention Brigade to fight armed groups directly. Despite tens of thousands of troops, it struggled to end the violence in the east and drew local anger over its failures. It remained one of the UN's largest missions for years.
Former CNDP fighters mutinied to form the March 23 Movement, or M23, which briefly seized the city of Goma in November 2012. UN Groups of Experts reported that Rwanda armed and directed the group, a charge Rwanda has consistently denied. M23 was pushed back in 2013 but revived years later, a sign that the roots of the Great War of Africa were never pulled up.
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