Foreign intervention in Zaire after the Cold War sparked the First Congo War. On its face an indigenous rebel insurgency, the war was in reality a continuation of the Rwandan civil war that had begun in 1990 and cul-minated in the 1994 genocide and the seizure of power by the RPF. In October 1996, after the international community ignored RPF appeals to halt extremist attacks, the Rwandan army launched a raid into Zaire to destroy Hutu refugee camps and to encourage Zairian Tutsis to rebel.
A rebel army called the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) was established a few weeks later. A creation of the Rwandan government, the AFDL operated under the authority of Colonel James Kabarebe, commander of Rwanda’s presidential guard. It was staffed with Zairian exiles, including Zairian Tutsis who had joined the RPF in their struggle against the Habyarimana regime and who were anxious to avenge the deaths of family members in Zaire. Rebel sol-diers—including some 10,000 unemployed youths and street children—
were trained, equipped, and led by the Rwandan army. The organization’s spokesman, Zairian warlord Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was handpicked by the Kigali regime.
A rebel leader during antigovernment insurrections in the 1960s, Kabila had established a personal fiefdom in Zaire’s eastern region, which served as a base for extensive smuggling operations. In the de-cades after independence, Kabila grew rich from trafficking in gold, diamonds, ivory, and leopard skins and divided his time between luxury homes in Tanzania and Uganda. Entering Zaire with the Rwandan army in October 1996, he focused his operation on three geographic areas: the food- and gold-producing provinces of eastern Zaire; the copper- and
cobalt-rich Shaba Province; and the diamond-rich East Kasai Province.7 Along with their enormous wealth, these regions had a long history of rebellion against the central government.
By November, the AFDL and its Rwandan backers controlled the Zairian borderlands from Uganda to Burundi. Killing thousands of ci-vilians in the east, where Tutsis had been persecuted, the rebel soldiers plundered everywhere they went. They quickly defeated Zaire’s undis-ciplined army, which raped, looted, and killed as it retreated, and they emptied the refugee camps, forcing as many as 700,000 Hutus back into Rwanda. Another 300,000 to 600,000 Hutus and tens of thousands of Zairians fled westward into the rainforest, pursued by the AFDL and Rwandan forces. The rebels and their Rwandan backers slaughtered men, women, and children, making no distinction between former Hutu Power soldiers, government officials, and militia members, on the one hand, and innocent Hutu civilians on the other. Tens of thousands of people were killed outright, while tens of thousands more died of dys-entery, cholera, malaria, and starvation. The response from the interna-tional community was muted. While aid organizations tried to cope with the humanitarian disaster, the UN Security Council remained on the sidelines. France called for humanitarian and military intervention, but its claim to humanitarian concern was weakened by its support for the Hutu Power regime during the genocide and its preoccupation with the dominance of anglophone countries. The United States and the United Kingdom, embarrassed by their failure to act in 1994, refused to counte-nance criticism of the RPF.
The Zairian war quickly became a regional one. As Kabila’s rebel forces pushed north and west, the Ugandan army moved in to assist them. As they approached Angola, antigovernment rebels from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), who were longtime Mobutu allies, joined Zairian soldiers in the fight. UNITA’s involvement brought the Angolan government into the war on the side of the AFDL. The Luanda government permitted Kabila’s soldiers to enter Zaire from Angolan territory and provided Angolan army aux-iliaries to supplement their ranks. Zaire’s third-largest city, Kisangani, which was poorly defended by Zairian soldiers and French and Serbian mercenaries, fell to the rebels in March 1997. A few days later, the rebels took Mbuji-Mayi, the capital of East Kasai. During the second week of April, the AFDL arrived in Lubumbashi, Zaire’s second-largest city and
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the capital of Shaba Province. Foreign mining interests—including South Africa’s De Beers and Anglo American and Canada’s America Mineral Fields—initiated contacts with the AFDL and began to discuss future investments. Zambia allowed the AFDL to attack the mining town of Kolwezi from Zambian territory, while Zimbabwe provided the rebels with military equipment. By the middle of April 1997, Kabila, his army, and his foreign backers controlled all of Zaire’s major sources of revenue and foreign exchange.
As the rebels and their external supporters swept one thousand miles across Zaire toward the nation’s capital, Mobutu’s Western allies abandoned him; only France supported the regime to the bitter end.
US officials established contact with Kabila’s top political and military aides even before the AFDL took Kinshasa. In the Security Council, Washington blocked French initiatives for humanitarian intervention, which might have stopped the rebellion’s progress, and in the final weeks the Clinton administration urged Mobutu to step down. Having “lost”
Rwanda to anglophone interests, France was desperate to save Zaire for la francophonie. Determined to thwart Kabila, whom it viewed as a Ugan-dan proxy and promoter of US interests in the region, Paris initiated a covert operation shortly after the RPF invasion that provided Mobutu Photo 7.1. Rwandan Hutu refugees on the jungle track from Kisangani to Ubundu, DRC, June 8, 1997. Photo by Derek Hudson/Getty Images.
with combat aircraft, pilots, mechanics, and hundreds of French, Bel-gian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and South African mercenaries.
As Zaire’s neighbors teamed up on opposing sides, South Africa as-sumed the role of mediator. In early May 1997, President Nelson Mandela hosted talks between Kabila and Mobutu. In a last-ditch attempt to cling to power, Mobutu proposed a transitional government followed by elec-tions. Kabila, however, was not interested in democracy. He demanded instead that Mobutu hand over the reins of government or face the con-sequences. On May 17, Mobutu fled into exile. To avoid a bloodbath in the capital, the Zairian national army stood down, and the AFDL took Kinshasa without a fight. Kabila immediately declared himself president and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. Refusing to work with the internal democratic opposition that had mobilized against the Mobutu regime, he rejected the notion of a broad-based coalition government. Like Mobutu, Kabila outlawed opposition parties, imprisoned political opponents and human rights activists, and ruled by decree. Opposition leader Étienne Tshisekedi was imprisoned and then sent into internal exile, while Mobutu loyalists were rehabilitated and incorporated into the government. Kabila, like his predecessor, ad-ministered the country through relatives and cronies, dividing the spoils among them. Accepting Kabila as the lesser evil, Washington blocked Security Council condemnation of his regime.