Kabila rose to power as Rwanda’s and Uganda’s proxy, but the honey-moon did not last. Kabila pursued his own agenda. Instead of destroy-ing the remnants of the Hutu Power army, he used them to build his own fighting force, and his patrons quickly turned against him. The Second Congo War began in August 1998 when Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi teamed up to oust the Kabila regime. Most Great Lakes countries entered the fray, along with some from East, Central, and Southern Africa. On Kabila’s side were Angola and Zimbabwe, which had supported the AFDL during the First Congo War, along with Na-mibia, Chad, and Sudan—as well as 15,000 to 25,000 Hutu fighters from Rwanda and Burundi.
The movement toward war began in February 1998, when Rwan-dans in the AFDL leadership began to plot Kabila’s removal. In July,
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suspecting disloyalty in the Congolese army, Kabila dismissed several high-level Rwandan commanders, including James Kabarebe, former head of Rwanda’s presidential guard who served as the Congolese army’s chief of staff. Kabila also launched an anti-Tutsi campaign in Kinshasa, where civilians had been humiliated and abused by Rwandan soldiers.
The government’s actions triggered new unrest in the capital and in the east, where Rwandan officers in the Congolese army instigated a rebel-lion. Blaming Rwanda for the strife, Kabila ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan troops to leave the DRC. Without its external backers, the Congolese army quickly disintegrated. When the Second Congo War erupted in August, James Kabarebe led the Rwandan operation.
Once again, Rwanda and Uganda enlisted indigenous proxies to promote their agendas. The disparate rebel factions, which had little popular support, included Congolese Tutsis linked to the Rwandan gov-ernment, Mobutu cronies who hoped to return to power, disappointed office seekers denied positions in Kabila’s government, and leftist intel-lectuals disenchanted with Kabila’s corrupt personal rule. The largest rebel organization was the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD). Like the AFDL, the RCD was an instrument of the Kigali government. Rwan-dan army officers commanded the RCD military organization; its inef-fectual political organization comprised an eclectic group of Mobutu loyalists and military officers, corrupt opportunists, and disillusioned intellectuals. Rife with internal rivalries, in 1999 the RCD broke into two. Rwanda threw its support to RCD-Goma, which was dominated by young Congolese Tutsis who sought land, citizenship, and opportu-nity in a country where they had suffered violence and discrimination.
Uganda favored RCD-Kisangani, which was led by leftist intellectuals.
Uganda also sponsored the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), led by multimillionaire Jean-Pierre Bemba—one of the DRC’s wealthiest men and son of a close Mobutu associate. The MLC’s mili-tary leadership included numerous veterans of Mobutu’s army, many of whom had been trained in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, or Morocco. Uganda eventually forced a merger of the two or-ganizations, establishing the Front for the Liberation of Congo (FLC) under Bemba’s leadership.
The war shredded the country’s social fabric. In the eastern DRC, Rwanda replaced indigenous chiefs with local administrations staffed by Congolese Tutsis and established militias and police forces
to further its interests. Hoping to protect themselves from the depre-dations of Rwandan soldiers and their proxies, eastern communities formed self-defense forces known as Mai-Mai.8 However, these armed groups also wreaked havoc in the countryside. Alienated, unemployed youths saw opportunities for enrichment through pillaging and bribes.
Personal quarrels, land disputes, and clan and ethnic rivalries grew in-creasingly politicized and violent. Killings spurred retaliatory blood-shed, instigating spirals of violence. All sides systematically employed rape as a weapon of war to humiliate and terrorize the Congolese population.
As Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi undermined Kabila, other coun-tries came to his rescue. Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia cited the SADC security pact as the basis for their intervention, while Chad sent troops to bolster French and francophone influence, and Sudan sought to undermine Uganda in retaliation for its support for the SPLA insur-gency. Zimbabwe’s involvement was the most significant. Harare sent 12,000 soldiers to Kabila’s aid, funding its war effort with the DRC’s own resources. Although Zimbabwe had no legitimate security claims in the DRC, it did have economic interests. Kabila owed Zimbabwe for mili-tary equipment and supplies delivered during the 1996–97 war, and Zim-babwe was anxious for repayment. Moreover, Robert Mugabe’s regime hoped that unfettered access to the DRC’s riches would appease powerful domestic constituencies in Zimbabwe that might otherwise protest their own government’s failed policies. Mugabe therefore gave Zimbabwean political, economic, and military elites free rein to plunder Katanga’s copper and cobalt and to loot diamonds from East Kasai.
If Zimbabwe did not have legitimate security concerns in the DRC, Angola did. The Luanda government was anxious to protect Angola’s oil and diamond regions, especially the oil-rich Cabinda Enclave, which was separated from the bulk of Angola by a wedge of Congolese territory. It was troubled by the presence of UNITA supply routes in the western DRC, the threat of renewed attacks from Congolese soil, and UNITA’s illegal mining of Congolese diamonds to finance its war against the An-golan government. Beyond these immediate considerations, Luanda was disturbed by the growing power of Uganda and Rwanda in the Central African region and their support for rebel forces that included Mobutu stalwarts. Angola entered the war in the hope of shoring up the weak Kabila regime.
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Namibia’s concerns dovetailed with those of both Angola and Zim-babwe. Like Angola, Namibia was anxious to weaken UNITA, which supported a secessionist movement in the Caprivi Strip, while Namibian elites, like those in Zimbabwe, had developed extensive mining interests in the DRC.
Like Western powers in the twentieth century, the DRC’s African neighbors bled the country dry. A 2001 UN Security Council report charged Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi with the systematic looting of the DRC and also implicated Zimbabwe. These countries stole Congo-lese diamonds, gold, coltan, cobalt, copper, tin, timber, and cash crops worth billions of dollars, which they used to finance their own develop-ment. Other sources indicate that from 1996 to 2009, Rwanda dominated the mineral-rich provinces of North and South Kivu and effectively integrated them into its domestic economy. Rwanda’s internationally acclaimed economic growth, achieved since the 1994 genocide, was actu-alized with the DRC’s stolen wealth. Meanwhile, Ugandan soldiers took control of gold-bearing regions in North Kivu and Orientale Provinces, where they forced locals to extract the gold for Ugandan interests. After peace accords were signed in 2002, Rwanda and Uganda continued to support rebel proxies who plundered on their behalf.