Bordering nine countries in a mineral-rich, strategic region, Zaire, a former Belgian colony, was the largest and most populous country in francophone Africa. The immediate impetus for external intervention in the 1990s was the presence of Hutu extremists who had perpetrated genocide in Rwanda and who continued to threaten that country. How-ever, Zaire’s vulnerability was rooted in inequalities and practices that dated to the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. During the Cold War, Zaire had served as a regional policeman for both the United States and France, which along with Belgium were Zaire’s primary pillars of financial support. For more than three decades, Zaire was subjected to the authoritarian rule of Mobutu Sésé Seko (originally, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu), who assumed political power through military coups staged in September 1960 and November 1965.3 An important CIA protégé, Mobutu allowed the United States to train and supply anticommunist Angolan rebels on Zairian territory and helped keep a lid on radical movements throughout the region. In return, Washington provided Zaire with more than $1 billion in military and economic aid between 1961 and 1990 and pressured the IMF and World Bank to favor the country with loans, re-scheduled debts, and relaxed lending conditions. Hoping to expand its influence in francophone Africa, France also supplied Zaire with gener-ous loans, weapons, and military training.
During his thirty-two-year reign, Mobutu presided over a corrupt patronage system. He treated Zaire’s vast mineral resources, parastatal companies, central bank, and tax offices as his own, plundering them at will for the benefit of family members and loyalists. He amassed a personal fortune worth billions of dollars, while Zaire’s economy was ravaged by plummeting copper prices, food shortages, inflation, and an external debt that had reached $14 billion in 1997. Mobutu’s regime was
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notorious for its human rights abuses and the repression of political dis-sent. Nonetheless, it received strong military and economic support from Belgium, the United States, France, and Israel, which feared a communist takeover of the mineral-rich region without a strongman at the helm.
The “Mobutu or chaos” argument guaranteed their backing until the end of the Cold War.4
As the Cold War waned in the late 1980s, Zaire, like many other Afri-can countries, was faced with a devastating economic crisis and mount-ing political unrest. Mobutu’s strategic value had diminished, and by the early 1990s the Zairian dictator had been abandoned by key foreign sponsors. Belgium ceased all military and economic assistance in 1990, and France unveiled a new Africa policy that linked French development aid to human rights and democratic practices. Mobutu and other fran-cophone autocrats implemented superficial reforms that would protect their relationships with France but preserve their power. During the same period, internal prodemocracy forces exerted enormous domestic pressure. In August 1991, Mobutu was forced to consider fundamental political change, convening a national conference where political oppo-nents and civil society activists pushed for new governing institutions and multiparty democracy. In September, erratically paid soldiers rioted, civil unrest ensued, and 1,500 French and Belgian paratroopers arrived to evacuate 20,000 foreign nationals. In October, Mobutu appointed a transitional administration headed by opposition leader Étienne Tshise-kedi, who was dismissed a week later for refusing to follow orders. By the end of the year, France and the United States had suspended their aid programs, the IMF had barred Zaire from further loans, and the World Bank had ended support for development projects. The following year was punctuated by demonstrations, violent crackdowns, and periodic closures of the national conference, as Mobutu obstructed any attempt at real reform.
Although domestic forces continued to mobilize for democracy, it was an externally backed insurgency and regional war that finally drove Mobutu from power. The insurrection and its aftermath were in-timately linked to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. A longtime supporter of the Habyarimana regime, Mobutu had opened Zaire’s borders to more than 1 million Rwandan Hutu refugees, as well as former government soldiers and militia members who had fled the advancing RPF. When genocide perpetrators asserted their dominance over the refugee camps,
controlling the distribution of food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid, Mobutu turned a blind eye. Camp leaders trafficked in arms, con-scripted and trained military cadres, conducted raids into RPF-governed Rwanda with impunity, and obtained millions of dollars in weapons from the UK, China, and South Africa. Zairian soldiers joined Rwandan Hutu extremists in ethnically cleansing eastern Zaire, displacing tens of thousands of indigenous Tutsis and killing thousands more. Some Tutsis, known as the Banyamulenge, had local roots that extended to the eigh-teenth and nineeigh-teenth centuries, when their ancestors had settled there.
Others had been brought to the region by Belgian colonizers to serve as cheap labor on settler ranches and plantations. Still others had fled from ethnic violence in Rwanda during the early independence period.
After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the citizenship of Zairian Tutsis was called into question. Tutsis became convenient scapegoats for the prob-lems plaguing Zairian civilians, who found common cause with Rwan-dan Hutu extremists. Concerned by the extremist activities and angered by the treatment of Zairian Tutsis, Rwanda warned that it would invade Zaire if the militants were not restrained. Mobutu declined to sanction his allies, the United States resisted military engagement where it had no interests, and France refused to support Rwanda’s RPF regime. Inhibited by powerful members, the UN Security Council did nothing.
The UN’s failure to respond ultimately led to two wars that would embroil most countries in the surrounding area. In 1997, a rebel army backed by Rwanda and Uganda drove Mobutu from power. As indigenous and external forces rushed to fill the power vacuum, Zaire was propelled into more than two decades of chaos, violent conflict, and civil war. Be-tween 1998 and 2007 alone, war claimed some 5.4 million lives—primarily from hunger, disease, and malnutrition resulting from massive displace-ment and economic collapse. UNICEF estimated that during this period, tens of thousands of children were abducted by government soldiers, local militias, and rebels and forced to work as fighters, miners, cooks, porters, and sex slaves.5 In addition, Human Rights Watch found that more than 200,000 women and girls were raped or otherwise sexually brutalized in a country where sexual violence had become a primary weapon of war.
The decades-long turmoil involved, at various times, countries from three of Africa’s five subregions. Rwanda and Uganda were deeply in-volved in the First Congo War, while the Second Congo War drew in
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most of the Great Lakes countries and others from East, Central, and Southern Africa.6 A problematic peace agreement signed in December 2002 led to an elected government that continued many of the abusive practices of the past. Meanwhile, the conflict continued in the east, as neighboring states and local militias plundered the country’s mineral wealth. A UN peacekeeping force, first deployed in 2000, did little to protect the civilian population and indeed was often party to the abuses.
Peace remained elusive, and in March 2017 the Security Council renewed the peacekeeping mandate for another year.