THE GREAT CONGO WAR EXPLAINED (PART 1)

The war that began in 1998 and ended in 2003 is also known as the Great African War. It was and remains Africa’s deadliest war with estimates of up to 5 million deaths. The estimate includes 2 million deaths caused directly by the armed conflict and up to 3 million caused indirectly.
To understand the second Congo war you have to look at the first Congo war that had ended in 1997.The seeds for the bloodier second war were sown in the first one, and the issues fought for were the same.

So let’s take a quick look at the first Congo war. We covered the Rwanda genocide in a previous video. That conflict and its consequences played a big role in the both Congo wars. After the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the victory of the Tutsi RPF, Hutus fled to neighboring Congo fearing retaliatory attacks. They fled under the cover of French Army to UN camps set up in the DRC, then called Zaire. These Hutu civilians were mixed with armed Interahamwe militias.
The leader of the RPF and vice president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame asked the international community to separate the unarmed civilians from armed extremist militias as the entered the DRC. His requests went unheeded and both innocent civilians and extremists were admitted into the UNHCR refugee camps at the border. Over one million Hutu refugees fled into Zaire.
The Hutu extremists and their leaders regrouped in the UNHCR refugee camps and began cross border attacks into Rwanda before retreating into the DRC. The corrupt Mobutu government refused to do anything to stop these attacks and in fact covertly supported them. This angered the newly formed Rwandese government. The Mobutu government had supported the Habyarimana government and its army was hostile to the RPF (Rwanda Patriotic Front) which now controlled Rwanda.

Another concern for Rwanda was the Banyamulenge, a population of Congolese Tutsis that had lived mostly homogenously but peacefully in Congo. This group fearing another ethnic cleansing by the Hutu extremists that had settled in the region began preemptive strikes against the refugee militia and Mobutu’s army. The Rwandese army also began attacking the Hutu camps near the border.

As the Interahamwe, that is the Hutu militia fled westward many Hutu refugees opted to go back to Rwanda. The new Rwandese government did not carry out any attacks on these civilians and they settled back into their villages. Things were different for the civilians that fled with the militia to the west with reports of indiscriminate attacks on women and children amounting to massacres. The Rwandese government still denies those claims.

By this time the RPF had been joined by anti Mobutu revolutionaries in Congo who opposed his corrupt and authoritarian regime. These revolutionaries were led by Laurent Desire Kabila who had led a small revolutionary group in South Kivu for over 20 years.

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