First Congo War

The First Congo War.

The First Congo War was a conflict which was fought in Zaire or the Democratic Republic of the Congo between October 1996 and May 1997. The war was the culmination of tensions which had been building in the wider geopolitical region throughout the 1990s, notably the spillover of the Rwandan Civil War and Genocide into the Congo in 1994 and 1995 and the collapsing authority of the longstanding dictator of Zaire, Joseph Mobutu. The fighting largely began in the east of the country in the border region with Rwanda and Burundi, but spread westwards as it went on. It pulled in over a dozen different countries in one form or another and created a significant refugee crisis. It ended with the fall of Mobutu’s regime and the accession to power of Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Because the First Congo War was followed almost immediately by the Second Congo War, a much longer and bloodier affair, some analysts refer to the two wars collectively as the Great War of Africa or Africa’s World War.

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First Congo War chronology of events

The Congo is one of the largest countries in Africa. As a distinct region within the continent, it is also a very wealthy one, at least in theory, with vast mineral and natural resources. Its potential contrasts sharply with the torturous nature of its modern history. In the 1880s King Leopold II of Belgium claimed a vast swathe of territory here as a personal fiefdom and over the next twenty-plus years established one of the most barbaric regimes seen anywhere in Africa or Asia during the European Age of Imperialism. Although the numbers proposed by historians vary considerably, it is accepted that several million people in the Congo were either enslaved, murdered or maimed by the Belgian regime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Leopold mercilessly exploited the region to produce rubber, ivory and other goods. Eventually he was forced to hand over the fiefdom into the control of the Belgian government in 1908. Still, colonial rule continued until 1960.

Mobutu Sese Seko (Joseph Mobutu)

When the Belgians left, Patrice Lumumba became the first post-independence Prime Minister. As occurred virtually everywhere across Africa in the 1960s, a military coup and civil war soon followed independence. Lumumba was killed and in the carnage that followed an army officer named Joseph Mobutu, or Mobutu Sese Seko, emerged as dictator of the Congo in 1965. In 1971 he changed the name of the country to Zaire. For the next twenty years he oversaw a period of spectacular mismanagement of Zaire and utter corruption which left the country destabilized and impoverished. So long as the Cold War was underway, Mobutu was supported by the United States and other western powers who viewed him as a bulwark against the growth of communism in the region, but once the clash with the Soviet Union ended, Mobutu found himself isolated and with his power declining.

Into this mix in the early 1990s was added a range of external factors which destabilized Zaire even further. In both neighboring Rwanda and Burundi, civil wars were underway in the early-to-mid-1990s, fought largely over historical tensions between the ethnic Hutus and Tutsis. In the case of Rwanda, this culminated in the late spring and summer of 1994 in the Rwandan genocide, as the Hutu majority sought to mass murder the Tutsi minority. This first drove many Tutsis over the border into eastern Zaire, and then subsequently an even larger number of Hutus fleeing reprisals in Rwanda after the Tutsis seized control of the country. In the course of 1995 and 1996 the Hutus began efforts to reclaim control of Rwanda by fighting a guerilla war from inside Zaire. Eventually the Tutsi-led government in Rwanda, understandably fearing that the Hutus would someday try to finish off the genocide they had started in 1994, invaded eastern Zaire in an effort to root out the Hutus there. So began the First Congo War.

Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire, c. 1996

The conflict that followed lasted just over half a year. In the course of it the Rwandans invaded the east, while a new phase of the civil war that had been simmering across Zaire for years was also initiated, with the goal of finally removing Mobutu, who by the mid-1990s controlled little more than Kinshasa and an enclave in the west, entirely from power. Then the country, which had become lawless and ruled for the most part by regional warlords, could be reunited and start afresh after over three and a half decades of decline post-independence. The war would eventually end with Mobutu’s flight into exile and the rise to power of one of the Congolese warlords, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. He had been allied with the Rwandans and promised to break up the Hutu camps in eastern Zaire. The country was also renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It all proved a false dawn though. Just over a year later a fresh conflict broke out, one which would last for half a decade, involve a dozen African nations and wildly destabilize large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa well into the twenty-first century. This is usually termed the Second Congo War, but so interrelated were the two conflicts that some analysts term the two wars together the Great War of Africa.

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Extent of migration associated with the First Congo War

The First Congo War set off a large wave of migration, particularly in eastern Zaire as the invading, Tutsi-dominated Rwandan forces began engaging in violent reprisals for the Rwandan genocide against the Hutus. In an almost paradoxical development, many of the Hutus in eastern Zaire, an estimated 700,000 of them, fled eastwards into Rwanda itself, the very country that was invading Zaire and tacitly overlooking the massacres its soldiers were committing there. Quite simply, the Hutus were safer in Rwanda, a country where international oversight of events was greater following the genocide of 1994. Others fled to different parts of Zaire. This internal migration was considerable and extended well beyond the Hutus.

Demographic impact of the First Congo War

The Congolese diaspora

The demographic impact of the migration associated with the First Congo War is very hard to assess in any accurate manner. As noted, hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled from eastern Zaire into Rwanda and many more to other parts of the Congo. Beyond this, though, the movement is impossible to disentangle from what came before and went after. There had already been years of internal displacement and migration in Zaire and the wider region in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s owing to civil wars in neighboring countries like Angola, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, and the breakdown of central government in Zaire itself. Moreover, what migration did occur as an explicit result of the First Congo War in late 1996 and early 1997 would soon be eclipsed by the mass displacement of the Second Congo War. Taken together the First and Second Congo Wars impacted on millions of people demographically and created a large Congolese diaspora internationally. As such, many people tracing their Congolese heritage in the United States, France or some other country may well find that their parents or grandparents left the Congo owing to the conflicts of the 1990s.

See also

• Second Congo War
• Rwandan genocide
• Central African ethnicity

Explore more about the First Congo War

• Eastern Congo: A Legacy of Intervention at the Council on Foreign Relations
• Explaining the Great War in Africa on JSTOR
• Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Migration History at the Migration Policy Institute

References

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