The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has a particularly tragic history. Since the late 19th century, this vast territory has been dominated by a succession of predatory colonial and postcolonial states that have focused on the extraction of valuable resources for personal profit and ignored the welfare and aspirations of the people. National political institutions and economic and social infrastructure were not developed in any meaningful way. Employed both retrospectively and contemporaneously, the rhetoric of genocide has featured prominently in the violent history of DRC. There are at least five periods in Congo’s history in which the term “genocide” has been mobilized: the colonial conquest of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s, the First Congo War of 1996–1997, the Second Congo War of 1998 to 2002, and the post-2002 violence in the eastern part of the country. In most instances, however, the use of the term genocide with reference to the DRC has clearly failed to measure up to the 1948 international legal definition. In many cases, accusations of genocide in DRC, which proliferated after 1994, have represented cynical ploys to demonize enemies and justify violent actions in pursuit of power and wealth.
Comprising the Congo River Basin in western equatorial Africa, the DRC covers well over 2 million square kilometers and is Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest state. The center of the country is dominated by a massive lowland rainforest, the world’s second largest, and characterized by many rivers. On the forest periphery is a savannah in the south and southwest, mountains in the east and west, and grassland north of the Congo River. It is important to remember that the current borders of the DRC, like those of most African countries, were imposed by late-19th-century European colonialism and meant little to the people who were already living there.
People have inhabited this enormous area for thousands of years, with those living around the forest edge tending to form centralized states. By the start of the 1400s, the Kingdom of Kongo had emerged among Iron Age farmers and fishers close to the Atlantic coast on the south side of the Congo River, which served as an avenue for trade. In 1483 Portuguese mariners established contact with Kongo, and in 1506 a faction of the royal family who had converted to Catholicism took power in a civil war. As Portugal’s primary ally in west-central Africa, the Kongo Kingdom engaged in wars to capture an increasing number of African slaves, who were exported to the Atlantic trade and often to the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The shifting of the slave trade south in the late 1500s to the new Portuguese colony at Luanda on what is now the Angolan coast weakened Kongo, which fell into a period of civil war and decline in the 1600s and 1700s.
To the south, on the border between the forest and savannah, farming and fishing communities around Lake Kisale merged into the Luba Kingdom during the 15th century. Those people had long exported dried fish and copper crafts in exchange for iron and salt from the north and copper from the south. During the 1700s, Luba conquered decentralized and populous groups along the upper Congo, Luvua, and Luapula River valleys and the western shore of Lake Tanganyika. A civil war delayed this expansion in the late 1700s but the process was renewed in the early 1800s. Around 1500, conflict among the Luba royals resulted in a disaffected faction moving west, where they established a large centralized state known as Lunda, which ruled the many small groups east of the upper Kasai River. Lunda expansion during the 1600s and 1700s was facilitated by the adoption of American crops, particularly drought-resistant cassava, which had been brought to the coast by the Portuguese and served to increase food production and population growth in the interior. Since Lunda had plenty of land but not enough people, its expansion was characterized by raiding armies sent out to seize captives, who were taken back to the capital area, where they worked in agriculture and were eventually incorporated into Lunda society. As its frontier became too far away to bring prisoners to the center, Lunda established satellite states that expanded in the same manner and sent tribute to the parent kingdom. In the 1700s, Lunda pushed westward to gain greater access to the Atlantic coast, where it exported slaves captured in raids against Luba in the northeast. Around the same time, a Lunda army established what would become the semiautonomous and powerful state of Kazembe to the east on the southern shore of Lake Mweru, near what is now the DRC/Zambia borderland. Located between the Luba and Lunda states, Kanyok farming and fishing communities on the southern forest edge experienced a process of militarization and state formation during the 1600s and 1700s.
During the 19th century, Lunda and Luba declined in the face of new aggressive raiders equipped with firearms. Originating from Angola, where they had engaged in slave raiding, which was now declining, bands of Chokwe elephant hunters with guns moved northeast and challenged Lunda. The growth of a slave and ivory trade along East Africa’s Indian Ocean coast brought Swahili-Arab and Nyamwezi gunmen into the area. In the 1850s, the Yeke, a Nyamwezi group under Msiri, pushed into the central African interior and carved out a copper-rich territory from the western part of Kazembe, the southern part of Luba, and the eastern part of Lunda. In the 1860s, Swahili-Arab leader Tippu Tip established a raiding state on the Lualaba River west of Lake Tanganyika. His slave- and ivory-trading empire stretched from Luba in the south, which he significantly weakened, to the westward bend of the Congo River in the north.
In the dense forest of Central Africa, people lived in decentralized communities and change occurred slowly. Over a long period, Bantu-speaking fishing and farming communities with Iron Age technology entered parts of the forest where they absorbed the existing bands of Twa (called pygmies in colonial times), Stone Age hunter-gatherers, or developed a symbiotic relationship with them. By the mid-1500s, northern Teke groups living around the junction of the Congo and Kasai Rivers began to move eastward to escape Kongo slave raiding or to search for their own victims.
At the northern forest fringe, after around 1600, Savannah raiders with horses and swords pressed south along the Ubangi River to capture slaves who were then sent north along the Trans-Saharan trade routes. Along the Uele River on the northeast forest frontier, in what is now the DRC’s northeast corner, the Mangbetu developed a strong agricultural foundation by growing plantain, maize, and cassava, and their skilled ironworkers produced weapons such as spears and a range of swords prized among their neighbors. During the 1800s, several new Mangbetu states fought against but were ultimately dominated by Arab slavers from Khartoum to the north (see chapter 5). In the late 1700s, Azande states expanded east toward the north part of the Congo and Nile watershed in what is today the border area of South Sudan and the DRC. They were motivated by the desire to incorporate subject peoples into their society and gain new land, rivers, and hunting areas. Although the Azande expanded rapidly, they did not centralize, but instead constantly established new and usually rival groups. By the 1870s, a number of powerful Azande states were almost constantly at war with ivory and slave traders probing south from Khartoum.1
In the late 19th century, Belgian King Leopold II engaged in private empire building, as his country’s constitutional government was uninterested in the Scramble for Africa. During the early 1880s, Leopold, using his International African Association as a front, organized the personal conquest of the vast Congo River basin, which was euphemistically named the Congo Free State. Although the goals of Leopold’s association supposedly involved scientific study and the abolition of slavery, his regime in the Congo became one of colonial Africa’s most brutal as it ruthlessly extracted rubber and ivory for profit. Leopold never visited Africa and hired famous Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to orchestrate the initial occupation, which focused on gaining control of the Congo River itself. The Congo Free State was not a Belgian colony, but rather Leopold’s personal fiefdom.
In 1881 Stanley mobilized Congolese people to carry a steamboat in pieces some 400 kilometers from the Congo River’s mouth on the Atlantic coast to Malebo (later Stanley) Pool, a stretch of river rendered unnavigable by rapids and falls, where it was assembled and proceeded upriver. Later, during the 1890s, Leopold’s regime constructed a railway from the river port of Matadi near the Atlantic coast to Malebo Pool, which became the site of the colonial capital of Leopoldville and was renamed Kinshasa after independence. Between 1886 and 1896, the Congo Free State expended half its revenue to develop a fleet of steamers that patrolled from Leopoldville, some 1,400 kilometers northeast up the Congo River, to Stanley Falls, eventual site of the town of Stanleyville, which is now Kisangani, and then another 800 kilometers south up the Lualaba River to what would become Katanga Province. Leopold hired Canadian-born British mercenary William Stairs to lead an expedition that travelled from Zanzibar on the Indian Ocean coast to the south end of Lake Tanganyika, where, in December 1891, they killed the Yeke ruler Msiri and incorporated Katanga into the Congo Free State. Leopold was prompted to dispatch this expedition to Katanga given the threat of British colonial expansion north from what was becoming Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia).
To enforce his rule in the Congo Free State, Leopold created a private army called the Force Publique, which consisted of European officers and local African soldiers and quickly gained a reputation for cruelty, pillaging, and ill-discipline. It became an instrument of state terror. The conquest of the Congo Free State coincided with a dramatic increase in the price of rubber on the world market because this product was needed to manufacture new inflatable tires for bicycles and motor vehicles. If a community in the Congo Free State failed to produce a set quota of rubber for export, Force Publique troops flogged people and cut off hands or heads to prove to their officers that bullets had not been wasted. In many cases, villages and crops were burned, and livestock seized. The Force Publique also put down resistance. In 1887 Tippu Tip, the Swahili-Arab slave and ivory dealer who dominated the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, agreed to become Leopold’s governor of the eastern Congo Free State. However, when Tippu Tip retired to Zanzibar in 1891 conflict developed between Leopold’s burgeoning regime and the remaining Swahili-Arab leaders, who resented restrictions on their ivory and slave trading. During the Arab War of 1893–1894, the Force Publique used its control of the river system to conquer the Swahili-Arabs and impose colonial rule on eastern Congo. In addition, some of the most serious resistance to Leopold’s state came from within the Force Publique, in which African soldiers rebelled against poor treatment. Between 1895 and 1897, mutineers from the Force Publique fought their former superiors in the Kasai region, with guerrilla warfare continuing until 1908. In 1896 a Force Publique expedition sent to seize the headwaters of the Nile in what is now South Sudan was abandoned when a large number of its troops mutinied, and fighting continued until 1900, with the flight of the rebels into the German territories of Rwanda and Burundi.
Even when European colonial conquest and exploitation in Africa were common, the horrors of Leopold’s regime were outrageous and inspired an international outcry in Western Europe and North America. The Congo Reform Association, led by E. D. Morel, severely criticized Leopold in a series of newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books, including some by such celebrated authors as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain. There were also calls for Leopold to be put on trial for his crimes and then executed. Leopold mobilized his own counter-propaganda, but it failed to convince. A damning 1904 official report by British diplomat Roger Casement, who visited Leopold’s Congo, was later confirmed by an independent Belgian commission. In 1908 Leopold was compelled to relinquish the territory to the Belgian government. The Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo. It has been estimated that about half of the Congo’s population died during the 23-year reign of the Congo Free State (1885–1908), though some areas were more affected than others. Although there was no census conducted in the Congo until 1924, some historians have claimed that the death toll amounted to between 5 and 10 million people. The causes of death included violence, hunger, disease, and displacement.2
The vast number of deaths attributed to Leopold’s Congo Free State has tempted scholars to compare those events to later genocides such as the Holocaust. However, the colonial regime’s intention, which seems to have been focused on extremely ruthless resource extraction, has led to some debate. Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term “genocide,” wrote an unpublished manuscript in the early 1950s that claims that the Congo Free State experienced “an unambiguous genocide.” He also believed that up to 75 percent of Congo’s population had died, though he blamed the violence on what he saw as the savagery of African colonial troops.3 According to Adam Hochschild, whose successful 1998 book popularized awareness about atrocities committed in Leopold’s colonial state:
Although the killing in the Congo was of genocidal proportions, it was not, strictly speaking, a genocide. The Congo state was not deliberately trying to eliminate one particular ethnic group from the face of the Earth. Instead . . . Leopold’s men were looking for labor. If, in the course of their finding and using that labor, millions of people died, that to them was incidental.4
In an overview of Congo’s history, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja agrees with that assessment, but reminds readers that the Congo Free State caused “a death toll of Holocaust proportions.”5 For international legal scholar Thomas W. Simon, Leopold’s regime did not display the type of “corporate intent” that would be needed to characterize those deaths as genocide.6 Human rights’ scholar Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, although she discusses events in the Congo Free State in terms of a colonial genocide, admits that “technically speaking, this was not genocide even in a legally retroactive sense. The Congolese were not systematically murdered because of their race, ethnicity, religion or nationality, the four categories set out in Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Crime of Genocide.”7 Holocaust historian Robert G. Weisbord, in looking at the role of Pope Pius X in endorsing Leopold’s regime, disagrees and maintains that the relevant UN convention considers that “an endeavour to eliminate a portion of a people would qualify as genocide.”8 Such genocide accusations against Leopold’s activities in the Congo have become common. For conflict scholar Jeanne Haskin, it was “one of the worst genocides due to colonization.”9 A recent multiauthored history of Western exploitation in the DRC explains its relatively low population in the early 20th century “as a legacy of the genocide of the 1890s.”10 In the most extreme version of this view, Yaa-Lengi M. Ngemi talks of “the genocide of over 10 million Congolese by Leopold II.”11
Belgian historian Guy Vanthemsche disagrees with comparisons to the Holocaust and questions the estimates of the population of late-19th-century Congo, and hence the number of fatalities brought about by Leopold’s regime.12 A recent best-selling history of the Congo suggests the use of another term to describe the tragedy of the Congo Free State:
It would be absurd in this context of speak of an act of “genocide” or a “holocaust”; genocide implies the conscious, planned annihilation of a specific population, and that was never the intention here, or the result. And the term Holocaust is reserved for the persecution and annihilation of the Jews during World War II. But it was definitely a hecatomb, a slaughter on a staggering scale that was not intentional . . . a living sacrifice on the altar of the pathological pursuit of profit.13
Those who easily apply the term genocide to Leopold’s regime seem to do so purely on the basis of its obvious horror and the massive numbers of people who may have perished. Of course, under the international legal definition, the number of murders has nothing to do with defining an episode of mass violence as genocide. Furthermore, no evidence has ever been put forward to prove that Leopold intended to exterminate even a portion of the Congolese population. That said, the impact of Leopold’s state on parts of Congo may have caused more loss of life than other incidents throughout Africa’s colonial history that could be accurately described as genocide: for instance, the 1904–1907 German campaign against the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia. The Congo Free State might not have been genocidal, but it certainly was murderous, criminally negligent, and deeply greedy and corrupt. Tragically, Leopold’s state would have much in common with subsequent regimes in the Congo.
During the 1950s, the era of decolonization in Africa, Belgian colonial rulers failed to prepare Congo for independence. Whereas the British devoted the better part of a decade to the transition in Ghana and Nigeria (which was still problematic), the Belgians gave the Congo six months. Few Congolese, despite the Belgian colonial rhetoric of assimilating Africans into Western civilization, had achieved anything beyond the most rudimentary Western education. The Belgian colonial administration, compared to that of other European colonial powers, had employed a high proportion of Belgian officials in Congo, which meant that almost no Congolese gained experience with running the state. Furthermore, the Belgians had never ruled the vast territory as a single colony: large regions were effectively rented out to multinational companies engaged in resource extraction. As such, the African political movements that emerged in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s were based on regional and ethnic affiliations and ambitions. When the Belgians finally decided to decolonize in 1959, they provided extremely short notice, intending for a weak, independent Congo to be reliant on their technical assistance for the foreseeable future.
At the end of June 1960, the Congo’s first independent government represented a coalition led by Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, a Pan-Africanist of the Congolese National Movement (MNC) based in the northeast around Stanleyville, and President Joseph Kasavubu of the ethnic irredentist Bakongo Alliance (ABAKO), centered in Leopoldville in the west. In early July, African soldiers mutinied against their Belgian officers, who arrogantly behaved as if independence had not taken place, which led to attacks on Belgian civilians throughout the country. Within a few days, the colonial Force Publique had been renamed the Congolese National Army (ANC); Belgian officers were replaced by rapidly promoted and poorly trained Africans, including former soldier and journalist Joseph Mobutu, who suddenly became a colonel; and the aspirations of the rank-and-file were addressed by promoting all personnel one rank. Some Belgian officers were retained as advisors, and order was restored to the military garrisons at Leopoldville and at Thysville in the west. Within the ANC, Mobutu cultivated a personal power base by channeling money from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), UN, and Belgium to favorite officers and exiling unreliable units to remote locations.
The army mutiny provided an opportunity for Congo’s regional separatists. Albert Kalonji proclaimed himself emperor of the diamond-mining area of South Kasai, which he imagined as an autonomous region within a federal Congo. In the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga, Moise Tshombe’s Confederation of the Tribal Associations of Katanga (CONAKAT) declared full independence, supported by Southern African and Western mining concerns. Belgian commercial and political interests supported both secessions. In Katanga, Belgian soldiers disarmed ANC units and organized a Katanga military that included white mercenaries from Belgium, France, South Africa, and Rhodesia. In mid-July 1960, Belgian troops intervened in Leopoldville, Elisabethville, Luluabourg, and other towns to protect Belgian civilians, which led to Congolese and wider African claims that they were recolonizing the country. Demanding Belgian withdrawal, Prime Minister Lumumba called for UN assistance and warned that if it failed he would turn to the Soviet Union. As a Pan-Africanist, Lumumba was also influenced by connections with diplomats from newly independent Ghana and Guinea, who were not friendly to Western interests. In late July, Belgian troops were replaced by multinational peacekeepers of the UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC), which undermined Lumumba’s authority by seizing the country’s airports, disarming soldiers loyal to him, and refusing to crush Katanga separatism, which was seen as an internal affair. In August, Lumumba asked for Soviet military support that, given the Cold War context, prompted the Americans and Belgians to begin planning his assassination.14 The CIA station chief in Leopoldville at the time later wrote that another American agent “had come to the Congo carrying deadly poisons to assassinate Lumumba, and I was to do the job.”15 As it turned out, others would act to eliminate the Congolese prime minister.
The history of Kasai was central in providing context for Lumumba’s murder. During the colonial period, Belgian officials in the province of Kasai had created an imagined ethnic division between the Luba and Lulua people, who spoke the same language. The Luba people were originally from the southeast of Kasai and had moved into the Lulua River area in the late 19th century to escape Swahili-Arab slave raids. As displaced people, they were more easily recruited by newly arrived colonial labor agents and missionaries, who cultivated a favorable stereotype of them as industrious and hardworking. On the other hand, the people originally from around the Lulua River were categorized as Lulua by colonial officials, who saw them as lazy because they preferred to work their own land and stuck to older agricultural methods. However, in the 1950s, the Luba elite, given their relatively greater access to Western education and therefore exposure to ideas about freedom and democracy, began to challenge Belgian rule and racism. That response prompted the Belgians, as they were doing in Rwanda, to abandon their former favorites and foster the growth of a Lulua counter-elite, who were more conservative and compliant. In 1959 Belgian plans to resettle the Luba to their ancestral but impoverished homeland of southeast Kasai led to violence between Luba and Lulua, and the ethnic cleansing of the former from some areas.
In forming his independent government in 1960, Lumumba appeared to side with the Lulua in appointing one of them as provincial leader in Kasai. Discussions over the creation of a new province called South Kasai, in which the Luba would have greater influence, morphed into Luba leader Kalonji declaring the Autonomous State of South Kasai in early August 1960. Kalonji was supported by Tshombe’s secessionist regime in Katanga, and the former made his declaration of autonomy from Elisabethville, the Katanga capital. On the other hand, Luba people who lived in Katanga generally did not support independence for that province. For Congo’s central government based in Leopoldville (Kinshasa), it made sense to deal with Kalonji’s secession first, as a military base in nearby Luluabourg (later renamed Kananga) would provide a staging area for military operations and the main railway to Katanga passed through South Kasai. At the end of August, ANC soldiers used Soviet-supplied vehicles and aircraft to move into South Kasai to crush the rebellion there before moving on to Katanga. Congolese National Army (ANC) soldiers and local Lulua militants massacred thousands of Luba civilians, including many who had taken refuge in a Catholic cathedral in the mining town of Bakwanga (now Mbuji-Mayi), capital of the secessionist state. Lacking logistical support, ANC troops pillaged local communities for food and loot. Some 3,000 Luba were killed.16 Despite those atrocities, the ANC incursion into South Kasai failed to crush Kalonji’s autonomous regime. Furthermore, ANC forces then left Kasai and made a poorly organized foray into Katanga, where mostly Swedish UN peacekeepers refused to act against Tshombe’s secessionist regime and the Congolese troops were repelled by the white mercenary-led Katanga army.
United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold was worried that Lumumba would undermine the UN and turn Congo into a Soviet ally. As such, the secretary-general sought to vilify Congo’s first prime minister by comparing Lumumba to Hitler, and his ideology of Pan-Africanism to fascism. Taking those analogies further, particularly Hitler’s association with the Holocaust, Hammarskjold also warned of an “incipient genocide” and later described the killing of Luba people in Kasai as “characteristic of the crime of genocide.”17 Academics and right-wing journalists repeated the accusations. An American anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in the Congo in 1960 wrote that the Lulua demand that the Luba accept their chiefs or leave South Kasai led to “one of the bloodiest genocide campaigns in African history.” He also stated that Lumumba sent “his troops to join the Lulua in their campaign to exterminate the Luba of Luluabourg.”18 While there has been little research conducted on the ANC massacres of Luba in Kasai, no evidence has been presented that Lumumba or anyone else planned to exterminate part or whole of any group. The rhetoric of genocide deployed against Lumumba was simply meant to justify his elimination.
In early September 1960, President Kasavubu cynically used the pretext that Lumumba had been responsible for “genocide” in South Kasai to dismiss him as prime minister. Lumumba rejected that claim as an unconstitutional neocolonial conspiracy by Belgium and France and responded by dismissing the president. In October 1960, Mobutu, conspiring with U.S. and Belgian officials, used the Congolese military to place Lumumba under house arrest in Leopoldville. After trying to escape to his home area of Stanleyville, where his armed loyalists were rallying under Deputy Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga, Lumumba was recaptured, publically beaten, and detained at the military camp in Thysville. The ousted prime minister was bundled onto an aircraft bound for South Kasai, where he was supposed to face charges of genocide, but, at the last minute, the plane was mysteriously diverted to Katanga. In January 1961, Lumumba was killed by a firing squad commanded by a Belgian mercenary working for Tshombe, who was in direct contact with Belgian officials. Lumumba’s corpse was dissolved in acid. The unsubstantiated charge of genocide was used not merely to justify Lumumba’s dismissal but his murder. At the start of February, Tshombe, who knew Lumumba was dead, “expressed his astonishment at the concern shown by the United Nations with regard to the transfer to Katanga . . . of the ex-Prime Minister, despite the fact that he had been recognized as guilty of genocide by the United Nations.”19 When asked by journalists about the fate of the missing former prime minister, “Tshombe reminded his audience that the United Nations had already accused Mr. Lumumba of genocide.”20 Several weeks later, the accusations of genocide were reversed, when Tshombe’s forces confronted Katanga Luba, who were supporters of the murdered prime minister. After Katangese troops were reported to have destroyed Luba villages and shot fleeing residents, UN head of operations in the Congo and Indian diplomat Rajeshwar Dayal warned Tshombe “that the behavior of his troops contains the elements of genocide.”21
Given that Kalonji shared the pro-Western and anti-communist view of Mobutu and Kasavubu, the fall of Lumumba renewed the life of the autonomous South Kasai state. Indeed, the Congolese regime sent many supporters of Lumumba there for execution. With revenue from diamond sales, Kalonji’s Luba-dominated state became increasingly militaristic and victimized minorities such as the Kanyok. The secession ended in September 1962, when a section of the South Kasai army, encouraged by Leopoldville, rebelled against Kalonji.22
In February 1961, the UN, prompted by the now-apparent death of Lumumba and accusations of genocide against Tshombe’s regime, authorized ONUC to prevent civil war in Congo by crushing the Katanga secession. In Katanga, Tshombe’s mercenary-led forces also fought the ANC and allied Luba fighters. On his way to negotiate a cease-fire in Katanga, Hammarskjold was killed on September 18 when his plane crashed in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Although the official Rhodesian and UN inquiries ruled that the incident had been caused by pilot error, many questions remain about the crash, which some see as an assassination by powers or commercial interests that did not want the Katanga succession to fail. In October 1961, elements of Mobutu’s ANC passed through Kasai to invade Katanga but were repulsed and during their retreat sacked Luluabourg. While the U.S. Eisenhower administration had tolerated Katanga as an anti-communist redoubt, the new Kennedy administration saw it as a neocolonial embarrassment and shifted policy toward supporting a friendly regime in the entire Congo. After a series of aggressive operations by UN forces, Tshombe surrendered in January 1963, and Katanga was reintegrated into Congo.23
With the suppression of separatist Katanga, ONUC withdrew from Congo, which provided an opportunity for alienated supporters of the murdered Lumumba, now seen as a martyr, who formed the National Liberation Council (CNL), based in neighboring and leftist Congo-Brazzaville. In January 1964, Pierre Mulele led a rebellion in the western area of Kwilu, and Gaston Soumialot established an insurgent staging area in Burundi, from which he recruited exiled Tutsi fighters from Rwanda (see chapter 2) and obtained arms from Communist China. During May and June, Soumialot’s rebels, called “Simba,” which means lion in Kiswahili, invaded eastern Congo and took the towns of Uvira and Fizi and the Lake Tanganyika port of Albertville. In August, they captured the northeastern city of Stanleyville. The CNL proclaimed the People’s Republic of Congo, which was recognized by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China. Tshombe, now strangely the prime minister of Congo, received support from the U.S. CIA and Belgium to recruit white mercenaries from South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and France and from among Cuban exiles in the United States. They bolstered the ANC in its campaign against the CNL rebels. By April 1964, the rebellion in Kwilu was crushed. In November, Belgian paratroopers, dropped by U.S. aircraft, and mercenary-led ANC ground forces recaptured Stanleyville and other centers in the east. Although a small Cuban contingent under Ernesto “Che” Guevara arrived in eastern Congo in April 1965 to assist the rebels, the insurgency had been reduced to isolated pockets and was essentially over by the end of the year.24
In November 1965, ANC commander Mobutu overthrew Kasavubu and Tshombe and established a U.S.-sponsored anti-communist dictatorship. Mobutu’s one-party state created a cult of personality to compensate for lack of legitimacy and competence. As such, it imposed an “authenticity” campaign, which included renaming the country Zaire, replacing colonial place names with African ones, outlawing European personal names and Western attire, and changing his own name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (The all-powerful warrior who goes from victory to victory leaving fire in his wake). At the same time, Mobutu had political opponents tortured and murdered and created such a thoroughly corrupt regime that it inspired political scientists to coin the term “kleptocracy.” Foreign allies helped overcome serious threats. With air transport provided by the United States and training by Israel, Mobutu’s forces overcame a late 1960s mutiny in eastern Congo by white mercenaries whose contracts had expired and did not want to give up control of the area. During the Angolan Civil War, which had been prompted by the departure of the colonial Portuguese in 1974, Mobutu backed the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which was led by his brother-in-law, Holden Roberto. That backing alienated the Zairean dictator from the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which seized power with Soviet and Cuban support. In 1977 exiled Katangese separatists based in Angola invaded Shaba Province (the new name for Katanga) but were eventually repelled by Zairean forces supported by Moroccan allies. Since the U.S. Carter administration had balked at helping Mobutu given his poor human rights record and Belgium resented his nationalization of mines, Zaire entered France’s network of francophone allies in Africa. In 1978 French and Belgian airborne operations, supported logistically by the United States and the United Kingdom, defeated another Katanga separatist invasion of Shaba that threatened Western mining interests. In 1984 and 1985, Zairean forces repelled amphibious raids on Moba, a port on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, by exiled rebels based in Tanzania.25
Mobutu lost his long-standing U.S. and French support in the early 1990s, given the end of the Cold War. Faced with international and domestic demands for democratization, he clung to power in Zaire by engaging in proposed political reforms that went nowhere as the economy and state crumbled. In eastern Zaire’s North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, violence flared over citizenship and control of land. Several groups originally from Rwanda had settled in eastern Zaire, including Tutsi pastoralists called Banyamulenge (people of Mulenge) who had moved there during the 19th century; Hutu and Tutsi laborers called Banyarwanda (people of Rwanda) who had been sent there as a labor force by Belgian colonial rulers during the 1930s; and mostly Tutsi refugees from Rwanda’s 1959 social revolution and the 1963–1964 genocide. While Congo’s Banyamulenge Tutsi had initially joined the Simba rebellion of the mid-1960s, the slaughter of their cattle by insurgents caused them to change allegiance to Mobutu, who rewarded them with administrative positions. In addition, many of the 1959-era Tutsi refugees were financially better off than locals and could afford to buy land and open businesses. Their prosperity led to bitter resentment, and, from 1963 to 1966, there was a wave of violence by “indigenous” Nande and Hunde people in North Kivu against anyone of “foreign” Rwandan origins, regardless of Hutu or Tutsi affiliation. Beginning in March 1993, with economic crisis and hunger, tensions resurfaced in North Kivu, with “indigenous” groups attacking “Rwandan” Hutu and Tutsi. Around 1,000 people from each of the “indigenous” and “immigrant” communities were killed, and tens of thousands were displaced. The arrival of Mobutu’s dreaded security forces calmed the situation, and a series of meetings in late 1993 and early 1994 restored order.
As the primarily Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took control of Rwanda in June and July 1994, over 2 million mostly Hutu refugees poured out of the country, with over half going to Zaire’s eastern provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu. Among them were elements of the former Rwandan military and Interahamwe militia, who began to reorganize and collect a war tax from civilian refugees to buy back weapons confiscated from them by Zairean forces. They worked through the Mobutu regime and France to have new weapons delivered to Goma. In early 1995, exiled Rwandan Hutu fighters based in eastern Zaire refugee camps began to infiltrate western Rwanda, particularly around the towns of Cyangugu, Kibuye, and Gisenyi, where they ambushed buses and raided schools. At the same time, the influx of Rwandan refugees in North Kivu prompted xenophobic attacks against people of Rwandan origin including some, like the Tutsi Banyamulenge, who had lived there for generations. In August 1995, the Zairian government ordered the expulsion of all refugees and immigrants from Rwanda and Burundi, including the Banyamulenge. In early 1996, violence in North Kivu escalated when Hutu militias attacked Hunde and Tutsi, and Hunde militias attacked Hutu and Tutsi. Many people of Tutsi identity fled to Rwanda. Several operations by Zairean security forces failed to stop the violence and even contributed to it: some units, their personnel not having been paid in some time by the collapsing state, received bribes to support such factions as the Banyamulenge, Hunde, or Rwandan Hutu. In South Kivu, despite the arrival of 200,000 refugees from Burundi in 1993 and 500,000 from Rwanda in 1994, the situation remained somewhat stable until June–July 1996, when attacks began on the Banyamulenge, who subsequently took up arms.26
The presence of exiled Rwandan Hutu Power groups and the oppression of the Tutsi Banyamulenge in eastern Zaire prompted Rwanda’s new RPF regime to intervene, resulting in the First Congo War of 1996–1997. In 1995 the RPF began to train and arm Banyamulenge fighters in Rwanda and Burundi, and, the following year, they began to infiltrate eastern Zaire along with Rwandan troops. In October 1996, the Mobutu administration officially accused Rwanda and Burundi of invading its territory. The undisciplined and unpaid Zairean soldiers simply ran away as the Banyamulenge rebels and RPF troops captured the key towns of Uvira and Bukavu. Backed by the allied states of Rwanda and Uganda, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) was formed as a coalition of Zairean anti-Mobutu groups, with the Banyamulenge rebels as its nucleus and the long-exiled 1960s revolutionary Laurent Kabila as its leader. The objective of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA, the name for the RPF-led Rwandan military) in supporting the AFDL rebellion was to eliminate the refugee camps in both South and North Kivu that represented a security threat to Rwanda as they housed exiled Rwandan Hutu Power fighters. As discussed in chapter 2, RPA attacks on refugee camps had started back in April 1995 at Kibeho in southern Rwanda. In September 1996, the RPA bombarded refugee camps across the border in eastern Zaire. In late October, RPA units, using armored vehicles and mortars, attacked the camps, in which some civilians were killed and others forced to flee further from the Rwandan border. By the end of October, some 600,000 people had assembled at Mugunga camp, 20 kilometers west of Goma in North Kivu, making it the largest-known refugee concentration in history. Genocide rhetoric was quickly deployed. Given the atrocious living conditions in the camps, UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali referred to the situation as “genocide by starvation” and a physician from Doctors without Borders told a reporter that it amounted to “genocide by disease.”27 The RPA advanced into Zaire. In early November, the RPA occupied Goma, and in early December, it captured the Bukavu-Goma road junction. In mid-November, given international talks about dispatching a UN peacekeeping force to protect the camps, the RPA forcefully and quickly dismantled the remaining camps, including Mugunga. Hundreds of thousands of refugees returned to Rwanda, others fled deeper into Zaire, pursued by the AFDL and RPA for several thousand kilometers; it is likely that large numbers were massacred.
Several other neighboring states invaded Mobutu’s beleaguered country. Units of the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) invaded Zaire’s northeastern Orientale Province on the pretext of pursuing exiled Ugandan rebels of the Alliance of Democratic Forces (ADF) and also assisted the AFDL in securing the town of Bunia. The Burundian military, in September 1996, made a foray into South Kivu, where they attacked exiled Burundian Hutu rebels of the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) and Burundian refugees. Mobutu’s regime collapsed as Angolan forces, seeking to end Zaire’s support for Angolan rebels, advanced across the southern border, and AFDL/Rwandan fighters pushed from the east. It appears that the United States may have provided intelligence, communications, air transport for supplies, and perhaps Special Forces advisors to the AFDL and its Rwandan and Ugandan sponsors. Although Zairean forces mostly abandoned or sold their weapons and withdrew, the retreating Rwandan exiles of the former FAR/Interahamwe fought the AFDL/RPA until late February and early March 1997, when some fled west to other countries, including the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) and Cameroon, and others hid in isolated pockets of vast eastern Zaire. Western guilt over failing to intervene in Rwanda to stop the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and the RPA’s banning of journalists from the war zone meant that there was very little international protest over the invasion of Zaire. In May, a sickly Mobutu fled the country, and Kabila declared himself president, changed the name Zaire to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and accompanied victorious AFDL forces into Kinshasa.28
Some have claimed that the killing of Rwandan Hutu refugees in Zaire by the RPA and its allies should be understood as genocide. Of course, the RPF regime in Kigali denied (and continues to deny) this, claiming that its forces were fighting exiled Hutu Power extremists and fugitive perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda who represented a threat to their new state. While credible eyewitness accounts state that Rwandan Hutu fighters were present in Zaire, it is clear most of the Rwandan victims of the RPA were unarmed and fleeing civilian refugees. In some cases, the RPA enlisted unwitting humanitarian workers to lure the refugees to a central location in the hopes of receiving aid, but instead they were killed. In May 1997, on the eve of Kabila’s seizure of power, AFDL forces under command of Rwandan officers massacred hundreds of unarmed Rwandan Hutu refugees at Mbandaka and the nearby village of Wendji as they were waiting to cross the Congo River into the neighboring Republic of Congo. The fact that Mbandaka is about 1,200 kilometers west of Rwanda undermines the RPF argument that those operations were important for the security of their country. Indeed, the concerted effort by the RPA to attack Rwandan Hutu refugee camps across Zaire and pursue those who escaped might be interpreted as evidence of intention to exterminate a specific group based on national or ethnic origin. Later, in early 1998, a UN team investigated those attacks on Rwandan refugees in Zaire, but its activities were ended prematurely, given lack of cooperation by the recently established Kabila regime, which, at the time, was dependent on Rwandan military support. The UN team reported that it had identified 40 massacre sites and that there was evidence of planned efforts to remove bodies from mass graves and dispose of them elsewhere. The report recommended further investigation and concluded that “one possible interpretation of this phase of the operations carried out by the AFDL with Rwandan support is that a decision was taken to eliminate this part of the Hutu ethnic group as such. If proved, this would constitute genocide.”29 It has been estimated that around 230,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees disappeared in Zaire/DRC during 1996 and 1997. No one has ever been held accountable. For political scientist Emizet Kisangani, “In light of the evidence, the killing of the Hutu refugees was a calculated and premeditated course of action, which started in eastern Congo and continued to the western part where refugees crossed the border. According to Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention, such acts qualified as genocide.”30
The new Kabila regime in Kinshasa quickly fell out with its regional backers. Although the new Congolese Armed Forces (FAC) contained many Congolese Banyamulenge and Rwandan Tutsi and its chief of staff was RPA Lieutenant Colonel James Kabarebe, the Rwandan and Ugandan governments believed it was not committing enough troops to control exiled rebel groups in the eastern border region. Beginning in October 1997 and continuing into 1998, former FAR/Interahamwe, known as the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR), used eastern Congo as a staging area for guerrilla attacks inside Rwanda. Consequently, the RPA launched an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign within Rwanda. Although the RPA officially withdrew from eastern DRC in September 1997, it returned in December, and the next year soldiers from Rwanda and Burundi began patrolling the Congolese towns of Uvira, Fizi, and Bukavu. Looting by Rwandan troops who locals mockingly called “Soldiers without Borders” prompted the formation of Congolese Mai Mai self-defense militias. Tutsi and non-Tutsi elements of the FAC fought each other, and non-Tutsi FAC soldiers refused to cooperate in the RPA’s war against the ALIR (former FAR/Interahamwe). In December 1997, FAC soldiers, firing their weapons into the air to simulate a battle, allowed hundreds of ex-FAR Hutu fighters to pass through Bukavu en route to Rwanda. In July 1998, Kabila, under criticism for his increasingly harsh regime and for letting foreigners control the country, dismissed Kabarebe and ordered all Rwandan military personnel out of the DRC. At the start of August, FAC units in eastern DRC mutinied with the support of the RPA and adopted the name Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), which aimed at overthrowing Kabila. Around the same time, 1,200 RPA soldiers under Kabarebe commandeered civilian airliners at Goma airport in eastern DRC and flew to Kitona in the west of the country, which threatened the nearby capital of Kinshasa. In September, Rwandan and Ugandan forces invaded and occupied parts of eastern DRC. In northern DRC’s Equateur Province, the Ugandan army sponsored a new rebel group known as the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, who had links to the old Mobutu regime, which had derived its support from that region.
Since the Kabila regime had recently joined the Southern African Development Community (SADC), it was able to call on military assistance from Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia. Zimbabwe wanted to secure business deals with Kabila; Angola wanted to continue its support for Kabila to obstruct the activities of Angolan rebels in the DRC; and Namibia supported its long-time ally Angola. Other SADC members, including South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia, were not eager to intervene in support of the unelected Kabila. Within the DRC, the Angolan military quickly destroyed the RPA expeditionary force near Kitona, as Zimbabwean forces secured Kinshasa, where mobs killed suspected rebel infiltrators and anyone who looked like a Tutsi. However, Congolese rebels and Rwandan and Ugandan troops quickly took control of key towns in eastern DRC. Other African countries became involved. Since Uganda was backing rebels in southern Sudan, the Sudanese government convinced Chad to send an expedition to support Kabila, and those troops were transported on Libyan aircraft. Sudan also recruited Rwandan former FAR/Interahamwe and sent them to fight in the DRC. Kabila and his allies mobilized exiled Rwandan and Burundian Hutu fighters to pit against the RPA. Kabila’s regime enlisted former FAR/Interahamwe from such neighboring countries as the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo, gave them weapons and training, and sent them to fight in the east and north. Burundian FDD fighters were recruited from refugee camps in Tanzania, trained and equipped in Zimbabwe, and sent to their new base in Lubumbashi in southern DRC. During the first half of 1999, the Rwandan-led RCD/RPA alliance advanced through Kasai and North Katanga toward the diamond-mining center of Mbuji-Mayi, but Zimbabwean troops halted their progress. The fighting around Mbuji-Mayi also involved some 8,000 ex-FAR/Interahamwe flown in on Angolan and Zimbabwean aircraft. The involvement of so many countries and exiled groups in the DRC inspired U.S. assistant secretary of state Susan Rice to dub the conflict the first “African World War.”
The war stalemated with a static “frontline”—in reality a series of pockets in which enemy forces opposed one another rather than a continuous war zone—running from Mbandaka in the northwest through Kananga (formerly Luluabourg) and Mbuji-Mayi to Pweto in the southeast. The DRC was effectively partitioned, with areas occupied by various state forces and rebel groups. In Equateur Province, Bemba’s MLC remained popular as locals anticipated the return of a northern-dominated regime and disciplined Ugandan troops behaved well. However, in the east, the RCD lacked legitimacy: it was seen as a puppet of Rwanda, its leadership quarreled, and RCD/RPA troops victimized communities in a continuing conflict with enclaves of Mai Mai and ALIR fighters. Many Tutsi Banyamulenge leaders now felt that Rwanda was cynically using them for its own reasons, opposed the RPA occupation, and rejected the RCD. In early 1999, some Banyamulenge rebels began fighting the RPA and eventually allied with their old Mai Mai enemies. In August 1999 and May–June 2000, soldiers from Uganda and Rwanda, along with their respective rebel clients, fought each other in Kisangani. The RCD split into rival factions, consisting of pro-Uganda RCD-Kisangani (RCD-K) and pro-Rwanda RCD-Goma (RCD-G). As the war continued, most external forces began to steal and illegally export DRC mineral resources such as diamonds, coltan, and cassiterite. The swelling of the global electronics industry fueled demand and increased profits for some of those resources. A UN investigation revealed that the armies of Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe were involved in theft of DRC minerals.
In July 1999, all major actors in the war agreed to a cease-fire and peace process called the Lusaka Agreement, which was meant to be supervised by the new UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC). However, Kabila’s stubbornness and Western international sympathy for Rwanda and Uganda delayed the deployment of UN peacekeepers, which meant the war resumed. In late 1999, both major rebel groups and their supporters attempted to advance down different rivers toward Kinshasa, with the MLC/Ugandans on the Ubangi and the RCD-G/Rwandans on the Tshuapa. That action was blocked by FAC and Zimbabwean troops, but a counteroffensive launched by Kabila proved disastrous. With their failure to advance down the Tshuapa, the Rwandans abandoned the goal of establishing a new puppet government in Kinshasa and focused on securing the mineral wealth of Kasai and Katanga. When Kigali, where the RPF’s Paul Kagame had recently become president, announced in August 2000 that it would withdraw its troops 200 kilometers from the frontline, the diplomatically incompetent Kabila exploited the opportunity by initiating an offensive in northeast Katanga in which FAC units were supplemented by former FAR/Interahamwe and Burundian FDD. The RCD-G and RPA immediately staged an effective counterattack that pushed south to grab the much-contested town of Pweto at the start of December. The RCD-G/RPA was prevented from moving on the city of Lubumbashi by Zimbabwean reinforcements that were flown right up to the frontline at Lake Mweru.
In January 2001, Kabila was assassinated by his own bodyguards and swiftly replaced by his son, Joseph Kabila, who was more open to negotiation. The new Bush administration in the United States, less burdened by guilt for failing to act against the 1994 genocide in Rwanda than its predecessor, appeared less sympathetic to Kigali and insisted it honor the Lusaka Agreement. The foreign powers involved in the DRC war were now looking for an exit, as the expensive and internationally embarrassing conflict could no longer be paid for by looted minerals. Throughout 2001 and 2002, the young Kabila attended a series of international meetings that resulted in foreign forces withdrawing from the frontline. In April 2002, at Sun City in South Africa, the Kabila regime and the MLC rebels signed an agreement to form a unified, multiparty government and hold elections, but their negotiations were rejected by RCD-G. At the end of July, Kinshasa and Kigali signed the Pretoria Accord, in which the former promised to dismantle and disarm ex-FAR/Interahamwe groups in eastern DRC and the latter agreed to extract its forces. The September Luanda Agreement followed, in which the DRC and Uganda made peace, and the latter committed to bring its soldiers home. By late October 2002, most foreign forces had left the DRC, except the Ugandans, who withdrew in June 2003. In mid-December 2002 in South Africa, all the major DRC parties, consisting of the Kabila regime, MLC, three RCD factions, Mai Mai militias, and civil society representatives signed the Global and Inclusive Accord (AGI), in which they agreed to form a shared government with Kabila as president, to integrate the armed groups into a new national military, and to hold elections within two years. The settlement was ratified by all parties at another meeting in Sun City in April 2003. The renewal of negotiations meant that the number of MONUC peacekeepers in the DRC increased from just 200 in December 2000 to 2,400 by October 2001 and 4,200 by the end of 2002.31
The number of people who died as a result of “Africa’s World War” has been hotly debated. Given the inaccessibility of the area during the conflict, it is not possible to calculate precise fatality figures, and estimates are based on demographic studies that extrapolate from small local surveys. During the conflict, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a long-established international humanitarian organization, regularly studied and reported the mounting death toll. It ultimately concluded that between August 1998 and November 2002 some 3.3 million people had died as a result of conflict in the DRC, which made it the world’s deadliest conflict since the end of the Second World War. Extending the period from 1998 to 2004 resulted in a figure of 3.9 million war-related deaths, and a further expansion from 1998 to 2007, given the continuation of violence in the DRC, resulted in a figure of 5.4 million deaths attributed to conflict. It was noted that the vast majority of those deaths were not caused by direct violence but by disease and hunger related to population displacement and state collapse. Those extremely high fatality figures were used to convince the UN to dispatch and maintain the world’s largest peace-keeping force in the DRC.32 They also resulted in widespread accusations from Congolese that they were the victims of genocide initiated in 1998 by the U.S.-backed Rwandan and Ugandan invaders. Many Congolese maintained that they had not been involved in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda but were paying the price for it, as the RPA invaded the Congo and looted its resources on the pretext of ensuring Rwanda’s security. For example, Yaa-Lengi M. Ngemi cites the IRC fatality figures when he accuses US President Bill Clinton of “supporting Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi in their invasion and occupation of part of the Congo, and in their carrying this genocide against the Congolese people, with the Congo’s minerals and other resources being stolen from the occupied areas by both these three countries and the American and European corporations operating there.”33 However, more recently, the Canadian-based Human Security Report Project (HSRP) has criticized IRC research methodology for underestimating the peacetime death rate in the DRC and thus dramatically inflating its estimate of war-related deaths. For the HSRP, which acknowledges the gravity of the conflict in the DRC, many of the millions of Congolese who died during the war would have perished regardless, given the country’s historically poor living conditions. As such, it is possible that in reality several hundred thousand people—not millions—died from war-related causes in the DRC during Africa’s World War of 1998 to 2002 and that the figure increases to around 800,000 for the longer period of 1998 to 2007.34 To some extent, arguments over death totals and related accusations of genocide are similar to claims made concerning the impact of early colonization on the Congo. For some, the higher number of deaths, the more appropriate it is to employ the term genocide. As previously discussed, however, that is a fallacy; the international legal definition of genocide makes no mention of number of deaths. Intention is the key point, and in the case of Africa’s World War, there is no indication that anyone planned to exterminate part or all of the Congolese population. Lack of intention should not be seen as a vindication of the powers who were involved in the war. Just like Leopold II a century earlier, the Congolese and foreign leaders who joined in what might be called the “Scramble for Congo” from 1998 to 2002 cannot be described as genocidal, but they were certainly bent on greedily looting the country’s natural resources and did not care about the people who suffered and died in the process.
Violence in eastern DRC continued after the formal withdrawal of foreign forces in 2002–2003. Accusations of genocide and genocidal intentions increased as local groups had seen how effectively the RPF government of Rwanda and its sympathizers had employed such rhetoric in previous years. Foreign occupation had created a deadly legacy in the DRC. In 1999 the Ugandan military occupying Congo’s northeastern Orientale Province created a separate local administration for the eastern portion, which became the new Ituri Province. That action enflamed existing tensions between the area’s Hema pastoralists and Lendu cultivators, as the Ugandans appeared to favor the former. The Belgian colonial rulers and Mobutu’s regime had also favored the Hema, who formed a local, administrative, land-holding, and economic elite. Tensions in Ituri worsened during 2001 with the split of RCD-K into a supposedly pro-Hema RCD-ML (Liberation Movement) and the allegedly pro-Lendu RCD-K. While each side expressed growing fear of genocide perpetrated by the other, control of the province’s rich mineral resources (particularly gold) provided a material motivation for conflict. Ugandan officers justified their continued occupation of Ituri as necessary to prevent genocide among those groups. Around 2002, with Ugandan withdrawal imminent, Hema militias accepted military support from Rwanda, which wanted to gain access to the mineral wealth of the area and counter Ugandan influence. Hema leaders compared themselves to Rwanda’s Tutsi and their local Lendu enemies to the Hutu. A Hema chief stated that the Tutsi leaders of Rwanda “had lived through a genocide so they knew what it was like. They understood me and provided us with weapons and logistics.” On the other hand, Lendu militias began to accuse Uganda and Rwanda of trying to establish a Tutsi-Hema empire in the region that would exterminate other groups.35
During the first half of 2003, the Ugandan military withdrawal from Ituri Province resulted in heightened violence between Hema and Lendu militias. At the same time, representatives of the historically marginalized Mbuti Twa (pygmy) minority reported to the UN Indigenous People’s Forum that their community had become subject to genocide and cannibalism by various factions, particularly the MLC in 2002 and more recently by local Ituri militias.36 In April 2003, MONUC deployed an 800-strong Uruguayan battalion in Bunia, but this force, although it saved many lives, was insufficient to stop the fighting. In June, Lendu militias and the Hema Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), led by Thomas Lubanga—who had formerly been under the protection of Uganda but now was supported by Rwanda—fought each other over Bunia, resulting in thousands of civilians fleeing to the local MONUC headquarters and airport. Both Hema and Lendu militias massacred civilians of the opposite ethnicity. At the end of August, UN envoy Iulia Motoc, a Romanian scholar of international law, visited Bunia and declared that genocide and other war crimes and crimes against humanity may have been committed in Ituri and urged an international investigation.37 The rhetoric of genocide was powerful enough to prompt the European Union to undertake its first autonomous military operation (Operation Artemis) outside Europe. With UN approval, an Interim Emergency Multinational Force (IEMF), consisting mostly of French troops, arrived in Bunia in June and secured the town but did nothing to disarm the ethnic militias. In September, the IEMF was replaced by MONUC’s new Ituri brigade. which imposed a weapon-free zone on Bunia. However, violence resumed in October and continued into the next year. In 2005 MONUC launched aggressive cordon and search operations against the Ituri militias. By late June, a UN ultimatum to surrender weapons or join the integrated national army resulted in the disarming of 15,600 out of an estimated 20,000 fighters. In February 2007, the Lendu Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI) became the last Ituri militia group to begin handing in weapons to UN officials. However, over the subsequent years, new armed groups involved in mineral smuggling clashed with DRC government forces trying to exert control over the province. No one has ever been charged with the crime of genocide for events in Ituri. In March 2005, the UPC’s Lubanga, who was detained by the DRC interim government, became the first person ever arrested on an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant. The Hema militia leader was sent to The Hague in the Netherlands and eventually found guilty of conscripting child soldiers and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. Pro-Lendu militia leaders Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui were handed over to the ICC by the DRC authorities in 2007 and 2008, respectively, and charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes for massacres of Hema people in 2003. Chui was released in 2012, given lack of evidence, and Katanga was convicted two years later.38
The 2002 Pretoria Agreement failed to end conflict between Rwanda and exiled Rwandan Hutu groups based in the eastern DRC provinces of South Kivu and North Kivu. While Rwanda had defeated the ALIR during its 1998 invasion of the DRC, the 2001–2002 peace process allowed former FAR/Interahamwe elements who had been mobilized by the Kabila regime to reestablish themselves in that region as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). When the DRC government halted official support for the FDLR as part of the wider 2002 peace process, Hutu rebels obtained weapons and ammunition from the local Mai Mai militia and corrupt Congolese military commanders. While the Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF—the new name of the RPA) officially evacuated the DRC in September 2002, it left behind a small covert presence to combat exiled Hutu militants and acquire valuable resources. The Rwandan government convinced some important FDLR officers to join the RDF, and some 7,000 Hutu fighters returned home between 2003 and 2007 as part of a reconciliation project. However, the continued presence of 5,000 FDLR insurgents in eastern DRC provided Kigali with an ongoing excuse to intervene across the border in pursuit of the dreaded genocidaires.
With encouragement from Rwanda, some Congolese Tutsi Banyamulenge officers from RCD-G refused to integrate into Congo’s new armed forces and claimed to protect local Tutsi civilians from the FDLR. In May 2003, General Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese veteran of the 1994 RPF campaign in Rwanda, led mutinous Congolese Tutsi troops from Goma in North Kivu to Bukavu in South Kivu, where they killed several hundred loyalist troops and civilians and raped and looted as MONUC peacekeepers stood by. Given diplomatic pressure from the UN, the United States, and Britain, the Kigali government encouraged Nkunda’s forces to leave Bukavu, and the returning Congolese army took revenge on local Banyamulenge, with 3,000 fleeing to Rwanda. In late 2004, Rwandan troops crossed the border to attack the FDLR and supplied weapons to Nkunda’s fighters, which enabled them to repel a Congolese army offensive with over 100,000 civilians displaced in the violence. The media-savvy Nkunda, at the time of the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, claimed to be fighting to prevent another genocide of Tutsi in the DRC. At the end of March 2005, following a MONUC demand for FDLR to disarm, the group’s chairman, Ignace Murwanashyaka, renounced the 1994 genocide and violence and requested to return to Rwanda to participate in politics, but that request was dismissed by Kigali. In 2005 and 2006, UN and Congolese forces conducted offensive operations against the FDLR, which simply moved deeper into the bush. In 2006 Nkunda’s mutineers enlarged their territory in North Kivu and sought legitimacy by forming the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), which claimed to protect minorities. The implication was that Congolese Tutsi needed to retain their weapons to protect themselves from genocide by the Hutu FDLR.39
After defeating another Congolese army offensive in 2008, Nkunda signed a peace agreement that involved a cease-fire, the return of civilians to their homes, and amnesty; but he continued to insist on FDLR disarmament. In late October 2008, the CNDP renewed hostilities against the Congolese government by seizing a major military camp near the Virunga National Park, which it used as a staging area for a southward advance toward Goma. Congolese and UN soldiers withdrew, leaving Mai Mai militia and FDLR to resist, and 100,000 people were displaced. In January 2009, the CNDP split with General Bosco “the Terminator” Ntaganda, a Congolese Tutsi who had fought with the RPF in the early 1990s, heading a faction that agreed to integrate into the Congolese military and transform their group into a political party. Unable to defeat the CNDP militarily, the Kabila administration made a deal with Rwanda to allow its forces to cross the border to engage the FDLR if they removed Nkunda. Later that month, Nkunda and his remaining three battalions were defeated by a combined Congolese Army–RDF operation that cleared rebels from the border area, and the fugitive general was arrested when he fled into Rwanda. He was never seen again. The FDLR regrouped, attacked villages, and clashed with the Congolese army in South Kivu.
In April 2012, Ntaganda and several hundred former CNDP fighters mutinied from the Congolese army after rumors spread that they were to be transferred away from their North Kivu home and that their leader was to face war crimes charges at the ICC. Calling themselves the March 23 Movement, or M23, in memory of the day in 2009 when they joined the political process, the mutineers rallied under the military leadership of Colonel Sultani Makenga in the Virunga National Park and then seized several towns near Goma. In November 2012, M23 fighters temporarily occupied Goma, which was suddenly abandoned by Congolese and UN troops, where they captured heavy weapons and ammunition. Although the Rwandan government denied international accusations that it was supplying M23, that claim soured its relations with the UN and the United States. In March 2013, Ntaganda, facing dissent within his movement and loss of support from Rwanda, surrendered himself to the U.S. embassy in Kigali and was eventually transported to The Hague. In November 2013, a UN special-intervention brigade consisting of South African, Tanzanian, and Malawian units together with Congolese forces embarked on an offensive that crushed the M23 movement, with many of its fighters fleeing into Uganda.40
The FDLR continued to function in parts of eastern Congo, where they became involved in illegal mineral extraction and smuggling facilitated by members of the Congolese military. By the late 2000s, the rank and file of the FDLR were mostly displaced and impoverished youth who had not been involved in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. However, FDLR military commander General Sylvestre Mudacumura had been deputy commander of the Rwandan presidential guard during the 1994 genocide and in 2012 became the subject of an international arrest warrant for war crimes committed in eastern DRC. Some of the FDLR’s European-based political leaders have been prosecuted for crimes committed in the DRC. In 2009 FDLR political leaders Ignace Murwanashyaka and Straton Musoni were arrested in Germany, where they were eventually convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentenced to 13 and 8 years imprisonment, respectively. In 2011 Callixte Mbarushimana, FDLR secretary, was arrested in France and sent to the ICC in The Hague, where he faced similar charges, but those were dropped because of insufficient evidence, and he was released in December 2012. In late February 2015, after the expiry of a demand by regional leaders for the FDLR to disarm, the Congolese military launched an offensive against the Hutu group, though UN support was withheld given the alleged involvement of several Congolese commanders in previous atrocities. While the Tanzanian and South African governments—which provided troops to the UN intervention brigade—expressed concern over the potential for heavy civilian casualties given the integration of the FDLR with local communities, the Rwandan government criticized the slowness of the UN to act against this group, which it continues to portray as a security threat.41
The modern history of the DRC is replete with accusations and counteraccusations of genocide. However, almost all of the accusations fail to meet international legal standards and may even fail to correspond with some of the alterative and broader definitions of genocide. The reign of terror imposed by Leopold II’s Congo Free State in the late 19th century, though terrible, does not qualify as a retroactive genocide because there was no intent to exterminate. The allegation that Patrice Lumumba, independent Congo’s first prime minister who so troubled the Americans and Belgians, perpetrated genocide against the Luba of Kasai in 1960 was an obvious contrivance to justify his overthrow and murder. Such demonizing language was not only employed by Katanga separatist leader Moise Tshombe but by the highest UN official. The deaths of hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of Congolese during Africa’s World War from 1998 to 2002 also fails to satisfy the legal definition of genocide; the domestic and foreign leaders involved were predatory, negligent, and greedy but not intentionally genocidal. In this they were reminiscent of Leopold II. While many rival groups in Ituri and the Kivus invoked the language of genocide after 2003, the violence that plagued those areas did not result in genocide, though terrible violence did take place. Accusations and fears of genocide became excuses for rebel and militia groups to retain their weapons so they could continue to control their fiefdoms and extract wealth. The only example of mass violence in Congo’s history that seems to approach the legal standard required to prove an accusation of genocide occurred in 1996 and 1997 when the Rwandan military and its Congolese rebel allies attacked Rwandan Hutu refugees and pursued them for more than 1,000 kilometers across Central Africa. The concerted transcontinental chase would seem to indicate intent to destroy, and the target group was identified on the basis of national and ethnic identity. Of course, the counterargument is that the Rwandan and Congolese forces were in pursuit of dangerous Hutu Power fighters who had perpetrated genocide in Rwanda and were using civilian refugees as human shields, which led to unfortunate collateral damage. Ironically, the fight against genocide can potentially become an alibi for genocide.