32 Sub-Saharan Africa: Political Geography – The Great African War

The Great African War was a thirteen-year conflict in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was actually a series of four conflicts: the Rwandan Civil War, the Rwandan Genocide, and the First and Second Congo Wars.

The origins of the Great African War date back to 1885 and the Conference of Berlin, when much of the Congo basin was designated as the Belgian Congo, a personal possession of Belgium’s King Leopold. In 1908, after terrible human rights violations in the Belgian Congo were widely publicized, the Belgian parliament assumed control over the colony. Over the next fifty years, the Congo would become the most lucrative European colony in Africa.

In 1897, Rwanda was annexed into German East Africa. The two dominant ethnic groups in Rwanda were the Hutu and the Tutsi. Although they shared a language and many other cultural traditions, the two groups were divided by occupation. The majority Hutu were crop farmers, while the minority Tutsi were cattle farmers. In 1918, following World War I, control of Rwanda was transferred to Belgium. The Tutsi were largely favored by the Belgians during this colonial era, and they grew relatively wealthy as they came to dominate the colonial bureaucracy, economy, and military, much to the growing resentment of the Hutu.

The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960. Its new government had ambitious plans to nationalize the country’s tremendous natural wealth to benefit the whole of the country’s the population. Belgium, which feared it would lose lucrative connections to their former colony’s raw materials industries, and the United States, which felt that nationalization would open the door to communism, both conspired with Congo’s military to overthrow the democratically elected government. In 1965, an army commander named Joseph Mobutu seized control of the country. Mobutu renamed the country Zaire in 1971, and assumed the name Mobutu Sese Seko. He led a brutal, corrupt, and undemocratic government, but he was supported by the United States, France, and Belgium because of his hardline stance against communism. Mobutu enriched himself, his family, and his political allies while public infrastructure and social services eroded and the economy collapsed, especially in the remote eastern part of the country.

In 1959, a Hutu uprising drove more than 300,000 Tutsi from Rwanda, and many of them were forced to resettle in Uganda. Those Tutsi who remained in Rwanda were an even smaller minority than they’d been before. In 1973, a military coup brought Hutu dictator Juvenal Habyarimana to power. In 1990, the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi rebel group, invaded Rwanda from Uganda. For nearly four years, the Rwandan Civil War was fought between Rwanda’s Hutu-dominated military and the Tutsi RPF. In the process, hundreds of Tutsi civilians were murdered by Hutu militias. The war ended, briefly, in 1993 when Habyarimana signed a peace agreement. It established a government in which Hutus would share power with the Tutsi. Many Hutu extremists found the agreement unacceptable.

The peace was shattered the following year when Habyarimana was killed as his plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. Hutu extremists accused Tutsi forces of the assassination, and seized control of Rwanda’s government. What followed is commonly known as the Rwandan Genocide. Hutu militias, with government support, slaughtered more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus in just one hundred days. The Tutsi RPF, led by Paul Kagame, resumed fighting. In a stunning turn of events, the RPF seized control of nearly all of Rwanda within two months. Two million Hutus, fearing retribution for the genocide, fled into neighboring Zaire (Congo). In the following months, tens of thousands of Hutu civilians died of starvation and disease in Zaire refugee camps. Mobutu Sese Seko gave support to Hutu militants that had fled with the civilians. These militias then launched a series of attacks across the border into Rwanda, massacring Tutsi civilians, and forcibly enlisting Hutus to fight alongside them. These violent events would eventually broaden into the First Congo War.

In 1996, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan military invaded Zaire and surrounded the Hutu refugee camps. Hundreds of thousands of non-combatant Hutus were allowed to return to Rwanda, but Hutu militia fighters and their families were pursued by Tutsi forces and slaughtered. Mobutu continued to support the Hutus, which proved to be a disastrous decision. With Uganda’s support, the Rwandan army marched across Zaire to its capital, Kinshasa. In 1997, Mobutu fled the country, and Rwanda and Uganda installed Laurent Kabila as the country’s new president. He changed the name to the country from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of Congo. After a few months of peace, fighting resumed in what became known as the Second Congo War.

In 1998, Kabila turned against those who had put him in power by allowing Hutu militias to regroup in eastern Congo. In response, Rwanda invaded Congo again, establishing a military buffer zone in eastern Congo. Kabila then enlisted the Hutu militias to fight against Rwanda. The war broadened as Angola, Namibia, and Tanzania send troops to support Congo, while Uganda and Burundi sent troops to support Rwanda.

The war raged for more than five years. In the process, more than five million people were killed, and there were thousands of reports of mass rape. A disproportionately large number of these fatalities were women and children, mostly as result of starvation and disease. The economy of eastern Congo was shattered as combatants from both sides plundered the region for diamonds and gold.

In 2003, a peace agreement was reached that led to the withdraw of all foreign armies, and hostilities came to an official conclusion. In many ways, however, the war has never fully ended. Over the nearly two decades since, there has been sporadic violence. Tutsi militias sponsored by the Rwandan government, and Hutu militias commanded by those responsible for the 1994 genocide, continue to fight for control of eastern Congo.

Cited and additional bibliography:

“Rwanda Genocide: 100 Days of Slaughter.” BBC News, 4 Apr. 2019. www.bbc.com, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506.