THE COLD WAR and THE FIRST WAR and THE END of MOBUTU
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Zaire and the Cold War
During the Cold War, Mobutu promoted Zaire as a crucial pro-Western ally from which efforts at containment of Soviet influence and expansion in central and southern Africa could be launched. Kinshasa station became the CIA’s largest station in Africa, providing the Mobutu regime with intelligence and support to maintain its grip over disparate regions of the country. The West tolerated Mobutu’s excesses and methods, as his country was the chief bulwark against communism in central Africa. (Neighboring Angola and the Republic of the Congo, aka Congo-Brazzaville, were ruled by Marxist regimes that enjoyed Soviet support during the Cold War.) While Mobutu’s grip might have been challenged in distant regions, his use of brute force to quell rebellions or silence opponents compensated for his forces’ slow deployment times, and also ensured that his population remained frightened and docile.
The end of the Cold War meant the West no longer needed an alliance with Zaire. By the mid-1990s, Zaire had lost its Western patronage, including that of the United States. Mobutu had become an old, increasingly isolated man who preferred the good life on the French Riviera to keeping opposing forces in check at home. Meanwhile, discontent in regions far from Kinshasa, long restless under Mobutu’s rule, had become more organized. Eventually, Mobutu’s own armed forces deserted him as officers and enlisted men, seeing the decay in his regime, stole whatever they could and abandoned their posts. By the mid-1990s, the central government had no ability to meaningfully project or sustain military force on the far side of the country, let alone in Kinshasa, and no foreign actor cared to intervene on its behalf.
The First Congo War and the End of the Mobutu Era
A rebellion led by Laurent Kabila that had festered in the eastern Congo in the 1960s, but was ultimately contained, cropped up again. Kabila resurfaced in 1996, this time with Rwandan and Ugandan backing. Both neighboring countries sought a share of Zaire’s mineral wealth, though both also supported Zairean rebel groups to protect their own national security.
Rwanda was hunting down ethnic Hutu rebels who had fled after that country’s 1994 genocide, seeking to prevent the Hutus from reappearing as a threat to Rwanda’s Tutsi-dominated government. Known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (better known by the French acronym, FDLR), the ethnic Hutu fighters — whose current strength is estimated at 8,000-10,000 — fled unchallenged by Kinshasa into eastern Zaire. The Tutsi-led government of Rwanda considered the FDLR a national security threat as long as it remained mobilized and unmolested in the North and South Kivu area of Zaire, immediately adjacent to Rwanda.
Kigali’s calls for Kinshasa to demobilize and disperse the Hutu fighters went unheeded. This prompted Rwanda to support an ethnic Tutsi force led by Laurent Nkunda, a former general in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had overthrown the Hutu regime that instigated Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. Nkunda’s force, called the National Congress for People’s Defense — known by its French acronym, the CNDP — is estimated to have about 6,000 fighters.
Meanwhile, Uganda moved to confront the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and other Ugandan rebel groups like the Allied Democratic Front that operated in the lawless jungles of northeastern Congo, from where they launched attacks to destabilize Ugandan territory and the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. Uganda’s intervention in Zaire was meant to prevent the LRA from gaining a secure foothold and to keep either Kinshasa or Sudan, the LRA’s main patron, from harboring the rebel group.
With material support from Rwanda and Uganda, Laurent Kabila in 1997 launched a cross-country assault on Kinshasa. He overthrew the Mobutu regime, took power by May of that year and changed the country’s name from Zaire to the DRC. Initially, Uganda and Rwanda supported Kabila, believing they would gain a satellite government in Kinshasa that would give them free rein to carry out counterinsurgency operations in DRC territory.
Kabila succeeded because, in addition to the support provided by Uganda and Rwanda, most of Mobutu’s defense forces stood down or joined Kabila’s forces during the operation. Facing no real internal challenge meant that Kabila’s forces could march the length of the DRC and overcome the natural geographic barrier in the Congo River basin, even though Kabila lacked air transport capability. Kabila took power while Mobutu fled into exile; he died soon afterward.
Good relations among the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda lasted one year, during which time Kabila firmed up his grip in Kinshasa — with the support of Ugandan and Rwandan troops surrounding him. By July 1998, Kabila was able to tell his Rwandan and Ugandan patrons to go home. Though those troops left Kinshasa, they did not leave the border region of eastern Congo, as the issues that propelled their initial intervention in the DRC remained unresolved. The Ugandans continued to carry out hot-pursuit operations into DRC territory against the LRA (which continued to hide out in the DRC), while the Rwandans continued to face off against FDLR elements in eastern Congo.