The Second Congo War (1998-2003)
The largest interstate war in modern African history, fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after Laurent-Desire Kabila turned against the Rwandan and Ugandan patrons who had brought him to power. Nine national armies and dozens of armed groups were drawn into a conflict over sovereignty, resources, and refugee-era security fears that killed millions and reshaped central Africa.
Events
The Rebellion Begins
After President Laurent-Desire Kabila expelled the Rwandan military advisors who had helped him overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko the previous year, Rwanda and Uganda backed a new rebellion against him. Troops of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), led by Banyamulenge Tutsi officers and tutored by Rwandan commanders, mutinied in the east while a rebel column flew toward Kinshasa, and within weeks the young post-Mobutu state was fighting for survival.
Location: Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Africa's World War
Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia sent troops and armor to save Kabila's government as rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda closed on Kinshasa, with Sudan, Chad, and Libya also siding with the government and Burundi joining the anti-Kabila coalition. The intervention saved the capital but froze the front lines, leaving the country partitioned between a government-held west and a rebel- and occupier-held east. By late 1998, nine African states were fighting on Congolese soil, the widest interstate war in the continent's modern history.
Location: Kinshasa, DR Congo
The Lusaka Ceasefire and MONUC
The DRC, Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe signed the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, which provided for an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of foreign forces, the disarmament of armed groups, and a national inter-Congolese dialogue. The United Nations Security Council established the MONUC peacekeeping mission that November to monitor the agreement. The ceasefire was violated repeatedly by all sides, but Lusaka remained the framework every later peace deal built on.
Location: Lusaka, Zambia
The Six-Day War in Kisangani
The armies of Rwanda and Uganda, nominal allies against Kinshasa, fought each other for six days in the diamond-trading city of Kisangani, the third such clash between them in two years. Hundreds of civilians were killed and thousands wounded in the fighting and indiscriminate shelling, and the battles, fought in part over control of diamond concessions, exposed the economic drivers of the occupation of eastern Congo and deepened local hostility to all foreign armies.
Location: Kisangani, DR Congo
Kabila Is Assassinated
President Laurent-Desire Kabila was shot by one of his own bodyguards in the presidential palace and died shortly afterward. His 29-year-old son Joseph Kabila was sworn in as president ten days later. The younger Kabila soon proved readier than his father to negotiate, reopening relations with Rwanda and Uganda and advancing the inter-Congolese dialogue that the Lusaka framework required.
Location: Kinshasa, DR Congo
The Pretoria and Luanda Accords
Under South African mediation, the DRC and Rwanda signed the Pretoria Accord, under which Rwanda agreed to withdraw its estimated 20,000-plus troops in exchange for Congolese action against the Hutu militias, including the ex-FAR/Interahamwe forces that had carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide and sheltered in eastern Congo. A parallel Luanda Agreement with Uganda in September 2002 set Ugandan withdrawal terms. By late 2002 most foreign armies had left the Congo.
Location: Pretoria, South Africa
Ituri and Operation Artemis
The war's deadliest final phase unfolded in the Ituri region, where fighting between Hema and Lendu militias, armed by the departing Ugandan occupiers and their Rwandan rivals, killed tens of thousands. With the understaffed MONUC force unable to protect civilians in Bunia, the UN Security Council authorized a French-led multinational force, Operation Artemis, the first autonomous military operation in European Union history. It stabilized Bunia long enough for a strengthened MONUC to take over.
Location: Bunia, Ituri, DR Congo
The Transitional Government and the War's Human Cost
Joseph Kabila was sworn in as head of a transitional government that brought the four main belligerent factions into a power-sharing executive, generally marking the war's end. Surveys by the International Rescue Committee estimated that the conflict and its aftermath had by then caused millions of excess deaths, overwhelmingly from preventable disease and malnutrition rather than direct violence, with later estimates reaching 5.4 million dead by 2007, the deadliest documented conflict since World War II. Armed conflict continued in the eastern provinces long after the formal settlement.
Location: Kinshasa, DR Congo