Between October 1996 and May 1997, a rebel coalition backed by Rwanda, Uganda and other neighbouring states swept across Zaire and drove Mobutu Sese Seko from power after more than three decades. The rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila declared himself president and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The war grew directly out of the Rwandan genocide and its refugee crisis, cost many thousands of lives, and set the stage for a far larger conflict a year later.
A hollow state
Mobutu had ruled since 1965, long backed by the United States for his anti-communism. By the 1990s the state had largely stopped functioning: the economy had collapsed, most people lived on the informal economy, and unpaid soldiers preyed on civilians. After the Cold War, Western support fell away. In the eastern Kivu provinces, tensions between local groups and people of Rwandan origin, including the Tutsi known as Banyamulenge, had deepened after a 1981 law stripped them of citizenship and through a wave of attacks on them from 1993.
Refugees and militias
When the Rwandan Patriotic Front won the Rwandan Civil War in July 1994, around a million Hutu fled into eastern Zaire, among them soldiers of the former army and Interahamwe militiamen who had carried out the genocide. They took control of vast refugee camps and launched raids into Rwanda and against local Tutsi. Mobutu's government did not restrain them and, according to Rwanda, helped them prepare an invasion.
The rebellion of 1996
Rwanda had been organising Tutsi militias in Zaire probably since 1995, and fighting broke out in South Kivu at the end of August 1996. Rebel groups soon joined in the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), led by Kabila, a long-time opponent of Mobutu. Paul Kagame, then Rwanda's vice-president and defence minister, later said the alliance had been formed and directed from Kigali, and Rwandan regular troops fought within it. Uganda, Burundi and Eritrea also gave support. By late December the rebels held a long strip of territory along the eastern border, and Rwandan forces broke up the refugee camps. Many refugees went home; others fled deeper into the forests.
March on Kinshasa
After a pause, the advance resumed in early 1997 once Angola joined the coalition, angered by Zairian help to the UNITA rebels. Mobutu's army offered little real resistance, though Zaire employed foreign mercenaries and received some help from Sudan. Moving in two columns, the AFDL took Kisangani, Mbandaka, Lubumbashi and other cities, slowed more by ruined roads than by fighting. Mobutu, gravely ill, fled the capital on 16 May 1997. Kabila proclaimed himself president the next day, and Mobutu died in exile in Morocco that September.
Killings of refugees
Hutu refugees pursued westward suffered heavily. Access for journalists and aid groups was tightly controlled, so the full scale is unknown. Amnesty International said that as many as 200,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees may have been killed by Rwandan and allied forces, and a later United Nations mapping report recorded large-scale killings of civilians by AFDL, Rwandan and Ugandan troops. Overall death toll estimates for the war run to around 250,000, including refugees who disappeared.
From one war to the next
Kabila's government soon resembled the old regime in its corruption and weakness. To shed the image of a foreign puppet, he turned on his backers and ordered all foreign troops to leave on 26 July 1998. Days later, in early August, army units in the east rebelled with Rwandan and Ugandan support, beginning the Second Congo War.
On our maps
Our 1994 map shows Zaire under Mobutu on the eve of the war, and the 2000 map shows the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the conflict that followed.
From the atlas
First Congo War in time and on the map
First Congo War lasted from 1996 to 1997. The nearest maps from before and after are 1994 and 2000; compare them side by side.
Living through it, among others on this site: Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006), Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), Desmond Tutu (1931–2021), Elizabeth II (1926–2022), Fidel Castro (1926–2016), Hafez al-Assad (1930–2000), Idi Amin (1925–2003), John Rawls (1921–2002), Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) and Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015).
Other events of the same years: Satsuma Rebellion (1877–2005), Nahda (1900–2000), The Troubles (1960–1998), Guatemalan Civil War (1965–1996), Angolan Civil War (1975–2002), Human Genome Project (1990–2003), Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002) and First Chechen War (1994–1996).
Next to it in time on this site: before, Rwandan genocide (1994) and Srebrenica massacre (1995); after, Good Friday Agreement (1998) and Kosovo War (1998–1999).
Quick answers
- When did First Congo War happen?
- It began in 1996 and ended in 1997.
- Where did First Congo War take place?
- Zaire.
- How did the map change?
- Compare the atlas’s maps of 1994 and 2000 side by side.