As illustrated in previous section, in ousting Mobutu, Laurent Kabila’s AFDL received military and political support from Rwanda.
The AFDL was not truly a Congolese rebellion. It was armed, trained and directed chiefly by Rwanda (Reed 1998; McNulty 1999; Nzongola-
Ntalaja 2002; Lemarchand 2003) but it strategically portrayed itself as a Congolese rebellion to overthrow the dictator Mobutu in order to be accepted by the Congolese population (Reed 1998; McNulty 1999;
Mwanasali 2000).
Prior to spearheading the AFDL, Kabila was the head of the Marxist People’s Revolutionary Party and he was engaged in gold trading in Tanzania with which he financed the war effort. He made contracts with mining and resource companies, including De Beers and American Mineral Fields (Reed 1998; Nest 2006b; Takeuchi 1997). These contacts with commercial companies, nonetheless, gave him a label of a typical African warlord rather than a revolutionary guerrilla leader (Nzongola- Ntalaja 2002).
Rwandan creation and backing of AFDL aimed to revenge to the support that Mobutu gave to the former Rwandan government that was led by a Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana during the fight between his government and the Tutsi rebel group of Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that was led by General Paul Kagame, the current Rwandan president (Péan 2005).
Zairian Armed Forces, Forces Armées Zạroises, intervened in Rwanda in 1990 during the Opộration Noroợt, a French-led intervention, when the Habyarimana government was under heavy attacks from the RPF. Together with French troops, Mobutu’s forces managed to prevent RPF victory. During this intervention, Mobutu’s ill-disciplined army got involved in illegal activities - they caused chaos by looting and raping Rwandan civilians (Reed 1998; McNulty 1999).
After the genocide of 1994, Mobutu continued to provide assistance to the defeated army and the Hutu-led government and helped them maintain their well-equipped troops and key command structure in eastern DRC.
The Rwandan refugees arguably took virtually everything from Rwanda when they fled, including the military capacity, skilled and
educated human resources, and state-owned assets that were located both domestically and abroad (Reed 1998). They created a mini state within eastern DRC from where they continued to promote the genocidal ideology and organised cross-border attacks on Rwanda (Prunier 1998; Reed 1998; Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002) in order to reconquer Rwanda and complete the genocide (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002).
Moreover, while Zairian soldiers were unpaid for several months, Mobutu allegedly assisted with supplying the former Rwandan government with arms (Evans 1997; Reed 1998). When it was revealed that the former Rwandan government was planning to carry out a full- scale invasion of Rwanda, the new Rwandan army led by General Paul Kagame linked with anti Mobutu rebels of AFDL and crossed into the DRC to fight against the former Rwandan government (Evans 1997;
Reed 1998) and successfully help AFDL to overthrow Mobutu without any major resistance from his army. The Congolese population saluted the ‘liberation’ because of the extreme level of suffering they were in and which was caused by economic collapse.
The AFDL also received military backing from Uganda and Angola in response to the support that Mobutu offered to Ugandan and Angolan opposition groups when they were launching attacks from then Zairian territory. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Jose Eduardo Santos of Angola therefore were keen to get rid of Mobutu.
For many years Mobutu allowed Jonas Savimbi’s rebel forces of UNITA to operate from bases in Zạre during their fight with the Angolan government and its ruling party of MPLA, Movimento Popular de Libertaỗóo de Angola - Partido do Trabalho (Nest 2006b). With Mobutu’s help, UNITA was able to sell diamonds, to buy weapons and to sustain its fight against the Angolan government. UNITA allegedly supported Mobutu when his regime was under attack in order to protect their bases and supply routes in Zaire from the AFDL (McNulty 1999).
In contrast, the Angolan government allowed the AFDL to enter Zaire
from its territories and sent in its troops (Reed 1998). With help from these countries the AFDL eventually managed to overthrow Mobutu and Laurent Kabila became the president of Zaire and he immediately changed the country’s name in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
When he took power, Kabila tried his best to increase his legitimacy by consolidating his authority all over the country and by rebuilding state capacity and reforming the country’s economic, political and social configurations.
This strategy did not work as his regime had lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the international community and the Congolese population because of the massacre37 of civilians and Hutu refugees that were committed by his and Rwandan forces in eastern DRC (Prunier 2009).
Kabila was also under pressure from local opposition who treated him as a puppet of Rwanda as he continually followed the agenda of Rwanda even when he was already in power. Furthermore, Congolese people were not happy with the overwhelming presence of Tutsis and Banyamulenge in key positions within the military and the political circles of Kabila’s regime (Lemarchand 2003; Nest 2006b; Putzel et al.
2008; Prunier 2009). To regain legitimacy, Kabila began to look for ways to detach himself from Rwanda with a view to gathering support within the country by manipulating and intensifying anti-Tutsi feelings (McNulty 1999; Lemarchand 2003; Reuters AlertNet n.d.). He publicly denounced the continued Rwandan attacks on the Mai Mai (People’s auto-defence force) in eastern DRC and he disappointed his backers by refusing to cooperate with Rwanda in providing security at the borders (Nest 2006b) and he also accused Ugandan officials of profit seeking in their intervention in the DRC (McNulty 1999).
37Presidents Kabila and Kagame did not allow UN investigators to investigate the alleged massacre of civilians and Rwandes refugees. Consequently the international aid for the DRC was blocked (Prunier 2009) as it was the case when Mobutu’s regime was sanctioned following the massacre of students in 1990 at the University of Lubumbashi. .
As in the case of failure by Mobutu’s strategists and intelligence services to understand intervening changes in Western relations with Africa at the end of the Cold War, Kabila’s intelligence services and strategists also failed to understand and advise him on the consequences of his brutal detachment from his backers. Kabila ordered all foreign troops including Rwandan troops to leave the Congolese territory on 27 July 1998. This decision prompted the Second Congo War which in its beginning was wrongly presented as a revolt of Tutsi Banyamulenge against the injustices of Kabila regime rather than a strategy by Rwanda and Uganda to oust Kabila (Vlassenroot 2002).