R1.7 Colonialism and crisis in Rwanda and the Congo (circa 1875–2003)

Rwanda and the Congo are neighbours in the Great Lakes region of central Africa: one a small, crowded kingdom of hills, the other a vast territory of rainforest, rivers and mines. Their histories from the 1870s to 2003 show how colonial rule shaped the states that followed it, and how a crisis in one country could spread to the whole region, as it did when the Rwandan genocide of 1994 led to the deadliest wars in Africa since independence.

The timeline of the whole period shows two colonial histories that ran side by side and two post-colonial crises that merged. Belgium ruled the Congo from 1908 and Rwanda (with Burundi, as Ruanda-Urundi) from 1916, and both became independent within two years of each other. After 1994 the two stories can no longer be told separately.

Leopold II and the Congo Free State, 1885–1908

Leopold II, King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, wanted a colony but could not persuade the Belgian parliament or public to pay for one. In 1876 he founded the International African Association, which claimed scientific and humanitarian aims, and from 1879 to 1884 he employed the explorer Henry Morton Stanley to sign treaties with chiefs along the Congo River. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 the European powers recognised Leopold's claim to the Congo basin in return for promises of free trade and an end to the slave trade. The Congo Free State was proclaimed in 1885.

The name was misleading. "Free" referred to free trade among Europeans, which the state soon abandoned, and Leopold's claims to be ending slavery and bringing "civilisation" were the language he used to win diplomatic support. Leopold never visited the Congo.

Political impact: a state built for extraction

The Free State was governed from Boma, near the mouth of the Congo River, by a governor-general and a small corps of European officials, many of them Belgian, Scandinavian or Italian officers on short contracts. Leopold's decrees claimed all "vacant land" (terres vacantes), meaning any land not occupied by a village or a cultivated field, as state property. Since African farming and hunting used forest and fallow land that was not permanently occupied, the decrees turned most of the Congo, and everything in it, into the king's property.

From 1891–1892 Leopold divided this land into zones. In the Domaine Privé the state itself collected rubber and ivory; within it a huge area became the Domaine de la Couronne (Crown Domain), whose income went directly to the king. Other areas were leased to concession companies such as the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR) and the Société Anversoise, in which the state held shares. Officials and company agents were paid bonuses on the amount of rubber and ivory they collected, which gave them every reason to use force.

The instrument of force was the Force Publique, the state army, created in 1885–1888. Its officers were Europeans; its soldiers were Africans, many of them conscripted, bought as slaves or taken from other regions so that they had no ties to the people they policed. By 1900 it numbered about 19,000 men. The companies also employed armed "sentries" in the villages.

The Free State was not established peacefully. Its forces fought a war in 1892–1894 against the Swahili-Arab traders of the eastern Congo, whom Leopold had earlier tried to use (he appointed the trader Tippu Tip governor of Stanley Falls in 1887). Leopold presented the war as a campaign against slavery; it was also a war to take control of the ivory trade. Mutinies by Force Publique soldiers in 1895 and 1897 showed how fragile the state's control was.

The diagram of the rubber system shows why historians describe the Free State as a state built for extraction. Every part of it, from the king to the sentry in the village, was organised to move produce out of the Congo, and every agent was rewarded for the quantity, not for how it was obtained.

Economic impact: ivory, "red rubber" and the railway

In its first years the state lost money and lived on ivory and on loans, including a loan from the Belgian parliament in 1890. Its fortunes changed with the boom in demand for rubber after John Boyd Dunlop's pneumatic tyre (1888) and the spread of bicycles, cars and electrical insulation. Wild rubber grew on vines across the Congo rainforest. Collecting it meant walking deep into the forest, cutting the vines and drying the latex, often for weeks at a time.

Villages were given quotas of rubber, food and labour. Where quotas were not met, soldiers and sentries took women and children as hostages until the men returned with enough rubber, flogged people with the chicotte (a whip of dried hippopotamus hide), burned villages and killed. Soldiers had to account for their ammunition, and in many districts they cut off the right hands of those they had killed, and sometimes of the living, as proof. Opponents of Leopold called it "red rubber" because of the blood spilled to collect it.

'The only way to get rubber is to fight for it. The natives are paid 35 centimes per kilog., it is claimed, but that includes a large profit on the cloth; the amount of rubber is controlled by the number of guns, and not the number of bales of cloth.' … 'Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used; and for every one used, he must bring back a right hand.'

A conversation with a Free State officer recorded in a diary, copied by Roger Casement in his Report as British consul (published by the British government, February 1904). The words are second-hand: Casement quotes a diary entry by an unnamed witness about an unnamed officer, as he did throughout the report to protect his informants. Its value lies in showing that the violence was linked to the system of payment and quotas, not only to individual cruelty; the anonymity is also what Leopold's defenders used to dismiss it.

Infrastructure served the same purpose. The railway from Matadi to Léopoldville (1890–1898) bypassed the rapids of the lower Congo River so that goods could reach the sea; thousands of African and Caribbean workers died building it. The profits of the rubber boom, at their height between about 1901 and 1906, paid for buildings and public works in Belgium, including the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren and Leopold's improvements to his palace at Laeken.

Experiences of the Congolese and the fall in population

For the people of the rubber districts the Free State meant forced labour, hunger and flight. Men spent much of each month collecting rubber, so less food was grown; women held as hostages were often abused; whole communities fled into the forest or across the border into French territory. Casement wrote that perhaps the most striking change he saw on his journey in 1903 was "the great reduction observable everywhere in native life". Some Congolese resisted: there were revolts among the Budja and in the Kwango and Kasai regions, and the Force Publique mutineers of 1897 held out for years.

Disease added to the toll. Sleeping sickness spread along the rivers and trade routes, which soldiers, porters and refugees used; smallpox and dysentery killed many more. Malnutrition made people more vulnerable to disease, and birth rates probably fell as families were separated. Because the violence, flight, famine and disease were all connected to the way the state ran the country, historians generally treat most of the population loss as a consequence of Free State rule, while disagreeing about how great it was.

Estimates as published in the works named. The range is wide because nobody counted the population in 1885, and because later scholars disagree about whether figures from the worst rubber districts can be applied to the whole Congo. Vansina himself later dropped the idea of a halving: in his study of the Kuba he found that their numbers fell by about a quarter between 1900 and 1919, mainly through sleeping sickness and other disease, and that violence caused only a small share of deaths there.

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Exposure and the end of the Free State

Leopold controlled what Europeans heard about the Congo, but evidence leaked out through missionaries, traders and officials. The African American historian George Washington Williams visited in 1890 and wrote an Open Letter to Leopold accusing the state of crimes against the Congolese. Missionaries such as the African American Presbyterian William Sheppard reported massacres in the Kasai, and the British missionary Alice Seeley Harris took photographs of mutilated people that were shown at public meetings in Britain and the USA.

The decisive campaign came from Britain. E. D. Morel, a shipping clerk who noticed that ships left Antwerp for the Congo carrying mostly guns and returned full of rubber and ivory, concluded that the Congolese were not being paid but forced. The British government sent its consul, Roger Casement, up the Congo River in 1903; his report, published in February 1904, confirmed the abuses. Morel and Casement founded the Congo Reform Association in 1904, and writers such as Mark Twain (King Leopold's Soliloquy, 1905) and Arthur Conan Doyle joined the campaign.

Leopold responded with his own propaganda and with a Commission of Inquiry (1904–1905), which, to his embarrassment, confirmed much of what Casement had reported. Under international pressure and in the face of a hostile Belgian parliament, Leopold agreed to hand the Congo to Belgium. The Belgian parliament approved the Colonial Charter in October 1908, and the Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo on 15 November 1908. Belgium paid off the state's debts and Leopold received large sums for his "sacrifices"; before the transfer he ordered the Free State archives to be burned.

The Belgian Congo, 1908–1960

Annexation changed who ruled the Congo but not the purpose of rule. The Colonial Charter of 1908 placed the colony under the Belgian parliament and a Minister of Colonies, with a governor-general in Boma (a decree of 1923 made Léopoldville the capital, and the administration moved there in the late 1920s). Real power lay in Brussels, and no Congolese, and no Belgian living in the Congo, could vote for the government that ruled them.

Political impact: the "colonial trinity" and paternalism

Belgian rule rested on what historians call the colonial trinity of state, Church and companies. The state administered and taxed; the Catholic missions (and some Protestant ones) ran almost all schools and much of the health system; and large companies, many of them linked to the Brussels holding company Société Générale de Belgique, ran the mines and plantations. Officials, missionaries and managers worked closely together and shared a paternalism that treated Congolese as children to be guided, not citizens to be consulted.

Below the European administration, the Belgians ruled through African chiefs, many of them appointed by the state rather than chosen by custom, who collected taxes and recruited labour. The Force Publique remained the army and police, with no Congolese officers until 1960. Towns were segregated: Africans needed passes to move, lived in separate cités and were subject to a curfew in European districts.

From the 1940s the colony began to recognise a small group of educated, urban Africans, known as évolués. From 1948 an évolué could apply for a carte du mérite civique (card of civic merit), and from 1952 for immatriculation, which in theory gave him the same legal status as Europeans. Few qualified (a few thousand at most by the mid-1950s), and the promised equality was often not honoured, which turned many évolués from loyal collaborators into critics of colonial rule.

Economic impact: mines, plantations and forced cultivation

The Belgian Congo became one of the richest colonies in Africa for its owners. The Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (founded in 1906) mined copper in Katanga; output rose from 997 tonnes in 1911 to over 27,000 tonnes in 1917 as the First World War increased demand. The Forminière mined diamonds in Kasai, and Lever Brothers' Huileries du Congo Belge (from 1911) ran palm-oil concessions in which forced and badly paid labour continued long after 1908. The Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga supplied most of the uranium used in the United States' Manhattan Project during the Second World War.

Although the Colonial Charter banned forced labour for private companies, the state continued to require work on roads and other public projects and pressed chiefs to supply labour to the mines. From 1917 it introduced compulsory cultivation of export and food crops such as cotton, which peasants had to grow and sell at fixed low prices. During the Second World War the "war effort" increased compulsory labour and crop quotas sharply, and the Congo's copper, rubber and uranium supplied the Allies.

After 1945 a ten-year development plan (1949–1959) paid for roads, housing, hospitals and primary schools. By the 1950s the Congo had one of the highest rates of primary-school enrolment in Africa. Secondary and higher education, however, were kept for a tiny few: the first university, Lovanium, opened only in 1954, and at independence the Congo had fewer than 30 Congolese university graduates (estimates range from about 16 to 30) and no Congolese doctors, lawyers or army officers.

The table comparing the two periods shows what changed in 1908 and what continued. The worst violence ended and the colony invested in health and schools, but the colony still existed to produce wealth for Belgium, and Congolese remained subjects without rights.

Experiences of the Congolese under Belgian rule

Congolese experiences varied by region, class and gender. Miners in Katanga worked under a company system that, from the 1920s, housed workers' families, provided rations and clinics and paid more than elsewhere, in return for strict discipline; it was a model of paternalism. Peasants in cotton-growing districts faced quotas and low prices, and many young men migrated to the towns, so that Léopoldville grew several times over after 1940, to about 400,000 people by 1960.

Resistance often took religious forms. In 1921 Simon Kimbangu, a Baptist catechist in the lower Congo, began a healing and preaching movement that drew thousands; the authorities saw it as a threat, sentenced him to death and then commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in Élisabethville in 1951. His followers kept the movement alive underground, and the Kimbanguist Church became one of the largest independent African churches. The Kitawala movement, based on the teachings of the Watch Tower movement, also spread in the east. Armed resistance included the Pende revolt of 1931 against forced labour and taxes, which was crushed with hundreds of deaths, and a mutiny of Force Publique soldiers at Luluabourg in 1944.

The emergence and growth of nationalism

Congolese nationalism developed late compared with nationalism in British or French West Africa, because Belgium banned political parties, gave Africans almost no higher education and kept them from travelling abroad. Until the mid-1950s most Belgian officials assumed that independence lay generations away. In 1955 a Belgian professor, Antoine van Bilsen, published a "Thirty-Year Plan" for gradual emancipation, which most Belgians thought too radical.

Congolese responses to the plan show how fast opinion moved. In 1956 a group of Catholic évolués published a manifesto in the journal Conscience africaine accepting a gradual path, but the ABAKO (Alliance des Bakongo), a Bakongo cultural association led by Joseph Kasavubu, replied with a manifesto demanding immediate independence. In 1957 the first local elections in the main towns gave ABAKO control of much of Léopoldville.

The most important nationalist party was the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), founded in October 1958. Its leading figure, Patrice Lumumba, a former postal clerk and beer salesman from Kasai, wanted a united Congo rather than a federation of ethnic regions. In December 1958 he attended the All-African People's Conference in Accra, hosted by Kwame Nkrumah of newly independent Ghana, and returned committed to independence.

As the vertical timeline of 1955–1960 shows, the crisis came in January 1959. When the authorities banned an ABAKO meeting in Léopoldville on 4 January, crowds of unemployed young men rioted; the Force Publique restored order, killing at least 49 Africans according to official figures (some estimates of the dead and wounded run to about 500). On 13 January King Baudouin announced that Belgium would lead the Congo to independence "without fatal delays". Belgium hoped that a quick decolonisation would leave a friendly government dependent on Belgian officers, officials and companies.

At the Round Table conference in Brussels (January–February 1960) Congolese leaders insisted on independence on 30 June 1960. The elections of May 1960 produced a fragmented parliament: Lumumba's MNC won the most seats but no majority, and parties based on regions and ethnic groups won most of the rest. Lumumba became prime minister and Kasavubu president in a coalition.

Two speeches on Independence Day

At the independence ceremony on 30 June 1960 in Léopoldville, King Baudouin and Lumumba gave very different accounts of the colonial past. The king spoke first.

Congo's independence marks the outcome of the work conceived by the genius of King Léopold II, which he undertook with tenacious courage and which Belgium has continued with perseverance.

King Baudouin, speech at the independence ceremony, Léopoldville, 30 June 1960 (English translation as quoted by Ludo De Witte, 2016). Baudouin spoke to an audience of Belgian and Congolese dignitaries and presented independence as the reward of colonialism, honouring Leopold II at the moment the colony ended. It shows how the Belgian monarchy wished the colonial record to be remembered.

Lumumba, who was not scheduled to speak, replied directly to the Congolese people.

We have experienced forced labour in exchange for pay that did not allow us to satisfy our hunger, to clothe ourselves, to have decent lodgings or to bring up our children as dearly loved ones. Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were "Negroes".

Patrice Lumumba, Independence Day speech, Léopoldville, 30 June 1960 (English translation in Lumumba, The Truth about a Monstrous Crime of the Colonialists, Moscow, 1961). Lumumba spoke as the first elected prime minister, to a Congolese audience listening on the radio as much as to the guests in the hall. The speech gives a Congolese perspective on colonial rule that the king's speech left out; Belgians saw it as an insult, and it made Lumumba enemies in Brussels and Washington within days of independence.

Rwanda before colonial rule

The Kingdom of Rwanda was one of the most centralised states in pre-colonial Africa. It was ruled by the mwami (king) of the Nyiginya dynasty, with a court, an army organised in hereditary regiments and chiefs responsible for land, cattle and armies. Its people shared one language (Kinyarwanda), one religion and the same clans, and lived intermingled on the same hills.

Three social categories existed: Hutu, the large majority, mostly farmers; Tutsi, a minority associated with cattle and with the ruling elite; and Twa, a small group of forest hunters and potters. These were not separate tribes. Status depended largely on wealth in cattle and on proximity to power, so a Hutu who acquired cattle and office could become Tutsi (a process called kwihutura), and a poor Tutsi could lose status. Most Tutsi were not rich or powerful; they were ordinary herders and farmers.

Kigeli IV Rwabugiri and the hardening of identities

Kigeli IV Rwabugiri (r. c. 1867–1895; some sources date his accession to 1853) expanded the kingdom by conquest to the north and west and centralised it. He replaced many local lineage heads with chiefs appointed from the court, often Tutsi, and extended royal control into regions that had kept their own Hutu leaders. Historians such as Catharine Newbury and Jan Vansina argue that it was under Rwabugiri that the Hutu–Tutsi distinction became a sharper line of political inequality.

Two institutions mattered most. Ubuhake was a contract in which a patron gave a client the use of cattle in return for service; it bound clients to patrons and could work for either side. Uburetwa, introduced under Rwabugiri in the later nineteenth century, was unpaid labour that Hutu (but not Tutsi) had to perform for chiefs in return for the use of land. Because it fell only on Hutu, uburetwa made "Hutu" mean a person who owed forced labour, which gave the category a new and humiliating meaning.

Rwabugiri died in 1895 on a campaign in the Congo. In the Rucunshu coup of 1896 his designated successor, Mibambwe IV Rutarindwa, was overthrown by a faction led by the queen mother Kanjogera and her brothers, who placed her young son Yuhi V Musinga on the throne. The new regime was insecure, which made it willing to use the Europeans who had just arrived against its rivals.

German and Belgian colonialism in Rwanda, 1885–1962

German rule, 1897–1916

Agreements among the colonial powers in 1885 and 1890 placed Rwanda and Burundi in German East Africa, though no European visited Rwanda until Count Gustav Adolf von Götzen crossed it in 1894. Musinga's court accepted German protection in 1897, but Germany had very few officials there: a resident, Richard Kandt, founded Kigali in 1907. The Germans practised indirect rule through Musinga's court and helped him put down revolts in the Hutu-majority north, including a rising in 1912, so that colonial support strengthened Tutsi chiefs against autonomous Hutu regions. The Catholic White Fathers arrived in 1900 and became the most influential Europeans in the country.

German rule had limited economic impact. The colony introduced taxes, some coffee planting and the beginnings of a cash economy, but Rwanda had few exports and was valued mainly as a reserve of labour and as a buffer.

Belgian occupation and the mandate

Belgian troops from the Congo occupied Rwanda in 1916 during the First World War. In 1922 the League of Nations placed Rwanda and Burundi under Belgian administration as the mandate of Ruanda-Urundi, governed from Usumbura (now Bujumbura) and closely linked to the Belgian Congo. After 1946 it became a United Nations trust territory, which meant UN visiting missions that later pressed Belgium for reform.

The Hamitic hypothesis

European views of Rwandan society were shaped by the Hamitic hypothesis. In 1863 the British explorer John Hanning Speke suggested that the ruling groups of the Great Lakes kingdoms descended from "Hamitic" invaders from Ethiopia, a "superior" race closer to Europeans. Missionaries and administrators applied this idea to the Tutsi, describing them as natural rulers of foreign origin and the Hutu as "Bantu" serfs. Colonial scientists measured heads, noses and heights to classify Rwandans.

The theory had two long-term effects. In the colonial period it justified favouring the Tutsi. After 1959, Hutu nationalists reversed it: if the Tutsi were foreign invaders, they had no right to be in Rwanda at all. Genocidal propaganda in 1994 drew directly on this idea.

Social engineering under Belgian rule

Between 1926 and 1931 the Belgian administration reorganised Rwanda's chiefdoms in the so-called Mortehan reforms, after the official Georges Mortehan. The three overlapping kinds of chief (for land, cattle and armies) were merged into a single chief in each area, and almost all Hutu chiefs were removed. By the late 1950s almost all chiefs and the great majority of sub-chiefs were Tutsi. Belgium also deposed Musinga in 1931, who had resisted both conversion and colonial interference, and replaced him with his son Mutara III Rudahigwa, who later became a Catholic.

The most lasting measure was the census of 1933–1934, which classified every Rwandan as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, and the identity cards issued from the mid-1930s that recorded this category. The census counted roughly 84 per cent Hutu, 15 per cent Tutsi and 1 per cent Twa. A popular story holds that anyone with ten or more cattle was registered as Tutsi; historians doubt it was applied as a rule, and most people were registered by their family's existing status. Whatever the method, the category was now written down, inherited through the father and almost impossible to change.

The chain of steps from Rwabugiri to the revolution shows why historians speak of the "institutionalisation" of identity. Colonial rule did not invent the words Hutu and Tutsi, but it took a distinction that was already becoming more unequal, explained it with racial theory and fixed it in law and on paper, so that political conflict after 1959 could be organised along an ethnic line.

Economic impact and experiences of Rwandans

The Belgians ruled through the Tutsi chiefs, who collected taxes and enforced labour, and the burden fell above all on Hutu peasants. Besides uburetwa, which the chiefs extended, the colonial state demanded akazi, forced labour on roads, terracing, reforestation and other public works, often enforced with the whip. From the late 1920s coffee became a compulsory crop; it provided Rwanda's main export and a cash income, but peasants had to plant it on scarce land and sell at controlled prices.

Famine was a recurring experience. Severe famines struck in 1916–1918 (Rumanura), 1928–1930 (Rwakayihura) and 1943–1944 (Ruzagayura); the last, made worse by wartime requisitioning of food for the Congo, killed tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans migrated, often seasonally, to work in Uganda and the Congo to escape labour obligations and earn cash.

The Catholic Church shaped Rwandan society deeply. Under Bishop Léon Classe it first favoured the Tutsi elite as the future rulers of a Christian kingdom; mass conversion followed the king's, and Rwanda became one of the most Catholic countries in Africa. The Groupe Scolaire at Astrida (now Butare), founded to train administrators, took mostly Tutsi pupils. Hutu who sought education usually found it in the seminaries, which produced the Hutu counter-elite of the 1950s. The Twa were marginalised by everyone, losing forest land and being excluded from schools and office.

The Hutu Revolution and independence, 1957–1962

In the 1950s, Belgium and the Catholic Church changed sides. Under UN pressure for democratisation, and with a new generation of Belgian priests and officials sympathetic to the Hutu majority (and alarmed by Tutsi demands for rapid independence), they began to support Hutu leaders. In March 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals, among them Grégoire Kayibanda, a former seminarian and editor of a Catholic journal, presented the Bahutu Manifesto to the Belgian governor.

le problème est avant tout un problème de monopole politique dont dispose une race, le mututsi; monopole politique qui, étant donné l'ensemble des structures actuelles, devient un monopole économique et social [the problem is above all a problem of the political monopoly held by one race, the Mututsi; a political monopoly which, given the whole of the present structures, becomes an economic and social monopoly]

Note on the social aspect of the native racial problem in Rwanda (the "Bahutu Manifesto"), 24 March 1957; English translation of the French original. Written by educated Hutu for the colonial authorities, it describes Rwandan society in the colonial language of "race" and calls Tutsi rule a second colonialism. It also opposed removing the labels Hutu, Tutsi and Twa from identity documents, so that the inequality could be measured. It shows both a genuine grievance against Tutsi chiefs and how fully the racial categories of colonial rule had been adopted by those who challenged it.

Political parties formed along these lines in 1959: Kayibanda's PARMEHUTU (Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement) and the monarchist, mainly Tutsi UNAR (Rwandan National Union), which demanded immediate independence under the monarchy. Mutara III died suddenly in July 1959, and conservative Tutsi installed his half-brother as Kigeli V.

On 1 November 1959 UNAR activists attacked Dominique Mbonyumutwa, one of the few Hutu sub-chiefs; false rumours of his death set off Hutu attacks on Tutsi chiefs and homes across the country, followed by Tutsi counter-attacks. Belgium sent Colonel Guy Logiest, who openly favoured the Hutu: his administration replaced hundreds of Tutsi chiefs and sub-chiefs with Hutu. PARMEHUTU won the communal elections of 1960 by a large majority.

On 28 January 1961, at a meeting of local officials at Gitarama organised with Logiest's support, Kayibanda's supporters proclaimed the end of the monarchy and a republic (the "coup of Gitarama"). A UN-supervised referendum in September 1961 confirmed the abolition of the monarchy by about 80 per cent of the vote, and Rwanda became independent on 1 July 1962 with Kayibanda as president.

The "Hutu Revolution" brought majority rule but was also an ethnic revolution. Hundreds of Tutsi were killed between 1959 and 1961, and by 1964 about 336,000 Tutsi had fled to Uganda, Burundi, the Congo and Tanganyika, according to a contemporary official count. Hutu nationalists described it as liberation from a double colonialism; Tutsi exiles described it as persecution. The refugees and their children formed the movement that invaded Rwanda in 1990.

The Congo Crisis, 1960–1965

The independent Republic of the Congo (often called Congo-Léopoldville, to distinguish it from the former French Congo across the river) had a parliament, a constitution drafted in Brussels and almost no Congolese administrators or officers. Belgium expected to keep control through its officials, officers and companies. Within a week, that expectation collapsed.

Mutiny, intervention and secession

On 5 July 1960 soldiers of the Force Publique mutinied against their Belgian officers after their commander, General Émile Janssens, told them that independence would change nothing for them (he wrote "before independence = after independence" on a blackboard). Lumumba dismissed Janssens, promoted every soldier by one rank and renamed the army the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC), appointing Africans as officers, among them his former aide Joseph-Désiré Mobutu as chief of staff. Attacks on Europeans led thousands to flee, and on 10 July Belgium sent troops back in without the Congolese government's consent.

On 11 July Moïse Tshombe, leader of the CONAKAT party, declared the copper-rich province of Katanga independent. The Katanga secession was backed by the Union Minière, Belgian officers and later European mercenaries; it took most of the government's revenue with it. In August South Kasai, with its diamonds, also seceded under Albert Kalonji. The new state had lost its army, its administrators and its richest provinces.

The UN, the Cold War and the fall of Lumumba

Lumumba and Kasavubu appealed to the United Nations, and on 14 July the Security Council passed Resolution 143 calling on Belgium to withdraw and creating the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC), which grew to about 20,000 troops. The UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, insisted that the force was neutral and would not be used to end the Katanga secession by force, which Lumumba saw as betrayal. Lumumba then accepted Soviet trucks and aircraft to attack South Kasai, where his troops killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Luba civilians in August 1960.

To the United States and Belgium, Lumumba now looked like a pro-Soviet radical in the heart of Africa. The CIA prepared plans to assassinate him, including with poison. On 5 September Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba as prime minister; Lumumba, backed by parliament, dismissed Kasavubu in turn. On 14 September Colonel Mobutu, with CIA encouragement, announced that the army was "neutralising" the politicians and expelled the Soviet bloc embassies. Lumumba was placed under house arrest, escaped in November, was captured by Mobutu's soldiers in December and was flown to Katanga on 17 January 1961. There he was shot that evening by Katangan soldiers in the presence of Katangan ministers and Belgian officers.

Lumumba's murder made him a hero of African nationalism and a symbol of Western interference. A Belgian parliamentary inquiry concluded in 2001 that Belgian ministers bore "moral responsibility" for his death, and the Belgian government apologised in 2002. In 2022 Belgium returned to his family a tooth, the only known remains, taken by a Belgian police officer who had helped to dissolve the body in acid.

Ending the secessions and the rebellions of 1964

After Lumumba's death the UN took a tougher line. The Security Council authorised force to prevent civil war in February 1961, and ONUC fought Katangan forces and mercenaries in 1961–1962. Hammarskjöld died when his plane crashed near Ndola, in Northern Rhodesia, in September 1961, on his way to negotiate with Tshombe; the cause is still investigated. UN forces finally ended the Katanga secession in January 1963. ONUC left in 1964 having kept the Congo in one piece, at the cost of about 250 UN deaths and of its reputation for neutrality.

Lumumba's supporters then took up arms. In 1964 Pierre Mulele, a former minister in Lumumba's government, led a rural rebellion in Kwilu, and the Simba rebels took Stanleyville and much of the east, where they held hundreds of Europeans and Americans hostage. Tshombe, recalled from exile as prime minister, used white mercenaries against the rebels, and in November 1964 Belgian paratroopers carried by US aircraft retook Stanleyville in Operation Dragon Rouge. Thousands of Congolese died in the rebellion and its suppression.

A new deadlock between Kasavubu and Tshombe followed the elections of 1965. On 24–25 November 1965 Mobutu, now commander of the army, took power for the second time, this time keeping it himself.

Mobutu and Zaire, 1965–1997

Mobutu ruled for 32 years, well over half as long as the Belgian Congo had existed. He began with promises of order, national unity and an end to the chaos of 1960–1965, and many Congolese, tired of war, welcomed him. He ended as a symbol of kleptocracy, presiding over a state that had almost ceased to function.

Maintaining power: eliminating opposition

Mobutu suspended parliament, banned political parties and ruled by decree. On 2 June 1966, four former politicians accused of plotting a coup, including the former prime minister Évariste Kimba, were hanged in public before a crowd of thousands in Kinshasa; they became known as the "Pentecost plotters". In 1968 Pierre Mulele returned from exile on a promise of amnesty and was tortured and killed. Student protests at Lovanium University in 1969 and 1971 were met with shootings and forced conscription of students into the army.

In 1967 Mobutu founded the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR), and in 1970 the MPR became by law the only party; from 1974 every citizen was by definition a member. Elections offered a single candidate. Mobutu constantly reshuffled ministers, governors and generals, so that nobody could build an independent power base, and kept elite units, such as the Special Presidential Division, loyal to him personally. Rivals were alternately jailed and brought back into office, which taught the elite that loyalty brought reward.

The cult of personality and authenticité

From 1971 Mobutu launched a campaign of authenticité (authenticity) to "Africanise" the country. The Congo became Zaire on 27 October 1971; cities lost their colonial names (Léopoldville had become Kinshasa in 1966); citizens had to drop Christian names, and Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seko. Western suits were replaced by the abacost (from à bas le costume, "down with the suit"). Authenticité gave Zaireans a real sense of national pride, but it also served Mobutu, who presented himself as the father of the nation, the "Guide" and the "Helmsman".

State media opened the evening news with an image of Mobutu descending from the clouds; songs, dances and party rallies praised him. "Mobutism" was declared the official doctrine of the MPR. A cult of this kind helped to bind a huge country of more than 200 ethnic groups to one figure, but it also left the state dependent on one man.

Economic policies and the plundering of the state

Mobutu's early economic record was mixed. In 1967 he nationalised the Union Minière, which became the state company Gécamines, and high copper prices in the late 1960s and early 1970s paid for prestige projects such as the Inga dams on the Congo River and the long Inga–Shaba power line to the mines of Katanga (renamed Shaba).

In November 1973 Mobutu announced Zairianisation: foreign-owned plantations, shops, ranches and small businesses were handed to Zairean owners. Most went to politicians, officers and their relatives, many of whom sold the stock, stopped paying workers and let the businesses collapse. At the same time the price of copper, which provided most export earnings, fell sharply in 1974–1975, and the oil crisis raised import costs. In 1976 Mobutu had to hand back (by "retrocession") many businesses to their former owners, but the damage was done, and Zaire fell deep into debt.

From then on, the state became a machine for extracting wealth. Mobutu treated Gécamines and the central bank as personal funds, built palaces such as Gbadolite in his home region and owned property across Europe. Estimates of his fortune range from tens of millions to about US$5 billion; the higher figures are disputed. Officials and soldiers, often unpaid, lived by bribery and extortion. Zaireans joked about "Article 15" of an imaginary constitution, débrouillez-vous ("fend for yourselves"), which summed up how people survived when the state provided nothing.

The graph of income per person shows the scale of the collapse. Average income was roughly stable until the mid-1970s, then fell year after year, and dropped steeply in the early 1990s, when hyperinflation, the end of Western aid and two waves of looting by unpaid soldiers (the "pillages" of 1991 and 1993) destroyed what was left of the formal economy.

Foreign support and the Cold War

Mobutu survived partly because the West needed him. Zaire was large, rich in strategic minerals and bordered nine countries, including Angola, where after 1975 a civil war set the Soviet- and Cuban-backed MPLA government against UNITA and the FNLA. The United States used Zaire to supply UNITA, and Mobutu cultivated American presidents, Belgian and French governments and the IMF. When rebels invaded Shaba from Angola in 1977 (Shaba I) and 1978 (Shaba II, the attack on Kolwezi), Moroccan, French and Belgian troops rescued him.

The diagram of Mobutu's power shows the combination of methods. When the Cold War ended in 1989–1991, Western governments began to demand democratic reforms. Mobutu legalised other parties in 1990 and allowed a National Conference (1991–1992), which elected the opposition leader Étienne Tshisekedi as prime minister, but he used his control of the army and the central bank to outmanoeuvre it. By the mid-1990s he was ill with cancer and the state had almost no army able to fight.

Rwanda after independence: the road to civil war, 1962–1994

The First Republic and the purges of Tutsi

Kayibanda's First Republic (1962–1973) was dominated by PARMEHUTU and by politicians from his home region of Gitarama in the centre-south. It presented itself as the government of the Hutu majority, the "rubanda nyamwinshi" (the great people), and treated the Tutsi as a defeated minority whose loyalty was suspect.

Tutsi refugees in neighbouring countries formed armed groups, which the government called inyenzi ("cockroaches"), and raided Rwanda between 1961 and 1966. After the largest raid, from Burundi in December 1963, which reached the Bugesera region south of Kigali, the government organised reprisals: local officials and "self-defence" groups killed an estimated 10,000 Tutsi in December 1963 and January 1964, with especially heavy killing in Gikongoro. Tutsi politicians who had stayed in Rwanda were executed. In February 1964 the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, writing in Le Monde, described the killings as a holocaust; the Rwandan and other African governments rejected the charge.

The pattern of these years recurred in 1990–1994: an attack from outside was answered by violence against Tutsi inside the country, who were treated as collectively responsible. Further purges in early 1973 drove Tutsi from schools, universities and jobs, enforced by "public safety committees", and caused another wave of exile.

Habyarimana's Second Republic, 1973–1990

On 5 July 1973 the army chief of staff, Major-General Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu from Gisenyi in the north-west, overthrew Kayibanda in a coup. He promised peace and unity, and for a time ethnic violence fell. In 1975 he created the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND), which became by law the only party, making Rwanda a one-party state; every Rwandan was a member from birth. Ethnic quotas, nominally based on the census, limited Tutsi to about 9 per cent of places in schools and public employment, and Tutsi were almost entirely excluded from the army and from politics.

Rwanda under Habyarimana became a favourite of foreign donors. It seemed orderly, Christian and committed to rural development, and aid from Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, the USA and the World Bank financed much of the state budget. Power, however, was increasingly concentrated in a northern clique around the president's wife, Agathe Kanziga, and her relatives, known as the akazu ("little house"), who controlled army commands, state companies and aid contracts.

Economic disparities and environmental crisis

Rwanda had one of the highest population densities in Africa and one of the highest birth rates in the world. Almost all families farmed, and with no new land to clear, plots were divided between sons until many were too small to feed a family. Hillsides were cultivated to the top, forests cleared and soils exhausted; by the late 1980s food production per person was falling.

The bar chart of population density shows how rapidly the pressure on land grew. Many historians see this crisis as a background cause of the violence of the 1990s, because it left millions of young men without land, work or prospects of marriage, and because land seized from victims later became one of the rewards of killing. Others warn against environmental determinism: crowded countries do not necessarily commit genocide, and the killings were organised by the state.

Economic shocks came on top of this. Coffee provided most of Rwanda's export earnings, and in 1989 the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement's quota system caused world coffee prices to fall by about half. Famine struck parts of the south in 1989. In 1990 Rwanda agreed a structural adjustment programme with the IMF and World Bank, which devalued the currency and cut spending, raising the cost of living. Regional inequality grew: the north-west received a disproportionate share of jobs and investment, and the shrinking state income became something the elite fought over.

The rise of the RPF and the outbreak of civil war

By 1990 there were several hundred thousand Rwandan refugees and their descendants in Uganda, Burundi, Zaire and Tanzania. Habyarimana's government refused their return on the grounds that Rwanda was full. In Uganda, many young refugees had joined Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army, which took power in 1986; among them were Fred Rwigyema, who became deputy army commander in Uganda, and Paul Kagame, a senior intelligence officer. In 1987 a refugee organisation renamed itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), committed to the right of return and to ending the Habyarimana regime.

On 1 October 1990 between about 2,500 and 4,000 RPF soldiers (estimates vary), many of them deserting from the Ugandan army with their weapons, invaded north-eastern Rwanda. Rwigyema was killed on the second day, and the invasion was driven back with the help of French and Belgian troops and Zairean soldiers sent by Mobutu. Kagame returned from military training in the USA to take command and rebuilt the RPF as a guerrilla army in the Virunga mountains.

The government used the invasion to stage a fake attack on Kigali on 4–5 October 1990 and arrested more than 8,000 people, mostly Tutsi and opponents, as RPF "accomplices". Local officials organised massacres of Tutsi civilians: 383 Tutsi were killed at Kibilira in October 1990, Bagogwe Tutsi herders were killed in the north-west in early 1991, and hundreds were killed in Bugesera in March 1992 after a radio broadcast falsely claimed a Tutsi plot. Historians such as Alison Des Forges treat these massacres as rehearsals for the methods of 1994.

Under pressure from donors, Habyarimana introduced a multiparty system in 1991, and in 1992 a coalition government included opposition parties. Multiparty politics did not reduce tension, because parties formed militias and the war gave extremists a reason to call every opponent a traitor. The MRND youth wing, the Interahamwe ("those who attack together"), and the youth militia of the extremist Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR), the Impuzamugambi, were trained and armed. A Hutu Power movement grew that rejected any compromise with the RPF.

The RPF launched a major offensive in February 1993, pushing to within about 30 km of Kigali before French troops helped to halt it. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu fled the war zone in the north, adding displaced people to the crisis.

The Arusha Accords and the assassination of Habyarimana

Negotiations in Arusha, Tanzania, produced the Arusha Accords, signed on 4 August 1993. They provided for a broad-based transitional government including the RPF, the integration of the two armies (with the RPF holding 40 per cent of the soldiers and 50 per cent of the officers), the return of refugees and elections. The UN Security Council created the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) by Resolution 872 in October 1993 to help implement them, under the Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, with about 2,500 lightly armed troops and a narrow mandate.

For Hutu Power extremists, especially in the akazu and the army, the accords meant losing power, jobs and the army to the RPF. Events in Burundi deepened their fears. On 21 October 1993 Tutsi officers in the Burundian army murdered Melchior Ndadaye, Burundi's first elected Hutu president, and tens of thousands died in the violence that followed. Extremist media in Rwanda presented this as proof that the Tutsi could never be trusted. Habyarimana delayed implementing the accords while militias armed and lists of opponents were drawn up.

On the evening of 6 April 1994, the plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi's President Cyprien Ntaryamira back from a regional summit in Dar es Salaam was shot down by missiles as it approached Kigali airport. Everyone on board was killed.

The factors diagram shows why historians separate the conditions of the crisis from its trigger. The assassination explains the timing of the genocide; the long-term causes explain why identity could be used to mobilise killers; the short-term causes explain why a desperate elite chose genocide to keep power.

The genocide against the Tutsi, April–July 1994

Between April and July 1994, Hutu Power extremists organised the killing of Tutsi across Rwanda, together with Hutu who opposed them. It was a genocide in the legal sense of the 1948 Genocide Convention: an attempt to destroy a group, as such, because of who its members were. The United Nations uses the term "the genocide against the Tutsi" (General Assembly decision of 2018), while recognising that moderate Hutu, Twa and others were also killed.

Preparation: Hutu Power, the Interahamwe and propaganda

From 1990 an extremist network around the akazu, army officers such as Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and the CDR party developed what became known as Hutu Power: the claim that all Tutsi were RPF accomplices and that the Hutu majority had to unite to destroy the "enemy". Militias were recruited and trained, and the army distributed weapons to them. In 1993 businessmen linked to the regime imported far more machetes than farmers needed. Officials drew up lists of Tutsi and opposition figures.

Propaganda prepared ordinary people to see their neighbours as enemies. The newspaper Kangura, edited by Hassan Ngeze, published the "Hutu Ten Commandments" in December 1990.

5. All strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military and security should be entrusted only to Hutu. … 8. The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi.

Kangura, no. 6, "Appeal to the conscience of the Hutu" (containing the "Hutu Ten Commandments"), December 1990; English translation of the Kinyarwanda original as widely reproduced. Published two months after the RPF invasion, for a Hutu readership, the text turns the war into a struggle between peoples and calls any Hutu who married, employed or traded with Tutsi a traitor. It is evidence of the ideology of the extremists, though historians debate how widely Kangura was read in a country where many could not read.

Radio reached far more people. RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines), a private station founded in 1993 by people close to the president's family, mixed popular music and jokes with attacks on Tutsi, whom it called inyenzi ("cockroaches"). During the genocide it read out names and locations of people to be killed and urged listeners to "work", a euphemism for killing.

The UN received warnings. On 11 January 1994 Dallaire sent a cable to UN headquarters (later called the "genocide fax") reporting that an informant inside the Interahamwe said he had been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali and suspected it was for their extermination; the informant claimed that "in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis". Dallaire asked permission to raid arms caches. The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, then headed by Kofi Annan, refused, saying the raids were outside UNAMIR's mandate, and told him to inform Habyarimana instead.

Mass killings and the arrival of the RPF

Within an hour of the plane crash on 6 April, the Presidential Guard and Interahamwe set up roadblocks in Kigali. On 7 April soldiers killed the moderate Hutu prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and the ten Belgian UNAMIR soldiers guarding her, as well as other opposition politicians, judges and journalists. A "crisis committee" led by Bagosora installed an interim government of Hutu Power politicians, with Théodore Sindikubwabo as president and Jean Kambanda as prime minister. The killing of the political opposition in the first days removed anyone in authority who might have stopped what followed.

The killing of Tutsi spread outward from Kigali, using the machinery of the state. Prefects, mayors (bourgmestres) and local councillors organised meetings, gathered men for "work" and directed militias and army units. Tutsi were identified at roadblocks by their identity cards, by appearance or by neighbours. Thousands fled to churches, schools and stadiums, where they had found refuge in earlier massacres; at Nyarubuye, Ntarama, Nyamata and many other places they were surrounded and killed in large numbers. In Butare, where the prefect Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana, the only Tutsi prefect, resisted, large-scale killing began only after the interim government dismissed him in mid-April.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hutu took part, many under pressure from officials and militias, some for land or property, and some from fear of the RPF fed by propaganda. Others hid Tutsi at great risk to themselves. Sexual violence was used on a mass scale: a UN Special Rapporteur estimated in 1996 that between 250,000 and 500,000 women and girls were raped. Children, the elderly and the disabled were not spared. The killing was fastest in April; most victims were dead by the middle of May.

The estimates differ because the 1991 census probably undercounted Tutsi (some hid their identity to escape quotas), because many bodies were never recovered, and because counting the dead became politically charged. All estimates agree that most of the Tutsi of Rwanda were killed in about 100 days.

The RPF resumed the war on 7–8 April, advancing from the north and east and around Kigali. It stopped the genocide in each area it took, rescuing survivors, and refused calls for a ceasefire that would have left the killers in control of the rest of the country. RPF forces took Kigali on 4 July 1994 (now Liberation Day) and the north-west by 18 July. The interim government, the army and the militias fled to Zaire, taking with them about 2 million Hutu civilians, some driven by fear of reprisal, some forced by their leaders.

RPF soldiers also killed civilians, mostly Hutu, during and after their advance. A UNHCR team led by Robert Gersony estimated in 1994 that between 25,000 and 45,000 people had been killed by the RPF between April and August; the findings were not published at the time, and the figure is disputed. These killings were war crimes and deserve to be studied; they were not part of the genocide, and they do not make the events of 1994 a two-sided massacre.

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The response of the international community

The outside world mostly withdrew. French, Belgian and Italian troops flew in to evacuate foreign citizens in the first week and left again, though they could have reinforced UNAMIR. After the murder of its ten soldiers, Belgium withdrew its contingent, the best-equipped part of the force, and lobbied for UNAMIR to be withdrawn entirely. On 21 April the Security Council, in Resolution 912, cut UNAMIR from about 2,500 to 270 troops. Dallaire's remaining soldiers protected about 20,000–30,000 people in places such as the Amahoro stadium and the Hôtel des Mille Collines, which shows what a larger force might have done.

The United States, still shaken by the deaths of US soldiers in Somalia in October 1993, had just adopted a policy (Presidential Decision Directive 25, May 1994) that set strict conditions for supporting UN peacekeeping. US officials avoided calling the killings "genocide", since the Genocide Convention obliges signatories to prevent and punish it. On 17 May Resolution 918 imposed an arms embargo and authorised a larger force (UNAMIR II) of 5,500 troops, but member states were slow to provide troops and equipment, and it arrived only after the genocide had ended.

Opération Turquoise, a French-led intervention authorised by the UN on 22 June 1994, created a "safe humanitarian zone" in south-western Rwanda. It saved several thousand Tutsi, but it also allowed many organisers of the genocide to escape to Zaire. France had been the regime's closest foreign ally, training and arming its army, and its role remains disputed. A commission of French historians led by Vincent Duclert concluded in March 2021 that France bore "heavy and overwhelming responsibilities" through its blind support for the regime, while finding no complicity in the genocide itself; a report commissioned by the Rwandan government (the Muse report, April 2021) argued that France had enabled it.

An independent inquiry commissioned by Kofi Annan, by then UN Secretary-General, reported in December 1999.

The failure by the United Nations to prevent, and subsequently, to stop the genocide in Rwanda was a failure by the United Nations system as a whole. The fundamental failure was the lack of resources and political commitment devoted to developments in Rwanda and to the United Nations presence there.

Report of the Independent Inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (the Carlsson report), UN document S/1999/1257, 15 December 1999. The inquiry was set up by the UN to examine itself, which gives its admission of failure particular weight; by blaming "the system as a whole" and member states' lack of political will, it spreads responsibility widely, so it says less about the decisions of individuals in the Secretariat and the Security Council.

The US president who had kept his country out of Rwanda gave a similar verdict when he visited Kigali four years later.

The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.

Bill Clinton, remarks to genocide survivors at Kigali airport, 25 March 1998 (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States). Clinton spoke to survivors and Rwandan officials during an African tour, and the apology served both moral and diplomatic purposes. Historians such as Samantha Power note that it understated the US role: Washington did not merely act slowly but worked actively in the Security Council to reduce UNAMIR.

Justice and reconciliation after the genocide

The UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) by Resolution 955 on 8 November 1994, based in Arusha, Tanzania. It tried leaders rather than ordinary killers. In September 1998 it convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor, of genocide: the first conviction for genocide by an international court, and the first judgment to recognise rape as an act of genocide. The former prime minister Jean Kambanda pleaded guilty in 1998. In the "Media case" (2003) the founders of RTLM and the editor of Kangura were convicted of incitement to genocide. Bagosora was convicted in 2008. By the time it closed on 31 December 2015, the ICTR had indicted 93 people and sentenced 62.

The ICTR was slow, expensive and far away, and most Rwandans knew little of its work. Rwanda's own courts faced an impossible task: by the late 1990s about 120,000 suspects were held in overcrowded prisons, and at the pace of normal trials it would have taken a century to try them. The government therefore created the gacaca courts, adapted from a traditional form of community dispute settlement. Elected lay judges heard cases on the hillsides where the crimes had taken place, with the community as witnesses; confession could reduce sentences. Piloted from 2002 and running nationally from 2005 until 2012, they handled about 1.9 million cases, according to the Rwandan government.

Alongside these forms of transitional justice came a policy of national unity. A National Unity and Reconciliation Commission was created in 1999; ethnic labels were removed from identity cards; the government's Ndi Umunyarwanda ("I am Rwandan") programme encouraged citizens to identify as Rwandans rather than as Hutu or Tutsi. Laws against "genocide ideology" and "divisionism" punished denial and incitement, but human rights groups have criticised them for being used against political opponents and journalists. Belgium tried four Rwandans, including two nuns, in 2001 (the "Butare Four") under universal jurisdiction, and France, Germany and other countries have since tried suspects living in Europe.

The impact of the genocide

The genocide reshaped Rwanda and the region. Rwanda lost most of its Tutsi population and much of its educated class; tens of thousands of children were orphaned and many survivors were left with trauma, disability or HIV from rape. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi refugees from earlier decades returned, often occupying the property of Hutu who had fled. The RPF, led by Kagame (vice-president and minister of defence from 1994, president from 2000), built a strong, centralised state that achieved rapid economic growth and great improvements in health, but tolerated little opposition.

Women, who made up a large majority of the population in 1994, took on new roles; after the 2013 election women held more than 60 per cent of the seats in the lower house of parliament, the highest share in the world. Internationally, the failure in Rwanda, together with Srebrenica in 1995, led to the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), adopted by the UN World Summit in 2005, which states that the international community should act when a state fails to protect its people from genocide and other mass atrocities.

The most immediate consequence lay across the border. The flight of the interim government, army and militias into the refugee camps of eastern Zaire turned Rwanda's civil war into a regional war.

The First Congo War, 1996–1997

The camps that grew up around Goma and Bukavu in eastern Zaire in July 1994 held more than a million Rwandan Hutu refugees. They were controlled by the former Rwandan army (ex-FAR) and the Interahamwe, who used humanitarian aid to feed their fighters, recruited in the camps and raided Rwanda. Mobutu tolerated and supplied them, seeing a chance to regain Western attention as the indispensable broker of the crisis.

The camps also changed the politics of Kivu. Congolese Tutsi, including the Banyamulenge of South Kivu, whose ancestors had settled there before or during colonial rule, had long faced disputes over land and citizenship; a 1981 law had stripped many of Zairean nationality. In 1996 local officials and Hutu militias attacked them, and the provincial authorities ordered them to leave.

Rwanda, now led in practice by Kagame, decided to destroy the camps and remove Mobutu. In October 1996 it organised, with Uganda, the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL), a coalition of Zairean rebels fronted by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a veteran Lumumbist rebel of the 1960s who had spent years smuggling gold in the east. Rwandan troops did much of the fighting. In November 1996 they attacked the camps; several hundred thousand refugees walked back to Rwanda, while tens of thousands fled west into the forest, pursued by AFDL and Rwandan forces.

The chain from the camps to Kinshasa shows how directly the war grew from the genocide. With Angola, Burundi and Uganda also sending troops, the AFDL crossed the country in seven months against an army that had not been paid for years and mostly fled. Kinshasa fell on 17 May 1997; Mobutu escaped to Morocco, where he died of cancer on 7 September 1997. Kabila declared himself president and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The war's human cost fell heavily on Rwandan Hutu refugees. A UN investigation in 1997 was obstructed, and the UN's Mapping Report (2010) on violations in the Congo from 1993 to 2003 listed 617 of the most serious violent incidents of the decade and documented systematic killings of Hutu refugees by AFDL and Rwandan forces, adding that some incidents, if proved before a court, might be characterised as crimes of genocide. Rwanda rejected the report strongly.

The Second Congo War, 1998–2003

Armed intervention by neighbouring states

Kabila soon tried to free himself from his Rwandan sponsors, who held key posts in his army. In July 1998 he ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan troops to leave. On 2 August 1998 Congolese army units in the east rebelled, and a new rebel movement, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), appeared with Rwandan and Ugandan backing. In a daring operation, Rwandan troops flew across the country to the Kitona air base in the far west and advanced towards Kinshasa.

Kabila was saved by his neighbours. Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent troops for him, and Chad and Sudan smaller forces, while Burundi joined Rwanda and Uganda. The war became the largest interstate conflict in modern African history, involving nine African countries and about 25 armed groups, which is why Gérard Prunier called it "Africa's World War". Each state had its own reasons: Angola wanted to cut UNITA's supply lines through the Congo; Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe sought regional leadership and mining concessions for his generals and companies; Rwanda claimed to be pursuing the génocidaires.

The diagram of the sides shows a war fought by foreign armies through Congolese proxies. The front stabilised in 1999, splitting the country into a government-held west and south, an RCD-held east (controlled by Rwanda) and a north held by Jean-Pierre Bemba's Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC), backed by Uganda. Rwanda and Uganda fell out over control of the east and its resources, and their armies fought three battles in the city of Kisangani in 1999 and 2000, killing hundreds of civilians.

The Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement of July 1999 was signed by the six states at war and later by the rebels, and in November 1999 the UN created a peacekeeping mission, MONUC. Fighting continued, however, and MONUC was too small to enforce anything.

The assassination of Laurent Kabila

On 16 January 2001 Laurent Kabila was shot dead in his palace in Kinshasa by one of his bodyguards. Who ordered the killing has never been established; a Congolese military court convicted dozens of people in 2003 in a trial widely criticised as unfair. His son Joseph Kabila, aged 29 and army chief of staff, succeeded him. Joseph Kabila was more willing to negotiate and to cooperate with the UN and Western governments, which opened the way to peace.

Control of minerals: foreign governments and companies

The eastern Congo is one of the richest mineral regions on earth: gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, tin ore (cassiterite) and coltan (columbite–tantalite, the source of tantalum used in mobile phones and other electronics). In 2000, demand for tantalum caused coltan prices to rise many times over, and armed groups and armies competed to control mines, trading posts and airstrips.

A UN Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources reported in April 2001 and October 2002. It concluded that the war had become largely about access to and control of minerals, and that the armies of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, their officers and their political elites had organised the systematic extraction of Congolese resources. The 2002 report named senior figures in several governments and listed 85 companies, many of them European, North American and South African, that it judged to be in breach of OECD guidelines for multinational enterprises. Rwanda's and Uganda's exports of minerals that they did not produce in large quantities rose sharply.

The table of actors shows why historians describe a "war economy": armies paid themselves from the territory they held, so war became profitable for those who controlled it. Whether minerals caused the war or sustained it is debated. The war began in 1998 over security and the fate of Kabila's regime, before the coltan boom, but the profits of plunder gave its participants reasons to prolong it.

Militias, M23 and the war in the east

Below the level of armies, dozens of militias fought for land, power and resources. The Mai-Mai were local self-defence militias, often claiming to defend "autochthonous" Congolese against Rwandan and Banyamulenge forces. The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), formed in 2000 from the ex-FAR and Interahamwe, continued the war against the RPF from Congolese soil. In Ituri, in the north-east, Ugandan officers manipulated a conflict between the Hema and Lendu communities in which tens of thousands died; the Hema militia leader Thomas Lubanga of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) became, in 2012, the first person convicted by the International Criminal Court, for recruiting child soldiers.

The M23 rebellion took place after the period of this study, but its roots lie in it. The Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma was folded into the national army after 2003, but one of its commanders, Laurent Nkunda, refused and formed the CNDP (National Congress for the Defence of the People) in 2006. After a peace agreement of 23 March 2009 integrated the CNDP into the army, former CNDP officers mutinied in 2012 and named their movement M23 after that date. M23 captured Goma in November 2012, was defeated in 2013, re-emerged in 2021, and captured Goma again in January 2025 and Bukavu in February 2025; as of 2026 it held much of North and South Kivu. UN experts have repeatedly reported Rwandan support for it, which Rwanda denies.

Atrocities of war: crimes against women and children

Civilians suffered most. Armies and militias massacred villagers suspected of supporting their enemies (for example at Kasika in 1998 and in Kisangani in 2002), looted and burned villages and used forced labour in mines. Rape was used systematically as a weapon of war, to terrorise communities, humiliate enemies and drive people from land and mines; tens of thousands of cases were recorded, and many more were never reported. In 2010 the UN official Margot Wallström described the eastern DRC as the "rape capital of the world".

Tens of thousands of children were recruited as soldiers, porters or "wives" of fighters; the child soldiers of the AFDL became known as kadogo ("little ones"). The Mbuti and other forest peoples were attacked by several groups. Millions were displaced, and schools and clinics collapsed.

Most deaths were not violent. Surveys by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimated about 5.4 million "excess deaths" (deaths above the normal rate) in the DRC between 1998 and 2007, most of them from disease and malnutrition among displaced and impoverished people. The Human Security Report (2009/2010) argued that the IRC used too low a baseline death rate and that the true figure was substantially lower. Even critics accept that the war caused deaths in the hundreds of thousands at least, and most scholars accept that the toll ran into millions.

The end of the war

South African-hosted negotiations, the Inter-Congolese Dialogue at Sun City (2002), led to a series of agreements: the Pretoria Agreement between the DRC and Rwanda (30 July 2002), under which Rwanda withdrew its troops in exchange for the disarmament of Hutu militias; the Luanda Agreement with Uganda (September 2002); and the Global and All-Inclusive Agreement (Pretoria, 17 December 2002), which shared power between Joseph Kabila and the main rebel movements. A transitional government took office on 18 July 2003, the date usually given for the end of the war. In Ituri, where fighting continued, a European Union force (Operation Artemis) secured the town of Bunia from June to September 2003. Elections followed in 2006, but violence in the east never fully ended.

Perspectives and debates

Almost every part of this history is argued over, by historians and by the people who lived it. The debates matter politically: in Rwanda, how the past is told is part of how the state justifies itself; in Belgium, the colonial past became a public controversy again in 2020, when statues of Leopold II were defaced and King Philippe expressed his "deepest regrets" for the wounds of the colonial period in a letter to the Congolese president.

Did colonialism create Hutu and Tutsi?

This is the central debate on Rwanda, because it shapes how far the genocide can be blamed on colonial rule. One school stresses colonial invention: Belgian racial theory and administration turned flexible categories into fixed "races", and the post-genocide Rwandan government teaches a version of this view, presenting pre-colonial Rwanda as a harmonious nation divided by Europeans. Another school stresses pre-colonial roots: the distinction already marked inequality, which Rwabugiri's state sharpened, and colonial rule built on it.

The evidence supports a combined view: the categories and some of the inequality were pre-colonial, but colonial rule changed their meaning (from status to race), their fixity (through identity cards) and their political weight (through Tutsi chiefships and then the Belgian switch to the Hutu). A judgement that colonialism "created" ethnicity overstates it; one that ignores colonialism cannot explain the racial language of 1957–1994.

Why did the genocide happen?

Historians agree that the genocide was organised, not spontaneous, but disagree about what mattered most. Alison Des Forges (Leave None to Tell the Story, 1999) shows a genocide planned and directed from the top by a small group of political and military leaders, who used the state administration to mobilise the population. Scott Straus (The Order of Genocide, 2006), using interviews with convicted perpetrators, argues that most participants joined because of wartime fear, insecurity after the president's death and pressure from local authorities and peers, more than because of deep ideological hatred; he found the effect of RTLM smaller than often claimed.

Others stress structure. Peter Uvin (Aiding Violence, 1998) argues that foreign aid supported a development model that deepened inequality, humiliation and "structural violence" while donors praised Rwanda. Economists such as Philip Verwimp have examined how land scarcity and the crisis of the late 1980s shaped who killed and who was killed. Prunier combines history, demographic pressure and the political manipulation of fear by an elite facing the loss of power. These views are compatible in part: structure explains why the elite felt threatened and why recruitment was possible; agency and planning explain why genocide was the chosen response.

Who was responsible for international failure?

Linda Melvern (A People Betrayed, 2000) and Samantha Power ("A Problem from Hell", 2002) argue that Western governments and the UN knew enough to act and chose not to, with the USA actively working to reduce UNAMIR and avoid the word "genocide". Michael Barnett (Eyewitness to a Genocide, 2002), who worked at the US mission to the UN in 1994, explains the failure through the bureaucratic culture of the UN, which defined its duty as protecting peacekeeping itself after Somalia and Bosnia. The French role is the most politically charged question: the Duclert and Muse reports of 2021 agree that France supported the regime, but disagree on whether that support amounted to enabling the genocide.

How destructive was Leopold's Congo?

Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost, 1998) brought the Free State to a mass audience and estimated a population loss of about 10 million. Belgian historians such as Jean Stengers and Jean-Luc Vellut criticised the figure as unprovable and objected to comparisons with the Holocaust, while accepting that the abuses were real and extensive. David Van Reybrouck (Congo: The Epic History of a People, 2010, English 2014) places the Free State in a longer Congolese story built on interviews with Congolese witnesses. The debate is now less about whether the regime was murderous and more about whether the population loss can be measured, and whether "genocide" is the right term for a regime that sought profit rather than the destruction of a people.

Lumumba, Mobutu and the Congo wars

Ludo De Witte (The Assassination of Lumumba, 1999; English 2001) used Belgian archives to show the role of Belgian ministers and officers in Lumumba's death, which led to the Belgian parliamentary inquiry. Crawford Young and Thomas Turner (The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, 1985) analyse Mobutu's state as a patrimonial system that decayed from within; Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, 2000) stresses kleptocracy and the Western governments and banks that sustained it.

On the wars after 1996, Prunier (Africa's World War, 2009) and Jason Stearns (Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, 2011) explain them through regional security after the genocide and the ambitions of neighbouring states. The UN Panel of Experts (2001–2002) emphasised plunder of resources. Séverine Autesserre (The Trouble with the Congo, 2010) argues that international peacebuilders focused on national and regional deals and neglected local conflicts over land, power and identity in the Kivus, which is why violence continued after 2003.

Comparing colonial legacies in Rwanda and the Congo

The two countries were ruled by the same colonial power, became independent within two years of each other and collapsed into violence in the 1990s, but their colonial legacies differed. Comparing them helps to explain why each crisis took the form it did.

The comparison shows a paradox. Rwanda's genocide was so destructive because the state was strong and reached every hill; the Congo's wars were so long because the state was weak and could not control its territory or its resources. Colonial rule shaped both outcomes, but post-independence rulers, Cold War alliances and regional politics determined how those legacies were used.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: colonialism and the genocide

Paper 3: Leopold's Congo and Belgian rule

Paper 3: Mobutu's survival

Paper 3: the international response to the genocide

Paper 3: the Second Congo War

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how Leopold II acquired the Congo and how the Free State was governed.

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  I can explain how the red rubber system worked and assess estimates of the population loss.

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  I can explain how Casement, Morel and others exposed the Free State and why Belgium annexed it in 1908.

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  I can describe the political and economic impact of Belgian rule in the Congo, including the colonial trinity, mining, forced cultivation and education.

• To do:

  I can describe Congolese experiences and resistance, including Kimbanguism and the Pende revolt.

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  I can explain the emergence of Congolese nationalism and why independence came so quickly in 1959–1960.

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  I can describe pre-colonial Rwanda and explain how Rwabugiri's rule hardened the Hutu–Tutsi distinction.

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  I can explain German and Belgian rule in Rwanda, including the Hamitic hypothesis, the reforms of 1926–1931, the census and identity cards.

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  I can describe the economic impact of colonial rule in Rwanda and the experiences of Hutu, Tutsi and Twa.

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  I can explain the Hutu Revolution of 1959–1962 and its consequences.

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  I can explain the causes and course of the Congo Crisis of 1960–1965, including the role of the UN and the Cold War.

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