Alliance of Democratic Forces For The Liberation of Congo - Background

Background

See also: Great Lakes refugee crisis

By the middle of 1996, the situation in eastern Zaire was simmering with tension. Following the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hutus had fled across the border into Zaire where they settled in large refugee camps. Many of those responsible for the genocide, the former Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and interahamwe militia, used the anonymity offered by the camps to reorganize into the rebel Rassemblement pour le Retour et la Démocratie au Rwanda (RDR). The RDR began to use the camps as bases to infiltrate back across the border and conduct an insurgency. Despite protests by the Rwandan government, the Zairean government and international organizations providing humanitarian aid to the camps were unwilling to remove the militants from the refugee population.

At the same time, the position of the Banyamulenge minority, ethnic Tutsis who had lived in Zaire for generations, was growing precarious. They had long been discriminated against for being relative newcomers to the region and having a different language and culture than neighboring tribes, part of Mobutu Sese Seko's strategy of encouraging a low level of internal discord in the country so an alliance would not form against him. The arrival of large numbers of Hutus, many of them militant Hutus who carried out attacks on Banyamulenge targets, had substantially upset what equilibrium existed. The Rwandan government also saw the Banyamulenge as natural allies and had quietly armed and trained a substantial force in anticipation of what it felt to be an unstable situation.

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