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Roberto Garreton stated that his investigation in the town of Goma turned up allegations of disappearances, torture and killings. A UN human-rights investigator published statements from witnesses claiming that Kabila's ADFLC (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo) engaged in massacres, and that the advancing army killed as many as 60,000 civilians, a claim the ADFLC strenuously denied. There were reports of massacres and of brutal repression by the rebel army. Kabila's army began a slow movement west in December 1996, near the end of the Great Lakes refugee crisis, taking control of border towns and mines and solidifying control.
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He had been waging armed rebellion in eastern Zaire for more than three decades, though Che Guevara in his account of the early years of the conflict portrayed him as an uncommitted and uninspiring leader. Kabila had declared himself a Marxist and an admirer of Mao Zedong. Kabila himself had credibility as a long-time political opponent of Mobutu, and had been a follower of Patrice Lumumba (the first Prime Minister of the independent Congo), who was executed by a combination of internal and external forces in January 1961, and was ultimately replaced by Mobutu in 1965. The bulk of Kabila's fighters were Tutsis, and many were veterans of various conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa. With active support from Uganda, Rwanda and Angola, the Tutsi forces of Laurent-Désiré Kabila moved methodically down the Congo River, encountering only light resistance from the poorly trained, ill-disciplined forces of Mobutu's crumbling regime. The Mobutu regime of Zaire vigorously denounced this intervention, but possessed neither the military capability to halt it nor the political capital to attract international assistance. The Tutsi-dominated RPF government of Rwanda, which had gained power in July 1994, protested this violation of Rwandan territorial integrity, and began to arm the ethnically Tutsi Banyamulenge of eastern Zaire. The militias, mostly Hutu, had entrenched themselves in refugee camps in eastern Zaire, where many had fled to escape the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The First Congo War began in 1996 as Rwanda increasingly expressed concern that Hutu members of Rassemblement Démocratique pour le Rwanda (RDR) militias were carrying out cross-border raids from what was then Zaire, and planning an invasion of Rwanda. Major funding for this war, and for subsequent fighting, came from conflict minerals. Despite a formal end to the war in July 2003 and an agreement by the former belligerents to create a government of national unity, 1,000 people died daily in 2004 from easily preventable cases of malnutrition and disease. Another 2 million were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighboring countries. īy 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused 5.4 million deaths, principally through disease and malnutrition, making the Second Congo War the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Nine African countries and around twenty-five armed groups became involved in the war. Hostilities have continued since the ongoing Lord's Resistance Army insurgency, and the Kivu and Ituri conflicts. Although a peace agreement was signed in 2002, violence has continued in many regions of the country, especially in the east. The war officially ended in July 2003, when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power. The Second Congo War, also known as the Great War of Africa or the Great African War and sometimes referred to as the African World War, began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War, and involved some of the same issues.