Why is there a war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)?
To answer this question we have to go back to 1994. At that time Mobutu Sese Seko, who had seized power in a 1965 coup, was at the helm in the country then called Zaire. His unpopular dictatorship, and personal greed, had run the country into the ground. The people were struggling to survive from day to day. Next door, in tiny Rwanda, genocide took place, in which up to 800,000 minority Tutsi were slaughtered by the majority Hutu. The killing ended only after the rebel Tutsi army captured the capital, Kigali, and routed the killers. The killers, namely members of the Hutu government army and the Interahamwe militia, fled across the border into Zaire, taking more than one million civilians with them. For the next nearly two years, the killers, or genocidaires, lived in and dominated the refugee camps in Zaire. During this time, they made clandestine raids back into Rwanda, destabilizing the efforts of the minority Tutsi rulers to get the country on its feet again. In 1996, the Rwandan g
