The Democratic Republic of Congo

The region is made up of Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. The Democratic Republic of Congo lies in the heart of Africa surrounded on all sides by neighbouring countries. Angola lies to the south west, Zambia to the south, East side is Tanzania and Uganda, Sudan to the north east think of a backwards C bottom to top.

The open space of your backward C is where the conflict zone is, it’s a vast open area that is run by rebels and gorilla militias. These operate in the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. What sparked rebel groups and militias to form was the wealth of resources it had from diamonds to fruits to the drug trades and illegal logging prospects any thing would grow in this part of Africa. The conflict started back in the early 1900’s with drugs gangs , diamond greed and human trafficking. They found a Tribe of PYGME people in the Rain Forest and sold them to Zoos across Europe and America.

The violence intensified in 1959 when the Hutu and the Tutsi clashed over these resources where the Hutu pushed back the Tutsi into exile in Uganda. In Uganda where the Tutsi were taking refuge IDI AMIN had been ejected from power after a rigged election by the former dictator MILTON OBOTE 1981. The Tutsi got involved with a civil war in Uganda and sided with YOWERI MUSEVENI and brought him to power in the eighties.

In 1990 they attacked Rwanda with a full scale war to get back at the Hutu’s forcing them out of Rwanda back into the Congo region this sparked a mass genocide by the Hutu’s killing 800.000 Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. The victorious Tutsi launched raids on the Congo to get the 2 million Hutu’s that took to the trees. Their incursion took them into eastern parts of the Congo an area which has been tearing itself apart since the sixties, this sparked another fraction of the war when the neighbouring militias attacked back, widening the conflict and adding to the humanitarian problem.

The Tutsi invaded the Congo and evicted Mobutu’s regime taking the lands wealth for itself and other regimes that followed them. With the Tutsi looking out at the armies by neighbouring countries looking in the violence seemed to die down, armies were avoiding each other. The most casualties were the civilians that got slaughtered for supporting a different group or militia even the armies themselves would take part in the looting of villages and raping of the women simply because there wasn’t any food for them and it takes a long time to get paid in some of these armies if your getting paid at all, reports have led to show that soldiers from these governmental armies were raping and killing and torturing villagers themselves, this sparked a global investigation into what the armies were actually doing over there. They were sent in to defuse the problem and ended up adding to it. Mostly they wouldn’t go into the battle field because they weren’t getting paid.