As with the Syrian Civil War, so did the Rwandan Genocide prove that modern times did not, in fact, abolish older historical patterns:
The First Congo War was, with the Second, still the largest war of the 21st Century and the second-largest of the 20th after the two world wars in terms of land area and numbers of countries involved. It began with armed militias of Tutsis fleeing the Rwandan Genocide and squatting to set up bases in DRC territory, much as the PLO tried to do in Lebanon before the IDF evicted them. Between this and the casual looting of the DRC, the movements and states that did nothing about the Rwandan Genocide itself refused to allow Rwanda to exploit the DRC when they themselves could do it.
As a result while Mobutu fell, at one level, and Mr. Kabila succeeded him with the help of these same Tutsi militias, the war that followed ended with Kabila staying in power, and briefly with a temporary withdrawal of the various movements that would return with a vengeance in two years. When I keep pointing out that African history exists independent of Israel-Palestine, the attempts to link these wars with that war only show a simple inability to accept that events across continents do not, in fact, have some direct 1:1 link with each other.
The Guardian's award winning Africa correspondent, Chris McGreal, explains why Congo's borderlands with Rwanda have become one of the contin
