Kisangani Burns: Ugandan-Rwandan Clash Erupts

Two armies that had once fought together as allies turned a Congolese city into a killing ground. Ugandan and Rwandan forces, both nominally present in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to pursue rebel groups threatening their borders, began fighting each other in the streets of Kisangani on June 5, 2000. Six days of artillery exchanges, small arms fire, and house-to-house combat killed an estimated 760 Congolese civilians and wounded over 1,700. Large sections of the city were reduced to rubble. Kisangani, the third-largest city in the DRC, had become a strategic prize in the overlapping conflicts collectively known as Africa’s Great War. Uganda and Rwanda had jointly invaded the Congo in 1998 to overthrow President Laurent-Desire Kabila, their former ally, but the two countries quickly fell out over control of the eastern Congo’s vast mineral wealth. Diamonds, gold, coltan, and timber made the region worth fighting for. The populations living there were treated as obstacles. The June 2000 battle was actually the third armed clash between Ugandan and Rwandan forces in Kisangani in two years. Each time, the combatants destroyed more of the city and killed more civilians. The United Nations, which had deployed a small peacekeeping mission to the Congo in 1999, lacked the mandate and the troops to intervene. The Security Council issued condemnations. Neither Kampala nor Kigali was moved. The International Court of Justice ruled in 2005 that Uganda had violated international law through its military activities in the DRC and owed reparations. In 2022, the court set the amount at $325 million. The Kisangani battles exposed a truth about the Congo wars that the international community was slow to acknowledge: foreign armies were not in the country to restore stability but to extract resources under the cover of security operations. The conflict eventually killed an estimated 5.4 million people, mostly through disease and starvation, making it the deadliest war since 1945.