Rwanda made the Congo it's Bitch

somebody post the paratrooper fetish image

>99.94% margin of victory

seconded

>ragtag semiprofessional african militaries and rebels probably numbering under 100k
>at least 2.7 million excess deaths
How

collapse of vital services and infrastructure most likely.

i wish israel was edible

Alright I made a few posts about this in a thread about a week ago, but I wasn't able to save it so I'm just going to go off the cuff and do what I can while being tired as hell.
>Be Rwanda
>Genocide is over, the RPF lead by Paul Kagame has kicked out the Hutu dominated government and the portions of the Rwandan military loyal to them
>This is where most people who know about the genocide think it ends, when its just the beginning
>The Hutus who fled went directly over the border to Zaire, where Mobutu harbored them and armed them
>The Hutu gov't/military remnants begin to start raiding across the border back into Rwanda
>Kagame's government is now in a reverse situation, now they are the government in charge fighting bush guerrillas (which is what the RPF was doing before the genocide)
>The now Tutsi dominated Rwandan government realizes that being limited to their side of the border that these raids would probably go on indefinitely since the Hutus could just flee back into Zaire
>So Paul Kagame and his top advisors decide that in order to end this situation once and for all, there was one solution
>They were going to not only go over the border and reverse-genocide the Hutus who fled, but also straight up invade Zaire with the intention of removing Mobutu from power
>So how the fuck does tiny Rwanda do this?
>By getting a motherfucking coalition going
>The Rwandan military had (and still has) some of the best infantry in all of Africa, but are lacking in most other aspects
>In order to fill this gap Kagame begins contacting regional neighbors and entices them to join him to fight against Mobutu
>Given that basically nobody in the surrounding countries liked Mobutu (Mobutu often funded rebel groups in neighboring countries), they are eager to jump in
>Uganda is sympathetic to the RPF (they harbored the RPF when the Tutsis began their fight against the Hutus), so they are the first on board and provide mechanized and armored units

>Burundi is also sympathetic, and provides troops
>Zimbabwe joins because they don't like Mobutu, and the Rwandans point out that there are plenty of exploitable resources in the Congo that could make Zimbabwe's leaders rich
>Being the greedy little fuck that he is, Mugabe joins in and while Zimbabwean forces do not participate directly (that would change in the second war), they provide logistical support
>Angola has always had a long running feud with Mobutu due to his harboring of UNITA, so they're immediately on board
>Angola deploys some regular forces in 1997, but also sends in old Katangese gendarmes who served all the way back in the original Congo Crisis and had been in exile for years
>Ethiopia and Eritrea also provide some limited technical, moral, and financial support
>However, the bulk of the anti-Mobutu alliance's manpower was made from an rebel coalition known as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDLC)
>This group was made up mainly of disgruntled ethnic minorities from Zaire's border regions as well as political dissidents or really anyone in the country who did not like Mobutu
>The Anti-Mobutu alliance directly funded and trained this rebel Coalition, providing them with the means to fight the Zairian military, in essence forming a massive proxy army manly directed from Kigali in Rwanda
>The Rwandans realize that such a large movement needs a good leader, someone that would be pliable to Rwandan interests and that wouldn't cause trouble for them
>Enter Laurent Kabila
>He's a washed up old Marxist revolutionary who's been fighting against Mobutu for decades, with rather little to show for it other than being a small thorn in his side
>He once fought alongside Che Guevara during the latter's ill-fated expedition to the Congo, and Che was not very impressed and while he respected Kabila's drive he believed that he was rather incompetent and should be kept from command positions

...

>Kagame and friends decide that Kabila will do, and set him up to be the leader of the AFDLC
>Kabila is overjoyed at having new "comrades" in the fight against the oppressor Mobutu
>His contribution is mostly grandstanding and making grandiose marxist speeches that nobody really cares about
>The Rwandans make a point to not put him in charge of anything military-related
>Anyhow, after formulating a large rebel movement and after everything's lined up, the First Congo War kicks off in late 1996 piggybacking off the ongoing Banyamulenge rebellion (ethnic Tutsis living in Zaire)
>The anti-Mobutu alliance makes massive inroads very quickly into Zaire (no small feat considering that Zaire/Congo is fucking HUGE)
>The Zairian military is in a state of decay, with most troops having not been paid and having little food or ammunition despite having much better equipment than the rebels
>The rebels are bolstered by the armed forces of the coalition seeking to topple Mobutu, with the Rwandans being the largest contributor
>Mobutu is largely disconnected from reality, he fully believes that its a minor revolt that will soon be crushed
>Meanwhile with each passing day the rebels move ever closer to Kinshasa far in the west
>Eventually the Zairian leadership realizes how bad the situation is and tries calling in mercenaries
>There are several ex French Foreign Legionnaires who answer the call, as well as the Yugoslav White Legion
>The former FFL guys act like professional mercs, but quickly realize that the military situation is utterly fucked for Zaire and try to tell the Zairian high command to no avail
>The White Legion spends most of their time getting drunk and randomly shooting anyone that looks at them funny
>Despite having several aircraft from Yugoslavia, most of these fall into disrepair and on one occasion a drunken Serb pilot crashes a Mig-21 directly into a Zairian military parade
>Having made no meaningful contribution, the Yugos eventually leave

>Despite having several aircraft from Yugoslavia, most of these fall into disrepair and on one occasion a drunken Serb pilot crashes a Mig-21 directly into a Zairian military parade
i cracked up. what were they thinking?

also good greentexts

Getting rather tired, will try to at least wrap up Congo War 1 and the reason the Second Congo War started and the countries involved (its a massive clusterfuck)
>what were they thinking
The Yugo White Legion was run by incompetent morons who were basically paid to look intimidating and were expected to fight, but chose in most cases not to. They did a handful of bombing runs against rebel targets but usually didn't hit anything. The few times they did engage in combat they got fucked hard. Most of them left after it was blatantly obvious that Mobutu was never going to win

Continuing on
>The end is nigh for the Mobutu government as the Zairian armed forces are falling apart as most soldiers and commanders are deserting
>Mobutu's government is disintegrating as all the rich ministers and officials grab everything they can and fly the fuck out of the country
>Mobutu is finally convinced that there is no more hope in staying, and bails out to exile in Morocco (where he would die of prostate cancer in later in 1997)
>One rather humorous note to add to the fall of Zaire concerns the deceased former president of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana (a Hutu who's death sparked the Rwandan genocide when his plane was shot down)
>Mobutu had been a close friend of Habyarimana, and had personally assured the latter's family that one day the Zairian backed Hutu rebel groups would re-take Rwanda and that he would be buried with honor in Rwandan soil
>Fast forward to Kinshasa being in the rebel's sights in the 1st Congo War
>Mobutu, now realizing that burying Habyarimana in Rwandan soil was never going to happen moved his body from a special refrigerated mausoleum Gbadolite to Kinshasa
>The body's container sits for 3 days out on the tarmac in Kinshasa's airport because everyone forgot about it
>Only as Mobutu is about to leave does he remember, and decides to cremate the body as the last decent thing he could do for his former friend

Veeky Forums has done the impossible: it's made Africa seem really interesting to me

Mercenaries tend to risk-averse by trade and slavic ones are drunk by nature.

>Only thing is, nobody present knows anything about cremation
>Of the foreign nationals fleeing Kinshasa, the Zairian security forces find an Indian Hindu who basically gives them a quick run down on how cremation mostly works and they burn Habyarimana's remains on the tarmac
>Mobutu leaves the next day
>The AFLDC enters Kinshasa with Kabila at the head
>Kabila installs himself as president of the new Democratic Republic of the Congo
Meanwhile, the Rwandans were up to some shenanigans
>While all of the fighting is happening, Rwandan military forces are scouring Zaire for Hutu refugee camps with the sole intent of killing every last Hutu they can find
>The idea is that if they can kill the fuck out of as many Hutus as possible, it will reduce the chance of the Hutu's coming back to fight them as they will be dead
>There is only educated guesses as to how many Hutu's were slaughtered in Zaire, but I believe that estimates of several hundred thousand dead are about right (there were two million Hutu refugees in Zaire when the war started)
>This is mostly glossed over today because everyone had stopped paying attention to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and because the Rwandan's had figured out how to orchestrate PR to their advantage (they also used a lot of aid coming in after the genocide to finance the invasion of the Congo, as well as receiving covert aid from the United States)
>So the first Congo War is over, and initially everyone in the coalition is rather happy
>Angola gets to go after UNITA with relative impunity, Uganda and Rwanda informally occupy chunks of Congolese territory, and the other nations have a chance to get some of dem sweet natural resources in the Congo
>Meanwhile Kabila promises a new beginning for the new Congo and everything looks like its going pretty well

>Of course this is Africa, nothing good ever fucking happens for long

>Roughly a year after the end of the 1st Congo War, the 2nd Congo War will kick off

oh god please give us a sequel, don't stop here

Do some reading nigga, there's plenty of cool shit to be found. I personally find the Cold War period and after to be fascinating with the myriad bush wars and conflicts
>Things begin to go bad as Kabila is now in a position that he had dreamed about for decades
>He's also mostly out of touch with how the world has changed over time and still acts like a 1960's revolutionary
>He begins to start a personality cult in the same vein as Mobutu, and declares that elections will not be held for two years as he needs time to make sure all is well in the country
>He's also very fond of the new luxuries afforded to him
>In a rather short time he essentially becomes another Mobutu, just one spouting a bit more leftist rhetoric but with the same authoritarianism, nepotism, and corruption as before
>Of course this is the norm in much of Africa and things may have simmered down, but that didn't happen
>Kabila makes the one mistake of biting the hand that fed him, and begins to become very hostile to Rwanda
>During this time Rwanda still had troops inside the Congo, ostensibly to provide security and stabilization but also to make sure Kabila was playing ball (also to kill Hutus)
>Kabila becomes less and less happy with this arrangement and begins to order the Rwandans out of his country while branding them as foreign occupiers
>Kagame and company down in Rwanda are less than pleased by this turn of events
>When Kabila begins to hint that he may help Hutu rebel groups fighting against Rwanda, he crossed a line that you do not cross with Kagame
>The Rwandan leadership decide that if it worked once, it can work twice and begin to make plans for a second invasion of the Congo
>They call on the neighbor countries again in an attempt to form a similar coalition to last time
>This doesn't quite happen
>Many of the countries in the first coalition are rather happy with the outcome, with Kabila giving them what they want

I love this, please more.

Also I fucked up, while Kabila did end up financing Hutu militias against Rwanda the straw that broke the camel's back was when he dismissed all of the Rwandan military advisers and officers present in Kinshasa and had them flown out, along with denouncing the Rwandan presence.
>Angola can go after UNITA with impunity, Ethiopia and Eritrea no longer care,and Zimbabwe is going after gold mines, natural resources, and diamonds
>Only Burundi and Uganda are willing to support Rwanda in another push towards Kinshasa
>So Kagame decides to go with what he has, and directs the Rwandan military to form and back a new rebel group known as the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RDC), again made up of Congolese minorities and quite a few former members of the AFDLC
>This rebel coalition, much like the first, begins to make very quick inroads into the Congo (the new Congolese military wasn't much better than their former Zairian counterpart)
>The Rwandans also pull off an insane paratrooper mission all the way to Kinshasa early in the war
See
for more info
>However, this progress did not last long
>The Rwandan paratroopers landing near Kinshasa were also very near to the Angolan border
>The Angolans freak the fuck out over this, and immediately deploy their military in support of Kabila
>They are followed by Zimbabwe, and later Namibia and Chad
>There are now 7 (and unofficially probably closer to 9) countries now in conflict in the DRC during this war
>The Angolans and Zimbabweans push the rebels away from the capital Kinshasa with their relatively modern armed forces
>The Angolans spend most of the war near Kinshasa, guarding the capital and not venturing out much except to attack UNITA
>They want their interests in the DRC protected, but aren't willing to risk much more in further intervention
>Chad and Namibia provide small troop contributions for different reasons, and don't do much
>Zimbabwe ends up deploying the most troops to aid Kabila

>The Pro-Kabila and Anti-Kabila coalitions duke it out for roughly 4 years (officially, there's plenty of fighting that happens after the ceasefire)
>The war becomes mostly a grinding stalemate, as the pro-Kabila forces manage to stave off the initial rebel advance but are unable to push far enough to make a decisive offensive
>The Anti-Kabila forces do not have the hardware necessary to fully take on the combined Zimbabwean/Congolese military (it was mostly Zimbabwe that had to do the heavy lifting), but retain a decent chunk of their initial gains
>The Rwandans and Burundians have arguably the best infantry in the conflict, but they are hampered by the fact that they need the Ugandans to provide armor and don't have much to defend against the Zimbabwean air force and mechanized forces
>Occasionally, they find creative ways to mitigate this
>On one occasion, the Rwandans were confronting a dug-in Zimbabwean mechanized force that would easily repel a Rwandan infantry-based assault
>The Rwandan commander force-marches his troops 10 miles around the Zimbabwe positions during the night, and the next day the Rwandans hit the Zimbabweans from all sides and surprise them, killing most of them
>However most battles usually turn into slugfests, with high attrition for both sides
>The Zimbabwean military is a massive boon to Kabila, as the Zimbabweans still have a decent arsenal from Rhodesia's days and have augmented it slightly with more aircraft and armored vehicles
>Still, the war strains the Zimbabwean army heavily as their performance is still average at best
>Several Zimbabwean planes and helicopters are shot down (with some evidence that mercenaries on the Rwandan side did some of the shoot-downs)
>Many Zimbabwean armored vehicles are lost due to mechanical failure and close-in RPG attacks
>The Zimbabwe military also loses several hundred (I'd put a high estimate to a thousand) soldiers in combat

>Zimbabwe arguably saves the Kabila government from destruction, but irreparably damages its military in the process as they have no means to replace its hardware losses
>Meanwhile the Zimbabweans have not been able to reap any rewards from their mining investments in the Congo as they have none of the necessary equipment to take advantage of the Congo's mineral and gold deposits
>Overall, the war devastates Zimbabwe's economy and military and leads to much of the turmoil in the country today
>Meanwhile on the pro-Kabila side, the Namibians provide some token troop and logistical support, but that's about the extent of it and they are not eager to send their men into combat. Their deployment is not well received at home or abroad
>Meanwhile Chad sends troops in to help Kabila, and quickly pulls them out after multiple reports of Chadians raping and pillaging many villages in the Congo
>The Angolans still stick mainly to the area around Kinshasa and hunt UNITA, their forces are still invaluable in maintaining Kabila in power

>On the anti-Kabila side, all is not well
>There are some frays in the rebel movement, and it does not help that Rwanda and Uganda are beginning to have different interests
>Uganda is more concerned with occupying chunks of the Congo as a buffer zone as well as to exploit economically (while also backing their own proxy rebel groups)
>Rwanda is still maintaining their own groups and fighting against Kabila
>Tensions between the Rwandans and Ugandans come to a head in the city of Kisangani in 2000
>The Ugandan and Rwandan commanders constantly shit-talked each other, with the Ugandans constantly boasting that they could easily defeat the Rwandan forces in the city due to the Ugandan armor advantage
>The Rwandans keep telling the Ugandans to fuck off
>Eventually a skirmish between Ugandan and Rwandan troops breaks out into a full-blown battle

>The Rwandan commander force-marches his troops 10 miles around the Zimbabwe positions during the night, and the next day the Rwandans hit the Zimbabweans from all sides and surprise them, killing most of them
neato

>The battle of Kisangani ends in a decisive Rwandan victory, despite the Ugandan armor presence
>The Rwandan infantry were much better at close quarters than the Ugandans, and were able to isolate and destroy Ugandan tanks in the city
>Between 1-2000 die in the battle, the majority of the casualties being Ugandan
>After this, the anti-Kabila coalition is a rather fractured group with the main goal being supporting various rebel groups rather than seeking all-out victory
>In January of 2001, Laurent Kabila is assassinated by one of his own bodyguards, it is heavily implied that Rwandans orchestrated the killing
>His son, Joseph Kabila takes power
>Joseph proves to be much more adept at running the DRC than his father, and presents himself much better on the international stage
>With the war running on and with every side getting nowhere, the participants agree to a ceasefire in July of 2003
>The pro-Kabila side succeed in keeping Kabila (and now his son) in power, but many of the countries involved were hit hard economically
>The anti-Kabila side failed to topple him, but succeeded in forming long-lasting rebel movements that would keep the border regions under nominal control of Rwanda and Uganda
>The war did little to resolve the ethnic conflict in the Congo, and there is still fighting
>There are also still a myriad of rebel groups operating in the DRC, with various state backers
>While the 2nd Congo war did end, its repercussions continue to echo on
Alright that's the best I can do right now, I need some sleep. Hopefully this was informative.

Also, most of the information in my posts came from this book. I highly recommend it as there is not much information on the 1st and 2nd Congo Wars due to the fact that the media didn't care much for it and very little documentation was done on it. Overall, both conflicts were the bloodiest in Africa with several million dead.

very informative, it looks like chaos from the perspective of modern nation states however it seems to make sense from the perspective of power hungry warlords

Thanks for the posts user, this has been informative.

Out of curiosity what role does Malawi play in this if any? My uncle was a colonel who served in the Congo, hence my curiosity.

Thanks for the greentext my man, you did very well explaining such a chaotic and scarcely coverd war!

The same like absurd casualties numbers during the 100 Years Wars, 30 Years War or any given chinese war.
A tiny bit was due to actually battles or battle-related casualties, the rest because of illness, break down of society and just plain anarchy

Rwanda has been described as the African Prussia.

Thanks for the recommendation user, most of these kinds of posts don't come with a reading recommendation

I hate the idea that a whole fucking war can get missed because the damn media didn't care for it. Like how does that even happen?

Bumping this thread so more folks can see it. Former /k/ommando here, my only knowledge about either of these wars was about the Rwanda invasion with paratroops up top. Thanks for the book rec. Just checked it out at my library.

It is not that unusual, in fact it is happening right now. I highly doubt you are aware of all the armed conflicts happening at this moment.

Damn, Africans are crazy as fuck

It's not even the worst event in the Congo in the last century. Read about the Congo Free State.

That's a special kind of fucked up that I prefer not to talk about.

Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting.[40] As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in chopped-off hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighboring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill. A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 500 kilometres (300 mi) north of Stanley Pool:

All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator...From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets...A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river...Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.[41]

One junior European officer described a raid to punish a village that had protested. The European officer in command "ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades ... and to hang the women and the children on the palisade in the form of a cross."[42] After seeing a Congolese person killed for the first time, a Danish missionary wrote, "The soldier said 'Don't take this to heart so much. They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our service.'"[43] In Forbath's words:

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

Any kind man willing to make a screen cap of that Congo greentext so it can be posted in later threads like the paratrooper one?

Rare mineral prices spiked with the tech boom, made the invasion profitable

Great, great book. If I had gotten to this thread earlier, I would have posted the exact same thing.

Missionary John Harris of Baringa was so shocked by what he had come across that he wrote to Leopold’s chief agent in the Congo saying: “I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people’s stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit.”

What the fuck was their problem?
You want rubber? There has got to be better ways of doing this.
Dehanding someone to do this surely would cut down productivity.

well given about half the monuments in Belgium were personally commissioned by Leopold II (including the national africa museum, I kid you not) I'd say he was doing something right

Its the same today. The most deadly war civilian-wise is probably not Syria but Yemen, but hardly anyone talks about it.

Or the French causing the Libya intervention only as smokescreen to invade and topple the Cote d'Azur government without anyone noticing.

Or India and China practically declaring war against each other over the Dokhlam issue this summer, with very little attention by MSM (granted, that was resolved before the shooting began)

Ohhh Yemen
when your arab Army is decked out in all the fanciest gear yet you’re losing to khat abusing sandal wearing tribesmen who launch tochka missiles to your major cities.

>cote d’azur
You mean cote d’ivoire

is Rwanda, dare I say, /ourcountry/?

Better ways of getting rubber were being developed, which is why there was so much brutality. In less than a decade, synthetic rubber would be mainstream, and the Congo would be just as unprofitable as any other colony. The brutality was needed so that as much wealth could be extracted in the short time frame they had.

nah, i think /Mobutu/ is Veeky Forums/. lazy, cynical, nihilistic, enamored with luxury and with a wicked sense of humor

Pretty much. They are even hated throughout Africa for making fun of niggers and africa in general all the time

The only thing against them is that they are essentially an 1:1 analogy to Israel, which might trigger some of the anons here.

I don't understand

Happy paid workers are more productive than slaves motivated by fear of violence

Is this the power of Anarcho-Capitalism?

>you genocide our people
>we launch the biggest war africa has ever seen
>TWICE

Where are the Hollywood biopics about this shit?

>make a biopic
>it's about literally the least interesting part of the genocide
why is Hollywood like this?

>he only thing against them is that they are essentially an 1:1 analogy to Israel
Are you kidding? That makes it even more /ourcountry/

Nice try shekelstein

+15

Leopold was a sicko like most B*lgians, and loved nothing more than to see innocent animals suffer.

>Leopold was a sicko like most ar*stocrats

FTFY

I can't believe I never knew about this, it's fucking amazing

If you're still here, they gave military access to Tanzania and Zimbabwe, but didn't contribute military support to the war because they (correctly) saw it as a black hole with no gain to be had.

muh "Africa needs aid" narrative
because African nations aren't allowed to have agency

This.

Westerners: liberals, conservatives, racists, progressives, apolitical people, etc etc- Don't give two shits about African politics or history. It's all 'dindu's' this and 'starving children' that. It's never about Africa itself but instead they only care about politics at home and want narratives to suit those purposes.

Normies talking about shit they don't understand and don't want to understand. Africans are just a mass of poor uneducated people with no real countries to them. South Park depicted Ethiopians as starving loincloth-wearing tribesmen who speak in clicks.

>The most deadly war civilian-wise is probably not Syria but Yemen, but hardly anyone talks about it.

Total military and non-military deaths in Yemen are under 40k. Syia's are between 400-500k. I'm pretty sure Syria has been much deadlier for civilians.

you got it. For all the supposed progressiveness of today's society, still nobody really cares about Africa. Racists at least are honest about it, but what I hate more than anything is the condescending babying that progressives and liberals tend to do towards Africa. It's pretty much a new White Man's Burden. You'll have various aid movements that blindly and half-assedly try to address some symptom of the major problem without ever doing anything to address the underlying causes. And it's been going on for decades.

Live Aid was a giant circlejerk of "humanitarianism" that just funneled all the supplies right into the Derg regime of Ethiopia, who was half the reason in the first place that the famine in Ethiopia got as bad as it did. The Derg did the same thing Mugabe did - divert aid away from those who didn't support the regime and towards supporters and the military. So while the West patted itself on the back for how progressive and helpful they were to these poor third worlders, the Derg was bolstered and able to stumble on for several more years.

Or you had Kony 2012, where some activists decided to start an "awareness" campaign to stop the Lord's Resistance Army in the Congo without any understanding of the actual situation on the ground or any endgame beyond "awareness."

And then you've got the voluntourism that's so popular nowadays. All the Westerners traveling to Africa for "mission trips" that are more often than not just expensive wasteful vacations that let you get a few pictures with starving african children to show off to all your friends how great of a person you are.

It's disgusting.

And for all the horrors of the Congo Wars, they actually feel like a good thing in the grand scheme of things. For really the first time ever, you had all these states in Africa exercising foreign policy independent of the Great Powers or the West. It's the first time they showed real independent agency on a large scale.

>the first time African nations were exercising their own foreign policy was to see who gets to fuck up the Congo more
There's a sad irony in it really. Also I have have heard some people talk about how aid is pointless if nothing is done about the corruption, but most people don't seem to want to here it.

Rwanda had a functioning army, Congo (for all its size) didn't.

Can you imagine how much better Africa would be if we let Rwanda do their business and become proper regional hegemons

Really the best way we can help Africa is to let them sort things out on their own.

Not sure if it'd be better. Regional hegemony usually involves a lot of bloodshed in the process, and Rwandan proxies in the 2nd Congo War were brutal as hell.

I'd argue corruption isn't the issue so much as providing meaningful long-term solutions.

Lots of the aid ends up just dumping money into poorly thought out "free money" projects that do more damage long term than they do good. Things like free shoes, clothing, housing, etc. undermine local economies in some of the few areas where they actually could be relatively self-sufficient. For every house you build for "free," that's one less house that a local company could have been paid to build. Free clothing and other essential goods undermine local prices, putting merchants in those sectors out of business and making the locals further dependent on aid.

Of course, the solution isn't necessarily to just cut all aid, but rather to restructure it in a way that's actually doing something meaningful to address the problems. Barring immediate emergency issues or palliative care for dying communities (something you see with a lot of aid in Appalachia in America), the focus should be on helping those in need in such a way that it's at worst not impacting the overall economy and at best a net good. The best case study I've seen was an unusual program which took advantage of the fact that mobile banking is fairly common even in your stereotypical mud-hut village in Kenya (kind of like how smartphones are everywhere in America even among the poorest of the poor). This program involved small, no-strings-attached cash transfers to recipients. And while it sounded retarded on paper, it ended up being surprisingly effective. People would use the money for everything from fixing up their house to investing in a new business. And while some still blew it away on dumb things, the end result was still a net good to the communities. An influx of cash bolstered local businesses, and investments like repairing homes or starting businesses freed up capital that helps the community in the long run.

Funnily enough that sounds similar to what I heard a UN representative for an African country (i can't remember which one, this was years ago) basically say to the assembly about aid.

pax romana is a form of peace

Don't you mean Pax Rwanda hon hon hon

Kind of. The world does need to accept that Africans have free agency, but the political climate in Africa somewhat resembles Europe after the rise of nationalism, and that's not something the world can just stand by and let run its course in this era of globalization. Waiting for things to run their course will mean decades (if not centuries) of successive failed states and changing borders, threatening strategically important resources for the global economy and potentially providing breeding grounds for terrorist groups with a global reach.

And that's where things get difficult. You can't reasonably expect a foreign power to not be acting in their direct interests, so any foreign intervention will inevitably have the same kind of toxic motivations to them that have helped keep Africa from progressing in these past decades. And many African states resemble Eastern Europe before WW1 - a clusterfuck of overlapping nationalities spanning the borders of several different countries and not adequately represented by their governments. Balkanization may happen and is one potential "solution," but another one that isn't as unrealistic as it seems is a push away from nationalism to create truly multicultural states.

>Darfur
I wonder if they'll ever break off from Sudan

Yeah it's a big concern I've seen talked about in my church, which does tons of mission trips. I do an annual trip to this tiny town in southwest Virginia called Hurley, and the same concerns of "are we really helping?" are always floated. We do work with a local organization and all the supplies are bought locally, meaning the money does go into the local economy, but there's always the concern that we're taking away potential jobs in an area where lack of jobs is probably the biggest factor in the community's poverty. "Fortunately," the community honestly seems like it's dying, and the majority of the people helped by the program have literally no means to help themselves otherwise, so as far as we can tell there's not much negative impact.

But that's an unusual case, and you can't just dump aid in like that to most communities if you want any long-term solution.

>and on one occasion a drunken Serb pilot crashes a Mig-21 directly into a Zairian military parade
Sauce?

Reading recommendations user?

he posted the book he got his info from

thanks user

thank you based user
Veeky Forums is the only reason I ever really discovered how interesting African conflicts really are.
Sure there was that movie about a motel in Zaire with Cuba Gooding Jr or whatever but goddamn there is some Full Metal Jacket level shit when West Africans chimp out.
>stay comfy my negus

If you're in the mood for another neat conventional African conflict, check out the Ogaden War.
The best look at the war I've seen is Gebru Tareke's Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa, although it's only one section of the book that covers the war in particular. Wings Over Ogaden by Tom Cooper is a neat look at the air war side of things, which is a weird point - it was an African conflict with some pretty significant air action.

Wasn't that the one with Ukrainian pilots on one side and Russians on the other?

Nope you're thinking of the Ethiopian-Eritrean War. Ogaden was Ethiopia and Somalia. There was a thread about it on /k/ a while back. Unfortunately all the archives are shit apparently, so all I could find was a link to the tumblr that served as an archive for those infodump threads for that specific reason.

kplanes.tumblr.com/post/140035219215/k-planes-episode-94-cripple-fight

It's obviously far from perfect, but it should be a nice quick introduction to the subject.

>Uganda and Rwanda fight each other because of banter

What the hell

Yeah that was funny. Luckily both are best friends again since the M23 rebellion, so if/when the next Congo War starts, they will be both together again, probably with their burundian bros in league (and hopefully Angola this time again)

Meanwhile Rwanda and Uganda are busy planning a mega highway between the two countries and a common currency

what, does Burundi not get to be a part of the highway?

>>The only thing against them is that they are essentially an 1:1 analogy to Israel
why?