25 years ago: Leaked Pentagon report exposes US role in Zaire invasion
On August 16, 1997, the Washington Post published a leaked account of an eight-page internal Pentagon report which exposed the fact that American military personnel had been working in Rwanda for the previous three years to train the forces used in the successful invasion of Zaire, leading to the overthrow of the Mobutu regime.
Beginning in January 1995, hundreds of Rwandan soldiers were trained in combat tactics, military management, disaster relief, team operations, landmine removal and military and civilian policing by American advisers wearing military fatigues. In July and August 1996, US Green Berets conducted two months of counterinsurgency training for selected Rwandan troops.
Two months later, the Rwandan military began cross-border operations against Rwandan Hutu guerrillas based in the refugee camps in Zaire. The routing of Hutu-led militias set the stage for the full-scale invasion of Zaire by Zairean exiles and Tutsi soldiers under the nominal leadership of Laurent Kabila, which culminated in the overthrow of the Mobutu regime.
In June, Vice Premier Paul Kagame, the military strongman of the Rwandan regime, admitted that his forces had played the main role in organizing and mobilizing Kabila’s rebel army, with the Rwandan Army supplying virtually all of Kabila’s officers. The Post report confirmed that the US government sponsored the overthrow of Mobutu, whose regime had become a liability to imperialist interests, by training the Rwandan soldiers who then trained and even commanded Kabila’s forces.
Kagame himself received US military training at Fort Leavenworth before the 1994 Rwanda genocide, which ended when Kagame’s largely Tutsi military force invaded Rwanda from bases in Uganda—a model for the subsequent invasion of Zaire from bases in Rwanda.
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