Puzzle No. 108: When?

Beginning on 2 August 1998 and formally ending on 18 July 2003, the Second Congo War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo drew in around nine African states and dozens of armed groups, earning the name 'Africa's World War'. Rooted in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1996 to 97 war that toppled Mobutu Sese Seko, the conflict pitted the Kinshasa government and its allies against Rwandan- and Ugandan-backed rebels, with fighting concentrated in the resource-rich east. Although large-scale combat formally ended with a transitional power-sharing government, violence persisted in the eastern provinces for years afterward. Estimates of the death toll vary widely and are contested; an influential 2008 International Rescue Committee survey put excess deaths at around 5.4 million, mostly from disease and malnutrition rather than direct violence, which would make it the deadliest conflict since the Second World War, while other scholars argue for figures closer to three million. The war entrenched cycles of displacement, sexual violence and resource plunder that continue to destabilise the region.

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