Godfrey Chikowore / Max John Chinyanganya / Vincent Chenzi
In less than a decade from its formation in 1992 the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) was to face one of its daunting challenges with the eruption of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1998. The DRC had just joined SADC in September 1997 when Laurent Kabila came into power. SADC countries face many social, development, economic, trade, education, health, diplomatic, defence, security and political challenges. Some of these challenges cannot be tackled effectively by individual members. The most pressing and controversial of these challenges was to the military intervention in the 1998 DRC crisis which drew in nine African countries and around twenty-five armed groups. By 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused 5.4 million deaths, principally through disease and starvation, making the 1998 DRC war (also known as the Second Congo War) the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Surrounding the causes and influences of the crisis is the subtle foreign ideological interests of powerful countries on the continent. A brief outline of the Cold War’s major world powers foreign ideological underpinning is analysed from the 1960s to the 1998 crisis.
