August 4, 1998

Second Congo War

Congolese army mutinies open the Second Congo War

A general walked into Goma's state radio station and announced that his own army had rebelled. The city changed hands with little fighting.

2 August 1998, on Goma's state radio

On 2 August 1998, Congolese army units in Goma mutinied against President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and General Sylvain Buki announced the rebellion over the local state radio station. Goma fell to the mutineers with little fighting.

Banyamulenge-led rebellions erupted simultaneously from Goma and Bukavu in eastern Congo, while fighting also broke out among soldiers in Kinshasa. Rwanda and Uganda intervened alongside the mutineers, turning Kabila's rupture with his former sponsors into a new war.

Six days after the expulsion order

The uprising followed Kabila's 27 July order ending the Rwandan military presence in Congo and sending the troops home. He had also dismissed the Rwandan commander James Kabarebe, previously chief of staff of the Congolese army.

Within two days, Rwandan and some Ugandan troops under Kabarebe were flown from Goma to Kitona in western Congo, opening a second front aimed toward Kinshasa. That airlift is what the 4 August date actually describes.

What the 5.4 million figure counts

The International Rescue Committee estimated 5.4 million excess deaths between August 1998 and April 2007, about 2.1 million of them after the formal 2002 peace agreement. Only 0.4% of deaths in its survey were attributed directly to violence.

The number is an excess-mortality estimate covering disease, malnutrition and disrupted services, and its methodology and baseline mortality assumptions have been challenged by other researchers.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes Date corrected

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date corrected. The research places this at 1998-08-02.

What the sources leave uncertain

The outbreak date is well supported as 2 August 1998. The listed 4 August date appears to confuse the war's beginning with the airborne operation against Kitona, which began two days later.
The widely repeated 5.4 million figure is an IRC estimate of excess mortality from August 1998 through April 2007, not a count of people killed in combat or of deaths occurring before the war's 2002–03 political settlement. Its methodology and baseline mortality assumptions have been challenged by other researchers.