SUMMARY
Present-day Republic of Congo (also called Congo-Brazzaville and the Congo) was known as Middle Congo during colonial times. The country gained independence from France in 1960, whereupon decades of turbulent politics followed. Organized violence in Congo was closely related to the democratization process that started in the early 90s.
Since 1989 the Republic of Congo has experienced the intrastate and one-sided categories of UCDP organized violence.
Constant violence
The country was ruled by a string of presidents, some military and some civilian, all with the common denominator that they seized power through unconstitutional means. In 1964, the Marxist-Leninist MNR (Mouvement national de la révolution, National Revolutionary Movement) was formed as the country’s sole legal party. In 1968 a new Marxist- Leninist party was established, the PCT (Parti Congolais du Travail, Congolese Labour Party), replacing MNR. PCT came to dominate the political life of the country until the early 1990s, when a democratization process was initiated.
The main ethnic groups in the country are the Bacongo, the Batéké, the MBochi, and the Sangha. Within most of these groups there are numerous subgroups. After the initiation of the democratization process, ethnicity came to play an important role in the country, as elites sought to mobilize their ethnic constituencies to gain political power. In effect, this also led to the outbreak of an intrastate armed conflict in 1993.
In the wake of the 1992-93 legislative and presidential elections, which awarded victory to Pascal Lissouba and his party UPADS (Union Panafricaine pour la Démocratie Sociale, the Pan-African Union for Social Democracy), the political elites plunged the country into three phases of subsequent intrastate conflict – 1993-94, 1997-99 and 2002 – as they competed for control over the government. To make credible claims to power, the three main parties mobilized youths from their respective ethnic constituency into armed militias – the Cobras (PCT), the Cocoyes (UPADS) and the Ninjas (MCDDI: Mouvement congolais pour la démocratie et le développement intégral, the Congolese Movement for Democracy and Integral Development).
Levels of violence varied during the three phases of the conflict, and the highest peak of fatalities took place in 1997 and 1998 in the regions of Brazzaville, Bouenza, Pool and Kouilou, among others. Instances of one-sided violence became a regular occurrence perpetrated by two successive governments. The opposition side also made use of one-sided violence. While the Cobras carried out acts of violence against civilians mostly in 1997 in the Brazzaville region, the Ntsiloulous perpetrated civilian massacres in 1998, 2002 and 2003 in the Bouenza, Pool and Brazzaville regions.
After the signing of the peace agreement in 2003, violence kept erupting sporadically around the fate of the Ntsiloulous fighters in Brazzaville, as well as new elections in 2016.
