Zaire

Zaire ( , also UK: ), officially the Republic of Zaire (French: République du Zaïre, [ʁepyblik dy zaiʁ]), was the name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1971 to 1997. Zaire was located in Central Africa and was, by area, the third-largest country in Africa (after Sudan and Algeria), and the 11th-largest country (from 1965 to 1997) in the world. With a population of over 23 million inhabitants, Zaire was the most populous officially Francophone country in Africa, as well as one of the most populous in Africa.
The country was a one-party totalitarian military dictatorship, run by Mobutu Sese Seko and his ruling Popular Movement of the Revolution party. Zaire was established following Mobutu's seizure of power in a military coup in 1965, following five years of political upheaval following independence from Belgium known as the Congo Crisis. Zaire had a strongly centralist constitution, and foreign assets were nationalized. The period is sometimes referred to as the Second Congolese Republic.
A wider campaign of Authenticité, ridding the country of the influences from the colonial era of the Belgian Congo, was also launched under Mobutu's direction. Weakened by the termination of American support after the end of the Cold War, Mobutu was forced to declare a new republic in 1990 to cope with demands for change. By the time of its downfall, Zaire was characterised by widespread cronyism, corruption and economic mismanagement.
Zaire collapsed in the late 1990s, amid the destabilization of the eastern parts of the country in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and growing ethnic violence. In 1996, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the head of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) militia, led a popular rebellion against Mobutu. With rebel forces making gains westward, Mobutu fled the country, leaving Kabila's forces in charge as the country restored its name to the Democratic Republic of the Congo the following year. Mobutu would go on to die less than four months later while in exile in Morocco.