James Kabarebe

General James Kabarebe
Alma mater	Makerere University
Political party	Rwanda Patriotic Front

General James Kabarebe (born 1959) is a Rwandan military officer who has served as the Rwandan Minister of Defence since April 2010. He served as a Rwandan Patriotic Army Commander and was an Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo strategist.

James Kabarabe was born in 1959. He attended Makerere University, where he received a B.A. in economics and political science. He was commissioned in 1989.

James Kabarebe was the private secretary and aide-de-camp (ADC) of Maj.-Gen. Paul Kagame. During the liberation war, he became Commander of the High Command Unit at Mulindi. Later, this unit became the Republican Guard under Kagame's leadership.

During the First Congo War, Kabarebe was the commanding officer of a Rwandan-led army that crossed into the Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to defeat the ex-FAR and Interahamwe, Hutu militia groups that had committed the Rwandan genocide and were engaged in cross-border attacks on Rwanda. This war eventually spread across Zaire. As chief military strategist in Laurent-Désiré Kabila's rebel Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL), Kabarebe helped engineer the capture of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on May 17, 1997, and the defeat of Mobutu Sese Seko. At the end of this mission, he was appointed head of Congolese Army by Kabila. However, around July 27, 1998 when L.D.Kabila realise the man his a Rwandan nationality was dismissed from this post and made a military advisor and replaced by General Célestin Kifwa, which was Congolese nationality who had previously served in the Angola .

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