National Congress for the Defence of the People

The National Congress for the Defence of the People (French: Congrès national pour la défense du peuple, CNDP) is a political armed militia established by Laurent Nkunda in the Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in December 2006. The CNDP was engaged in the Kivu conflict, an armed conflict against the military of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In January 2009, the CNDP split and Nkunda was arrested by the Rwanda government. The remaining CNDP splinter faction, led by Bosco Ntaganda, was planned to be integrated into the national army.

Gen. Laurent Nkunda had been a senior officer in the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (Goma faction) after 1998. Following the end of the war in 2003, he was offered a position in the army of the transitional government but refused to join out of fear that he would be arrested due to the International Criminal Court investigation against him. In 2004 his troops attacked Bukavu before retreating, but he rebelled again in November 2006 and attacked Goma. After sustaining heavy casualties in battle with the Pakistani battalion of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he entered negotiations with the government and agreed to put his men into mixage, which involved mixing rebel and non-rebel units together but is not brassage. Perhaps inspired by the recently concluded general elections, when Nkunda engaged in negotiations with Maj. Gen. John Numbi, at that time head of the Congolese air force, he declared the group he led to be the National Congress for the Defence of the People on 30 December 2006. Nkunda benefited greatly from mixage; before 2007, he had two brigades while mixage created five mixed brigades. While numbers are disputed, Nkunda's two original brigades (the 81st and the 83rd) numbered about 2,200 men but by May 2007 some 8,000 to 8,500 men considered themselves under his command. This expansion was at least partially accomplished because Nkunda began incorporating all manner of men with unclear backgrounds into the brigades under his control, including former Rwandan soldiers, members of former militias who had been demobilized and had no skills outside of war, and others simply attracted to his populist Tutsi rhetoric.

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