Democratic Republic of Congo
Snapshot,
November 28, 2011
The European Union spent more than a half billion dollars to underwrite Congo's first nationwide election in 2006. That election was not perfect, but it led to economic and political progress. As the country goes to the polls today, however, those gains risk being squandered.
Letter From,
April 29, 2009
Rwandan troops have pulled out of eastern Congo. Will peace fill the vacuum they left behind, or is a new front in a long war on the horizon?
Essay,
May/June
2008
Although the war in Congo officially ended in 2003, two million people have died since. One of the reasons is that the international community's peacekeeping efforts there have not focused on the local grievances in eastern Congo, especially those over land, that are fueling much of the broader tensions. Until they do, the nation's security and that of the wider Great Lakes region will remain uncertain.
Essay,
Fall
1978
Karl Marx once wrote that history always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Zaïre in 1978 appeared an apt illustration of this aphorism, except the sequence was inverted; farce preceded tragedy. The 1977 invasion (hereafter Shaba I), from Angolan bases, of 1,500 raiders of the Front National pour la Libération du Congo (FNLC), lineal descendants of the old Katanga gendarmes, had the appearance of comic opera. They swept through southwestern Shaba with almost no resistance, then inexplicably stopped at the gates of the rich prize of Kolwezi, to evaporate with few armed encounters before the Moroccan-reinforced Zaïre Army.
