Adam Curtis Blog: KINSHASA: CITY NUMBER TWO.
DRC research. DRC - curators... To sort... Congo Siasa. How Millions Have Been Dying in the Congo by Neal Ascherson. The brassy title of Jason Stearns’s book, more like that of an old rock album than a history, comes from a speech by Laurent Kabila. President of the Congo from 1997 until his murder in 2001, Kabila had replaced the interminable tyranny of Mobutu Sese Seko with his own much shorter and more erratic tyranny.
He said: “Who has not been Mobutist in this country? Three-quarters of this country became part of it! We saw you all dancing in the glory of the monster.” The remark is like Kabila himself: ambiguous, weirdly alluring, useless. Jason Stearns himself does not believe in the glory of monsters. He does not swallow the rhetoric about a “failed state.” His book has been put together out of many dozens of interviews, sustained research, and Stearns’s personal experiences. This is not the story of the Rwanda genocide in 1994, in which 800,000 people—almost all civilians—were massacred by their ethnic rivals in the space of a hundred days.
How many people died in the Great Congo War? RVI Usalama Project 1 CNDP-M23.pdf. Liberation congolese women speak out. Liberation. CERIS Congo RDC Theodore Trefon Tervuren election Development Politics Governance.flv. Ending Sexual Violence in the DR Congo. Millennium Development Goals: Congo. Congo's elections: Determined to vote.
U.S. - Congo relations... DR Congo: Africa's sleeping giant? - Africa... States of Independence. DR Congo is known as a nation with vast quantities of natural resources: Gold, silver, timber, copper, tin - resources that have changed the face of the Western world, but have brought nothing but chaos to most Congolese people - fuelling war, corruption, dictatorship and violence. On June 30, 2010, Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, celebrated the country's 50th anniversary of independence from Belgium. Joseph Kabila, the country's president, was keen to put on an impressive show - thousands of people turned up. The whole area was given an entire makeover: Roads were repaired and new streetlights were put in place. The world saw an image of an advancing and prosperous capital city.
"Slowly but surely Congo is recovering, as a giant who is waking up after a long sleep," Kabila said. But DR Congo's so-called long sleep has been nothing short of a nightmare for its beleaguered population. Patrice Lumumba: the most important assassination of the 20th century | Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja | Global development. Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50 years ago today, on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed. Ludo De Witte, the Belgian author of the best book on this crime, qualifies it as "the most important assassination of the 20th century". The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader.
For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In Congo, Lumumba's assassination is rightly viewed as the country's original sin. Theodore Trefon talks about his new book ‘Congo Masquerade’