Free Republic

Nearly 80 percent of the equipment for staging the December 23 election in DR Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, was destroyed when a fire ripped through a warehouse, as violence flared just 10 days before the vote. The blaze, which officials blamed on arson, was the latest drama of an increasingly tense election campaign ahead of the December 23 election when the country will choose a successor to President Joseph Kabila. Also Thursday, a teenager was shot dead in the central Kasai region as party faithful gathered ahead of a rally by Felix Tshisekedi of the UDPS, one of the leading opposition...

<p>KINSHASA, Congo -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's temper flared on Monday when a Congolese university student asked her for her husband's thinking on an international financial matter.</p> <p>A week after former President Bill Clinton traveled to North Korea to secure the release of two detained American journalists and stole the limelight from the start of his wife's first trip to Africa, Clinton was clearly displeased by the question at town hall forum in Kinshasa.</p>

Saddam's Shadow Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 Copyright 1997 Indigo Publications Africa Energy & Mining June 18, 1997 SECTION: MINING; DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO; N. 207 LENGTH: 787 words HEADLINE: Saddam's Shadow BODY: It's not only diamonds and base metals that interest big mining companies and the latter are not alone in being interested in Katanga. In the delegation that the United States sent to Kinshasa on June 2 under its ambassador to the United Nations, Bill Richardson, the state department's African affairs department was represented by Marc Baas, director for Central Africa. (Susan Rice, director for African...

Heavy fighting broke out around noon yesterday (Thursday 22 March) in Democratic Republic of Congo's capital between the government troops and the militia loyal to Jean-Pierre Bemba. Bemba's personal militia was ordered by the country's government to register at an army base last week to begin their integration into the Congolese security force. But his militia ignored the deadline. These clashes are the first in the in the capital, a Bemba stronghold, since Joseph Kabila was installed as president on Dec. 6. Early in the regellion a witness in a high-rise building on the city's main boulevard said he could...

KINSHASA, Congo (AP) -- The U.N. said Monday it had launched a military operation to rescue foreign diplomats inside the besieged home of a Congo presidential candidate.

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Thousands of civilians have taken refuge on floating islands in the lakes of Congo's Katanga province to escape rape and murder by government and militia fighters, a top U.N. humanitarian official said on Thursday. Some 120,000 people have fled their homes in the remote Mitwaba area, where hundreds of women have been raped during fighting between the army and former pro-government militiamen that U.N. peacekeepers are unable to control, he added. Congo is staggering toward elections, due later this year, but fighting continues in Katanga and elsewhere in the lawless east, where minerals are plentiful and gunmen...

If the preachers who spread their message on the banks of the Congo are to be believed, the face of evil is found in the despairing gaze of an abandoned child. With their pinched faces and thin limbs, the ragged street children found throughout Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo's fetid capital, are the bearers of wickedness and sin. Most have been cast out of their homes for being "witches" and, supposedly, bringing every kind of misfortune on their families. A visceral fear of "possessed" children is sweeping Congo's cities, causing tens of thousands of boys and girls to be...

Congolese officials say hundreds of foreign troops have been spotted in the far west of the Democratic Republic of Congo, less than 400 kilometers from the country's capital Kinshasa. The fighters, who are believed to be Rwandan and Burundian Hutu extremists and Ugandan rebels, were all used as proxies by the former government in Congo's five-year war. Senior Congolese officials, including Congo's vice president in charge of defense and security, Azarias Ruberwa, confirmed reports of a large group of foreign fighters in the western town of Kikwit, in Bandundu province. The officials have said that the presence of one such...