Word: congo
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...Vice President and Minister of Defense. It was Kagame, with Uganda's and Burundi's support, who had chosen Kabila to replace Mobutu. In exchange, Kagame made one demand: he wanted Rwandan officers to retrain the Congolese army, as a way to help stop cross-border attacks by Congo-based Hutu warriors on Rwanda's Tutsi population...
...wasn't only the Rwandans who worried about that. Tutsi-led Burundi, whose soldiers have been fighting Kabila, has been pressing to use the Congo as a buffer zone. It is 100 miles from the capital of Rwanda to the Congo border but just 10 miles from that border to Burundi's capital--too close in the eyes of Burundians, who worry about a contagion of Rwanda's ethnic chaos...
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had similar designs on Congo. Ugandan troops have been supporting a second group of Congolese rebels eager to remove Kabila. Museveni insists his intentions are peaceable. As he appeared on television last week describing his army's hunt for the Bwindi killers, he was polished, global and sophisticated. Museveni takes pride in his soldiers and insists their presence in Congo is a stabilizing force. They train the Congolese rebels. They turn over any mines captured to the rebels so that they can buy the hearts and minds of their fellow Congolese...
...Museveni's generosity hasn't stopped him from exporting more Congolese gold last year than any other nation in the region--trade he swears was legitimate. Congo's civil war has destroyed what was once a promising personal alliance between Kabila and Museveni, men who seemed to embody a new kind of progressive African leadership. "Museveni is a nigger like Mobutu," Kabila says of his onetime ally. "He's an exploiter." Says Museveni: "Kabila was always weak, but I didn't know he would also be so treacherous...
Museveni says he still dreams of building a road from Uganda to Kisangani, fathering a Uganda-Congo economic and military alliance that would be among the strongest forces in Africa--an idea that is a nightmare for other African states...