Word: congo
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...Nkunda has form - and there is nothing in it to suggest reasonableness. It was his previous refusal to integrate with the national army in 2004 that began the present stage of Congo's 15-year civil war. His forces have just spent the last two months killing the same army troops he now says he wants to join. And Nkunda has a history of war crimes. The U.N. accuses his forces of executing enemies and raping women and indicted him for war crimes in September 2005. This month, it accused his forces - now numbering an estimated...
Africa has seen the likes of Congo rebel leader Laurent Nkunda before. The story of the revolutionary who storms out of the hinterland in a lightning advance and seizes power is a familiar one, from Nkunda's native Democratic Republic of Congo to the Comoros Islands. Sometimes, as with Paul Kagame in Rwanda or with Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, the new leaders are an improvement. But in other cases, as with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Laurent Kabila, the assassinated father of the current Congolese president, they quickly impose the autocracy and corruption they were initially fighting...
Nkunda is still in his hinterland, along the Rwandan border in eastern Congo. But the Tutsi rebel leader has doubled his territory in the last few weeks, precipitating a humanitarian crisis involving a million refugees. And with his forces closing in on the regional capital Goma and facing a collapsing national army and a weak and isolated President, his threat to take the Congolese capital Kinshasa is suddenly one to take seriously. Nkunda's decision to hold a rally and press conference on Nov. 22 in Rutshuru, newly captured by his forces, was a chance to discover what kind...
...Presidency and speaks instead of a position in the Congolese army - "where I am most comfortable." Two days later, he expands on that, declaring he is ready to integrate his forces into it. His dream, he says, is not one of personal ambition, but of a "big Congo" no longer overshadowed by its smaller, more developed neighbors...
...popular frustration is manipulated by political forces to advance their own agenda. The problem is simply practical. There are 10 million people in North and South Kivu, and we have less than 10,000 soldiers there. In Liberia I had the same amount of troops as I have for Congo, and [Liberia] is less than one-hundredth of the size. Congo is the size of Western Europe, without roads. That's the scale of the problem. We cannot be everywhere all of the time. It's not indifference; far from it. We are there as part of a peace process...