Word: congo
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...help in rebuilding his shattered country and to promise to abide by a peace deal to end the 33-month war there. He fired the ministers he inherited from his father, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and promises to install a cabinet that "will work for Congo." Says a senior Western diplomat in the capital, Kinshasa, a city of moldering colonial grandeur and mid-1970s mineral boom excess: "For a guy his age he's remarkably savvy. The big question is, can he be ruthless enough to pull...
...would be hard to do worse than his father did. When the one-time Marxist Laurent-Désiré - backed by Rwanda and Uganda - ousted the venal Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, he was greeted with cheers and optimism. After three decades of kleptocratic dictatorship, it seemed that Congo could finally begin again. But the senior Kabila's promise of national reconstruction didn't get much further than slogans and billboards. Within a year the country was back at war, and the smiling giant had cracked down on political opponents and postponed promised elections. So when a bodyguard shot...
...Angolan allies. "The power today is dictated by Zimbabwe," says opposition leader Joseph Olenghankoy, who is calling for immediate talks on elections and last week, with other opposition leaders, met the head of the main rebel group Jean-Pierre Bemba to discuss a possible alliance. "The weight of Congo is too much for him. Politics needs strategy, and all he's got is foreign backing." Kabila says he will hold elections once the "foreign aggressors" have withdrawn and dismisses talk of foreign influence on the government. "The Congolese people understand. There is a government, I am the President of this...
...contract granting an Israeli company a monopoly on the export of diamonds. Crucially, "he hasn't just broken the contract unilaterally, as would have happened in the past," says another Western diplomat. "It could be that he's scared of the repercussions, but it also seems that he wants Congo to have a new image...
...news video showing him floating Godlike in the clouds. "I know how I look, so I don't need to have a poster to realize that I look like Joseph," he says. "Has it really got any meaning? Times have changed. The expectations of the people of the Congo are not to see Joseph on posters or to listen to songs that make him much more special than anybody else. In fact, I'm just like any other Congolese...