Word: congoes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, which fought on Kabila's side, from seeking military advantage in the uncertainty following this week's assassination. Eternal optimists are still talking about a mooted U.N. peacekeeping mission of 5,500 troops, although its deployment is about as likely as snowstorms in the Congo's lush rain forests. But whatever equilibrium currently exists in the Congo is a function of the balance of force between the armies of Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and their local protégés, and the country's fate, as ever, will likely be settled beyond its borders...
Traditionally, the assassination of an autocratic president brings the fear of a power vacuum. Less so in the Congo, for the simple reason that the capital has long since ceased to be the epicenter of power. And that may be the salient fact determining the future of a country that has known little else but the ravages of colonialism, despotism and war for more than a century...
...case of allies Rwanda and Uganda, occasionally fought each other, too, for control of the spoils in the regions they occupied), and African and foreign diplomats have been trying ever since to implement a peace agreement that would have them withdraw and restore some form of democratic rule in Congo. And although Kabila was most consistently blamed - even by his allies - for wrecking the peace process, it's far from clear that any of his interventionist neighbors will ultimately let go of their stake in a country where, despite the absence of the most basic economic infrastructure, rich mineral deposits...
...Congo, of course, was the 19th-century invention of the venal King Leopold of Belgium, whose epic abuses of human rights in a colony he claimed as his personal property inspired history's first international human rights campaign, as well as Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." It's still there on the map, of course - a territorial behemoth the size of Western Europe, stretching from Sudan in Africa's northeast to Angola and Zambia in its southwest. It has a flag (although its bland blue banner spangled with an assortment of gold stars looks more like the neutral emblem...
...minor regional insurgent into the president. Rwanda had installed Kabila precisely because Mobutu had provided shelter to the Hutu genocidaires who had killed a million of their Tutsi countrymen in 1994, and Kabila had failed to deliver on promises to stop the Hutu gunmen operating from bases inside the Congo. When he turned on the Rwandans in his capital and made common cause with the Hutu militants, Rwanda launched a lightning operation to overthrow him. But where the defeat of Mobutu had relied in part on the intervention of Angolan forces over Congo's western border, the renewed Rwandan invasion...