Word: congos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Congo that Kabila inherited was in need of help. The vast river basins and dense rain forests of the Congo, a piece of land the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, have never been conquered by asphalt or rail ties. Steamers still ply the Congo River, the only efficient means of transport that survived Mobutu's unbenign neglect...
...What the Congo could be has been obvious since British explorer Lieut. Verney Cameron captivated Belgium's King Leopold in 1876 with tales of riches. The soil is fertile. There are giant stretches of tropical wood, and an estimated $58 billion of mineral wealth is in the ground...
Kabila meant to turn that promise into a future. Between his arrival in office in May 1997 and the outbreak of civil war last August, he changed the name of the country back to Congo (from Zaire). He brought inflation down from 900% to 5%. He attempted to build a professional army. But what Kabila didn't do was broaden his political base beyond his own tribe. And he began using arrests of politicians and journalists as a management tool...
...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...