Word: congos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...didn't take long. Even before the Democratic Republic of Congo's electoral commission announced the interim results of the country's first free vote in more than 40 years Sunday night, fighting had broken out in Kinshasa, the mouldering capital on the Congo River. Supporters of President Joseph Kabila clashed with backers of former warlord and current vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba, who accused Kabila's Republican Guard of attacking its headquarters. Earlier, young men angry with Kabila's success hurled insults and rocks at patrolling policemen. "If you want war," they shouted, according...
...results from the July 30 poll give Kabila, who took office after the assassination of his father Laurent in 2001, just under 45% of the votes cast. Bemba, who led one of the biggest rebel factions in Congo's civil war (from 1998 to 2003) before taking a vice-presidential post in the transitional government, came second with just over 20% support. Because no challenger passed the 50% mark, the two will now face a run-off vote in October...
...Loss of support from former Sudanese allies and a long Ugandan military campaign have also pushed most LRA fighters into the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. "They don't have the capacity to recruit," says Walter Ochora, Uganda's Resident District Commissioner in Gulu, the epicenter of the conflict. "They're surrendering on a daily basis." Child abductions and other attacks are way down from their peak in 2002. Farmers in Uganda's army-defended camps tentatively return to cultivate their land by day. And the north's main town of Gulu is once again bustling with commerce...
...Congo's Vote Tally A new risk of bloodshed A preliminary tally from Congo's July 30 presidential election is expected by Aug. 20. But many have vowed to take up arms if a winner is declared without a runoff, which they want in October...
...Congo's electoral commission has already taken some steps to clean up the mess - investigating a suspicious fire that destroyed used and unused ballots at a Kinshasa election center and attempting to reconstitute the results by checking polling station reports, for instance. But unless they take better control of the count, which still has weeks to run, suspicions will linger that many of Congo's voters were robbed. "We're not saying we've seen widespread fraud. We have seen some but not anything systematic," says Stewart. "But because of all the ambiguities we're not in a position...