Word: kabila
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...expect to see many of those who cheered Laurent Kabila's march to power mourning over his assassination. Because the diminutive guerrilla leader, who assumed the presidency of the Congo only four years ago as the Rwandan army led an insurrection that swept aside the four-decade dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, had become a caricature of the man he'd replaced. He headed up a corrupt, inept and duplicitous government that delivered little to its long-suffering people except more war. Kabila was reportedly shot dead Tuesday by one of his bodyguards, in what may have been part...
...assassination plot may have originated in his own military, grown weary of his endless exhortations to fight on in a civil war that has drawn in six neighboring states and been likened to World War I. Some reports suggest that the shooting occurred as a group of generals confronted Kabila after he'd reportedly tried to sack them. Many observers believe the prospects for ending the war are somewhat brighter in Kabila's absence, since his tendency to find pretexts for breaking agreements or avoiding them altogether had begun to exasperate even some of his regional allies. Kabila's army...
...Many of Kabila's officers had begun to express frustration over the war, which began in earnest early in 1997 when Kabila turned on those who'd brought him to power. The former guerrilla leader tapped into resentment of his "outsider" regime in Kinshasa by initiating a pogrom against Rwandan Tutsis - the very army that had transformed him from a 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...
...Local tradition suggests it's far from certain that Kabila's removal will end the war and bring stability, because in the absence of democratic institutions in the war-torn country, politics is conducted with Kalashnikovs. Still, few would see his assassination as a blow to peace...
...which would make the U.N. mission in Sierra Leone, or UNAMSIL, the largest peacekeeping force in the world. Yet last week Holbrooke acknowledged that Sierra Leone cast a "potential shadow" on all U.N. operations as he and a Security Council delegation met with Democratic Republic of Congo President Laurent Kabila in Kinshasa to sign the agreement to send 5,000 U.N. troops to monitor a tottering peace deal there. Holbrooke says the Congo war, which pits Angola- and Zimbabwe-backed government troops against Rwanda- and Uganda-backed rebel groups, is far too complex for the U.N. to do much more...