Word: katanga
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Sitting on a bed in a refugee camp in Katanga, a cursed province in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaïre), Mukeya Ulumba, 28, recounts the epic losses she has suffered in recent months. Several of her relatives and neighbors were killed when antigovernment rebels stormed their village last November, moving from house to house in a murder spree that lasted for hours. Ulumba and her husband managed to flee with their four children, leaving behind their life's possessions, a ravaged community of torched houses and the bloodied corpses of family members and friends. Now Ulumba is struggling...
...looks about 17. When her husband heard her distraught tale, she says, he said: "What can we do? He is a soldier, and I am a civilian." Chilling as it is, Djoli's story is a small detail in the epic misery unfolding in Katanga, a province of the D.R.C. that's approximately the size of France and has a population, mostly poor, of 4.1 million. According to U.N. humanitarian officials, some 164,000 people have fled their Katanga homes since late last year, most of them victims of a vicious struggle as government soldiers close in on Katanga...
...remnants of Congo's civil government, launching the newly-independent nation's long slide into institutional theft and ultimate bankruptcy. Lumumba was placed under house arrest, and after he escaped, was captured, tortured and turned over to Moise Tshombe who had tried to lead a secessionist movement in Katanga, the Congo's richest province. With the blessing of both Belgium and the U.S., Lumumba was nearly beaten to death, then taken out to an isolated forest and shot. His body was hacked to pieces and then dissolved in acid in order to prevent its use as a symbol...
...mercenaries are photographers, actors, accountants and farmers. They practice unarmed combat, play war games on the weekends and hang around certain cafés and bars of southern Africa and Western Europe waiting for contracts through the grapevine. A typical hangout in Brussels advertises "Simba, the beer of Katanga. " Inside, empty cartridges are lined above the counter and photos of mercenaries cover the walls...
...mostly by way of Zambia. They are survivors of an invasion force of several thousand Katangese secessionists in exile who massacred 131 Europeans and at least four tunes that many blacks in an abortive effort to liberate their homeland, Zaïre's mineral-rich Shaba region, formerly Katanga province. The invaders were driven into the jungle by French Foreign Legionnaires and Belgian paratroopers, called in by Zaïrian President Mobutu Sese Seko, No. 1 enemy of the Katangese...