Nipate
Forum => Kenya Discussion => Topic started by: Kim Jong-Un's Pajama Pants on February 23, 2018, 02:20:00 AM
-
His term ended and he just said screw that and stayed on. It's crickets from the AU. Not to mention the USA.
WHEN change comes to Congo, it can come fast. The previous president, Laurent Kabila, lost power when a bodyguard shot him in 2001. The president before that, Mobutu Sese Seko, was overthrown by Rwandan-backed rebels who marched 1,600km through the rainforest in a mere six months, wearing gumboots. Mobutu did not pay his troops. “You have guns,” he told them. “You don’t need a salary.” Faced with a serious enemy, they ran away. A tyrant who had ruled for 32 years was suddenly unemployed.
Could it be about to happen again? Congo’s ruler today, Joseph Kabila, who inherited the job from his late father, is beleaguered. Like Kabila père, he has many enemies. Like Mobutu, he has presided over a violent kleptocracy, which few Congolese would lift a finger, let alone a rifle, to defend. His presidential guards remain loyal because they, at least, are well-paid and he maintains a large network of cronies who benefit from corruption. But he is wobbly.
President Kabila is in the seventh year of a five-year term and is constitutionally barred from standing again. He was supposed to call an election in 2016 but found excuses to delay it over and over. He has no legitimacy. His authority is disintegrating. And with it, central Africa faces once again the possibility of a slide into war.
After Mr Kabila broke a vow to hold elections by the end of last year, there were protests at Catholic services in Kinshasa, the capital, and 12 other cities. Mr Kabila cracked down hard. Police surrounded 134 churches in Kinshasa alone, beat and tear-gassed churchgoers, and shot live rounds into fleeing congregations. At least eight people died and probably many more. Human Rights Watch reports that bodies were dumped into the Congo river.
In rural areas the violence is worse. More than 70 rebel groups trade bullets with the army or, more commonly, prey on civilians. The security forces are equally vicious. Some 2m people fled their homes in 2017, bringing the total internally displaced to 4.3m. The UN predicts that an army offensive launched last month against Islamist guerrillas near the border with Uganda will drive another 370,000 from their homes. At least ten of Congo’s 26 provinces are in the grip of armed conflict. Refugees are flocking into Uganda, Tanzania, Angola and Zambia. Recent history suggests that things could get much bloodier.
The great Congo war of 1998-2003 was the most lethal on any continent in most people’s lifetimes. It sucked in soldiers from eight other countries. Mass rape became routine. No one knows how many people died of machete wounds, hunger and disease. Estimates range from 1m to over 5m. Four factors fed the war: an external shock to start it; a state too rotten to hold Congo together; vast mineral wealth that paid for weapons and was worth fighting over; and a tangle of ethnic and tribal grievances for warlords to exploit.
The external shock was the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In its aftermath 2m refugees fled into eastern Congo. They were not the victims, but the perpetrators, along with their families and weapons. The forces of Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s Tutsi strongman, had chased them into the rainforests of what was then called Zaire. When they used the forest as a base to attack Rwanda, he invaded his giant neighbour, twice, to slaughter them. The first time he overthrew Mobutu and put Laurent Kabila in the palace. The second he tried to overthrow Kabila, who had double-crossed him and started to aid the genocidal Hutus. Only swift military intervention by Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia saved Kabila’s life.
The war then degenerated into what Joseph Conrad once called a vile scramble for loot. Armies and militias seized mines and helped themselves. Gunmen plundered villages and raped every woman they could catch. The carnage ended, more or less, in 2003, when all sides were exhausted and donors were leaning on them to make peace. Today the world’s largest UN peacekeeping force, numbering 18,000 blue helmets, tries to enforce a measure of calm in the east of the country.
Paul Collier of Oxford University estimates that when a civil war ends, it has a 40% chance of reigniting within a decade. Congo has so far avoided a full relapse. But it still has three of the four factors that fed a conflict last time—a rotten state, mineral wealth and warlords stirring up animosities. It also has an illegitimate president. Small wonder Congolese are nervous.
https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21737021-president-joseph-kabila-seventh-year-five-year-term-he-struggling-hold
-
I think he's an entitled brat who will wind up dead like his dad.
-
I just wanted to come on and protest the confusing change from the long Windy City Assassin to Bitmask. Wth is Bitmask? Iyo tu!
-
I just wanted to come on and protest the confusing change from the long Windy City Assassin to Bitmask. Wth is Bitmask? Iyo tu!
The old name was a Derrick Rose nickname. The youngest MVP in history is now so injury prone and has such a horrible attitude to the game he almost doesn’t belong in the league anymore.
A bitmask allows you to manipulate individual bits. Those 1s and 0s that store info on computers. It never goes out of fashion :).
-
I think he's an entitled brat who will wind up dead like his dad.
Mobutu did it for 32 years. Kabila is now in power illegally for two. He is looking around the trends in the region and he probably likes his chances of hanging on.
-
Kabila is kaput. You can't fight the largest christian cult and Islam both at the same time and win.
-
It seems Africa will likely renter the era of assassinations and coups.
-
It seems Africa will likely renter the era of assassinations and coups.
To be fair to Congo, they have never really left that era.