Walls plastered with campaign posters from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s historic elections are newly peppered with bullet holes. Tank fire has smashed buildings just down the bloodstained streets from voting centres in the war-battered capital. Balloting was meant to bring a final closure to the Central African nation’s 1996 to 2002 conflict.
Businesses reopened and people reappeared on Kinshasa’s streets on Wednesday as fighting appeared to have ceased following three days of clashes between troops loyal to the two presidential candidates in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) capital.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) long-delayed elections have been pushed back again, at least week beyond the earlier scheduled June 18 date, an Electoral Commission spokesperson said on Tuesday. The vote is to be the first in decades in this sprawling and war-ravaged Central African country.
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/ 6 December 2005
A powerful earthquake toppled homes onto children in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday, killing at least one child in a region already beset
by war, poverty and volcanoes. Dr Jean-Donne Owali told The Associated Press by telephone that two people died from quake injuries in his clinic in lakeside Kalemie, 55km from the epicentre.
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/ 9 November 2005
Former poacher Guillaume Kasereka once used a rusty Russian-made rocket launcher to kill hippos for meat in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) forests. These days, he says, the competition is too fierce — and the prey too scarce. The world’s largest hippo population is being decimated by poaching, conservation officials in the DRC say.
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/ 18 October 2005
An infant gorilla in a Democratic Republic of Congo sanctuary is smashing palm nuts between two rocks to extract oil, surprising and intriguing scientists who say they have much to learn about what gorillas can do — and about what that says about evolution.
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/ 17 October 2005
Nicolas Muhamiriza (47) was once the owner of a thriving bottling plant. Now he’s among thousands in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern city of Goma who struggle to pay rent for wooden shacks, their livelihoods destroyed nearly four years ago when lava submerged schools, hospitals and houses.