Brazzaville’s residents live to the rhythm of natural disasters but the state does little to help
For several years, the Republic of the Congo has been quietly buying an arsenal from Azerbaijan, with the latest cache arriving before next month’s election
Congo’s army has widened a safety zone around the site of the weekend arms dump explosions that killed nearly 200 people.
Fears of more unexploded munitions at a Congo arms depot where a series of blasts killed nearly 200 people have delayed the search for more wounded.
The number of victims from the Congo armoury blast continues to rise as morgues run out of space and are forced to stack bodies two each onto a tray.
Congo wants to amend the terms of a multi-million hectare land deal with South African farmers, a top aide said on Wednesday.
An Air France plane hit a building just after landing in Brazzaville and was banned from taking off with any passengers, an official said on Thursday.
At least four mortar shells pounded a northern working-class district of the Congo capital Brazzaville overnight, causing heavy damage.
Sitting at a small clinic in the Talangai area, north of Congo’s capital, Brazzaville, Elise Diamba holds the hands of her malnourished two-year old grandson. "Gérard’s mother stopped breastfeeding him when he was seven months," the 61-year old grandmother says. "He hadn’t even started walking. Since then, his health has not been good."
The Republic of Congo heads into a second round of voting on Sunday, but many there are wary of electoral chaos and the fact that their lives aren’t improving much, despite their country pumping out billions of Âdollars from oil every year. The remaining 84 seats in Congo’s 137-seat Parliament will be fought over after a first round of voting in late June gave President Denis Sassou-Nguesso’s Congolese Labour Party a huge victory and a further stranglehold on his rule.
The first round of Congo’s legislative elections was marked by chaos on Sunday, with long delays, protesters crying foul and about 40 smaller opposition parties boycotting the ballot. In neighbourhoods of the capital, Brazzaville, and the economic capital, Pointe-Noire, several polling stations had still not opened by noon.
President Denis Sassou Nguesso’s ruling party is expected to be the big winner of legislative elections on Sunday in Congo, where opposition complaints have had little impact. Sassou Nguesso has been back in controversy this week after French prosecutors started investigating allegations that he used embezzled state funds to buy luxury Paris apartments.
The remains of one of the few white colonists still held in regard in Africa were reinterred on Tuesday in a glass and marble mausoleum in the city named after him, Brazzaville. The body of the Franco-Italian explorer Pierre de Brazza was exhumed in Algeria last week and flown to the capital of the Congo.
A Congolese court on Wednesday acquitted all 15 defendants in the trial over the 1999 murder of about 350 refugees in Brazzaville after finding them not guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. However the court ordered the Congolese government to pay 10-million CFA francs to the relatives of 86 of the missing refugees.
The trial opens in Brazzaville on Tuesday of 16 people accused of slaughtering dozens of President Denis Sassou Nguesso’s opponents in the explosive case of the ”beach missing”. The trial of those charged with the killing of people who disappeared after returning from exile in 1999 marks the last chapter in a political and legal saga that has touched both Congo and France.
Another person died of Ebola in the north-western Congo, raising the number of victims to 10, health officials announced on Friday. The latest victim died on Thursday in Etoumbi district after being in contact with her husband, who succumbed to the haemorrhagic fever on May 11.
Authorities in the Congo have quarantined two north-western districts hit by the deadly Ebola virus to ensure the highly contagious disease does not spread, officials said on Friday. The two districts — Etoumbi, where eight deaths were recorded, and Mbomo, where a ninth person died — were sealed off on Wednesday.
The Congo’s top health official said on Monday he fears an outbreak of a rare haemorrhagic fever could spread from neighbouring Angola despite efforts to curtail cross-border traffic and monitor arrivals from the infected area. ”We’re worried despite the precautions we have taken,” he said.
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/ 3 February 2005
Leaders from Africa’s Congo Basin gather in Brazzaville with international officials on Saturday for a conference on the threats facing the region’s vast forest expanses, one of the world’s two lungs. The seven-nation meeting aims to breathe life into a conservation treaty signed in 1999, but which has so far made little progress.
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/ 19 November 2004
Human-rights groups on Friday urged the Congo’s government to ratify an international treaty that would protect the rights of pygmies, many of whom live in virtual slavery in the country. Most of the Congo’s estimated 600 000 pygmies live deep in its north-eastern forests, eking out an existence by hunting and gathering.
Central African countries and international donors failed at the weekend to agree how to finance an ambitious plan to manage the region’s natural parks and forests, especially the Congo Basin forest, considered the world’s second-most important green lung after the Amazon.
A train derailed on Sunday in the south of the Central African Republic of Congo, killing 31 people and injuring scores of others, a government spokesman said on Tuesday. It was unclear what caused Sunday’s crash, which occurred about 150km south of the capital, Brazzaville.
Government forces killed seven rebels south of the capital in a rare firefight this week, a government spokesperson said. The rebels, loyal to renegade Pastor Frederic Bitsangou, were killed on Tuesday near Kinkala, 70km south of Brazzaville, spokesperson Alain Akouala said late on Thursday.
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/ 12 February 2004
The Aids virus is spreading in the main cities and towns of the Republic of Congo, with a higher average rate of HIV-positive people among women than among men, according to a survey published on Thursday. The survey shows that the national average rate of infection is 4,2% among people aged 15 to 49.
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/ 4 December 2003
At least 25 people have died of the incurable Ebola virus in the latest outbreak of the haemorrhagic fever in northwestern Congo. So far 47 cases have been identified of Ebola, which is characterised by high fever, diarrhoea and bleeding from the nose and gums, and can induce massive internal haemorrhages.
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/ 26 November 2003
Health authorities raised the death toll in an Ebola outbreak in the northwest Republic of Congo to 18 on Tuesday, and said they had imposed a quarantine on the hardest-hit village. Health workers are following 164 people believed to have come into contact with those infected, the Health Ministry said.
The death toll from an outbreak of the highly contagious Ebola virus has risen to 88 in the Republic of Congo’s Cuvette-Ouest province, near the border with Gabon, the health ministry announced on Monday.
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/ 19 February 2003
Health investigators confirmed Wednesday that an outbreak killing scores in central Republic of Congo is Ebola, and warned the highly lethal hemorrhagic fever could still be spreading.
The army in the Republic of Congo has regained control of the town of Kimba from Ninja rebels.
UN agencies have of a ”humanitarian catastrophe” for thousands of people displaced by fighting and beyond the reach of aid workers in the Congo’s Pool region.
Polling stations opened early Sunday for the second round of legislative elections in Congo, but tens of thousands of people displaced by fighting were not expected to vote.
Vindza and Kimba, two cities in the heart of Congo’s Pool region, have become virtual ghost towns in recent months, as residents flee to the forest to escape fighting between government troops and rebels.