Kinshasa

Soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have arrested the manager of a local radio station in the central Kasai Oriental province, the head of a private radio association said on Wednesday. ”Fortunat Kasongo, manager of the ‘Mon sillon de Boya’ station in Boya was arrested by a dozen soldiers on Tuesday afternoon and neither his family nor the radio have heard anything since,” Freddy Mulongo said.

Nine people were killed and 26 wounded in the north-western Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) when soldiers went on the rampage to avenge a colleague shot dead while thieving, a United Nations-backed radio station said on Monday, quoting the Red Cross. Radio Okapi said the incident happened on Sunday at Mbandaka.

Government soldiers looted homes, beat people and fired gunshots into the air on Sunday in the western Democratic Republic of Congo, a United Nations spokesperson said. The looting spree in Mbandaka was sparked after a soldier was found slain and his body mutilated early on Sunday morning, said UN spokesperson Kemal Saiki.

Black-clad riot police fired tear gas and beat demonstrators with batons as thousands protested delays to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first postwar
presidential elections. The United Nations said at least six died in violence nationwide.

Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila has announced that foreign rebel groups operating in the vast country are to be forcibly disarmed. He did not name the groups but the reference was taken to be to bands of Rwandan Hutus who fled after perpetrating the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in their country.

A Nepalese United Nations peacekeeper died overnight from injuries he sustained in an attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s troubled region of Ituri, the UN mission announced on Friday. His death brings to 18 the number of UN peacekeepers killed in the central African country since the UN mission was deployed there in 1999.

Twenty-six people were missing and feared dead on Thursday after a plane crashed in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an aviation official said. The plane went missing shortly after takeoff on Wednesday and was found by United Nations helicopters on Wednesday night in the dense forests near Walungu.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) President Joseph Kabila was joined on Monday in Parliament by his South African counterpart, Thabo Mbeki, for an official ceremony to pass a post-war DRC Constitution. The full Parliament’s adoption of the new Constitution is a major symbolic step in giving the DRC a new basis for democratic rule.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s legislature has adopted a new Constitution that reduces the required age for presidential candidates, a move that would allow President Joseph Kabila to stand in the country’s next elections, officials said on Saturday.

Nearly three dozen people have been arrested during the last 10 days in the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) province of Katanga, officials said on Monday. They include Andre Tshombe, son of Moise Tshombe, who led a breakaway rebellion in Katanga in the early 1960s.

About 2 500 pygmies emerged from their forest homes in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday to demand equal rights in the vast Central African nation. ”We also exist, the pygmies,” ”Justice, equality and rights for the pygmies in the DRC,” read signs carried by demonstrators.

A typhoid epidemic has returned but the taps installed 15 years ago still can’t provide drinking water to the residents of Kinshasa’s crowded Kimbanseke area.
Their plight and that of millions of others worldwide is the focus of the United Nations World Water Day on Tuesday.

A diamond mine collapsed in the southern Democratic Republic of Congo and killed up to 40 people, authorities said on Wednesday, adding the news had taken weeks to emerge from the remote area. Governor Clement Kanku said he had scant details because of the remote location of the mine, in Kampangala, a town about 135km southeast of Tshikapa, on the border with Angola.

The United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Monuc) on
Friday launched a new military operation to combat militia activity in the northeastern Ituri region. The soldiers, backed by combat and transport helicopters, were in action in the Penie region east of Ituri’s main town, Bunia.

The United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo is investigating an operation in which peacekeeping soldiers killed about 60 militiamen who had ambushed and killed Bangladeshi troops. ”The probe at Loga, which began on March 7 is a routine investigation of the kind we carry out after each operation for a military assessment of the results,” said mission spokesperson Kemal Saiki.

Nearly 4 000 members of one of the half-dozen armed bands operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) violence-ridden Ituri region have begun to lay down their arms in a move hailed as a breakthrough. But the United Nations on Tuesday acccused another group of continuing to commit atrocities in the north-eastern region.

The risk of epidemics is rising dangerously in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as more than 70 000 refugees fled to already-crowded camps over the weekend after renewed violence in the Ituri region, United Nations officials said.

United Nations peacekeepers in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo have killed as many as 60 militia members in a vicious gun fight that wounded two of the UN troops, a UN spokesperson said on Wednesday. The clash took place on Tuesday, about 30km north of Bunia, the capital of the violent Ituri province, where nine peacekeepers were ambushed and killed last week by militia members.

Several United Nations peacekeepers were killed on Friday when unidentified gunmen attacked their patrol in the northeast region of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the UN mission in the country said. A spokesperson for the Monuc mission said details of the attack are still sketchy.

Attacks by local militia groups have killed about 100 people and driven 70 000 from their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s northeast Ituri region in the past two months, United Nations officials said on Tuesday. In the latest attack, three villagers were killed on Friday at Baliba, about 35km northeast of Ituri’s main town of Bunia.

Forty-three people have died and 13 others have been infected following an outbreak of pneumonic plague in the mining area of Zobia, in the region of Bas-Uele in Oriental province in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an official in the ministry of health said on Monday.

A rare form of plague has killed at least 61 people around a diamond mine in the remote wilds in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and authorities fear hundreds more who fled into the forests to escape the contagion are infected and dying, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.

Scheduled elections will take place in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) come rain or come shine, the speaker of the national assembly promised on Monday at the start of a special session on a new Constitution. But Olivier Kamitatu warned against being too rigid about holding the poll before the end of June, as the opposition insists.

Residents of Kinshasa could be forgiven for rubbing their eyes in disbelief. First, a statue of the late Belgian king Leopold II, whose rapacious colonial rule of the Congo caused the death of millions of Africans, was reinstated in the heart of the Congolese capital.

While the world’s richest and most powerful meet in the snowcapped mountains of Switzerland to lament Africa’s dead and starving, the people here advise them to save their breath — they’ve heard it all before. ”It should not be just talk, talk, but do, do something,” said Charles Davies, a newspaper editor in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Rival parties in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will begin new talks next week to work out a timetable for elections, a senior member of Parliament said on Monday in a new indication that the polls may be put off. The announcement came as South African President Thabo Mbeki put off a mediation visit planned for Tuesday.

South African President Thabo Mbeki is due in Kinshasa on Tuesday to push the fragile peace process in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but few believe elections will take place in June as scheduled. The country is struggling to reach the objectives of the December 2002 peace accord, which ended five years of war in the huge country.

One hundred and fifty people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were feared dead on Tuesday after a crowded boat capsized on the Kasai river between Ilebo and Tshikapa, the provincial governor said. The disaster occurred Sunday night, said Andre-Claudel Lubaya, speaking from Kananga, capital of the Kasai Occidental province.