(PPG Editorial) Congo chaos: Another ‘president for life’ in this African nation?

Three recent disastrous events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, indicate that it may be approaching another meltdown point, not at all the first in its history.

The highly contagious disease Ebola, the outbreak of which in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa in 2014 became a global concern, has reappeared, not for the first time, in northeast DRC, in the region of Kisangani, formerly known as Stanleyville. The area where it has appeared is so remote and devoid of infrastructure that even Doctors Without Borders is having a hard time getting personnel and supplies into it.

The second event, potentially catastrophic in its implications, is the killing of two human rights workers, one Swedish and the other American, who were inquiring, on behalf of the United Nations, into reports of other killings, perhaps even by DRC soldiers, in the south-central region of the country. Other deaths, of Congolese colleagues of the two international workers, may also have occurred although neither they nor their bodies have yet been found.

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Posted in Politics in General, Republic of Congo

One comment on “(PPG Editorial) Congo chaos: Another ‘president for life’ in this African nation?

  1. The mention of Ebola here shows a bit of a misunderstanding by the author. One of the reasons why Ebola rarely spreads beyond Congo is because the outbreaks have been in remote, hard-to-reach places in the northeast and thus burn out before they get anywhere.