News – en

GENEVA, Switzerland, IPU deeply regrets the sentencing of opposition leader and MP Diomi Ndongala by the Supreme Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 10 years imprisonment.

Peter Clottey

April 10, 2014 1:35 PM
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) information minister says joint military offensives launched by the national army (FARDC) and the United Nations Mission to the country (MONUSC) to protect unarmed civilians have sharply reduced the number of rebel groups from 55 to about 20.

BY PETER JONES

TONGO, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) – Twenty years after the genocide in Rwanda, a rebel group founded by ethnic extremists who took part in that slaughter still prowls the lush hills of neighboring eastern Congo, defying a renewed threat by the army and U.N. peacekeepers to dislodge it.

By Kris Berwouts

In the early morning of April 7, 1994 all hell broke loose in Rwanda. A few hours earlier, President Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down and crashed in the garden of his own palace. He was returning from a regional summit in Tanzania about the implementation of the peace agreement between the regime, based on the Hutu majority, and the Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), who had grown up in the Rwandan refugee camps in Uganda and had started an armed struggle in October 1990. Habyarimana’s death triggered an unprecedented massacre of around one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The genocide ended when the RPF came to power in July 1994. Two million Hutus fled to Congo. Rwanda stabilized but the violence continued on Congolese soil and eventually led to what later was later called The Great African War.

Young Rwandans take part in the vigil held at Amahoro National Stadium, Kigali last year to mark the start of the 19th commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Young Rwandans take part in the vigil held at Amahoro National Stadium, Kigali to mark the start of the 19th commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Twenty years after the genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi minority, the massacres of Hutu civilians who fled across the border into the DR Congo remain a taboo subject in Kigali. PHOTO | CYRIL NDEGEYA | FILE PHOTO | CYRIL | FILE NDEGEYA NATION MEDIA GROUP

by Raoul Monsembula

Almost all of the logging in the Democratic Republic of Congo is illegal, says a new report by the UK-based think tank, Chatham House. Though the figure of 87% is a startling one, it is not surprising for those of us here at Greenpeace who have been working on forestry issues in the Congo Basin.