Rwandan President Paul Kagame recently won reelection in a landslide, adding five more years to his 24-year rule. At the point that election officials had counted almost 80 percent of the ballots, he had garnered more than 99 percent of the vote. The news was...
Read full story →
Security forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo said they thwarted an attempted coup Sunday, an incident that came amid an ongoing political crisis five months after the country’s presidential elections, Al Jazeera reported. Authorities said the coup began early Sunday near the residence of...
Read full story →
Rwanda’s incursion into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has sparked violence, massive displacement and concerns about the possibility of a new war in one of the poorest, most unstable regions in the world. Irredentist Rwandan leaders claim that colonial mapmakers cleaved off sections of...
Read full story →
The Election Commission of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) invalidated 82 candidates in December’s general election last week, amid claims of fraud and irregularities and calls to re-run all the elections, including the presidential race, Reuters reported. The list of disqualified candidates included three...
Read full story →
Incumbent Felix Tshisekedi won the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s presidential elections, a victory that many opposition candidates quickly disputed as fraudulent and called for protests, the Financial Times reported Monday. Election officials announced Sunday that Tshisekedi secured more than 72 percent of the vote during...
Read full story →
Musa Bi, a 42-year-old mother, is one of the nearly 7 million internally displaced people in Congo. She fled M23 rebels who have sown chaos in the central African country, walking for seven days with six children to reach a United Nations refugee camp. She...
Read full story →
The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Congo (MONUSCO) finalized an agreement to withdraw its 15,000 peacekeepers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), amid ongoing violence in the country’s east and criticism of the mission’s effectiveness, Africanews reported. On Tuesday, DRC Foreign Minister Christophe Lutundula...
Read full story →
Pope Francis kicked off a visit to Africa this week, telling crowds of more than a million people in the Congo to forgive those who have harmed them, while admonishing world powers to “stop choking” Africa, the Associated Press reported. On his first stop in the...
Read full story →
Thousands of people took to the streets of the city of Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) this week to protest against Rwanda’s alleged support of a rebel group in the region, Al Jazeera reported. Protesters accused neighboring Rwanda of supporting the...
Read full story →
The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo is considering ejecting a UN peacekeeping force after weeks of violence between demonstrators and soldiers has left 33 people dead, Reuters reported. Twenty-nine civilians and four peacekeepers were killed during demonstrations across east Congo last week, officials said....
Read full story →
The Great African War, or the African World War, took place in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. As many as six million people died from violence, disease and malnutrition, the BBC explained. The...
Read full story →
Belgian King Philippe made a historic visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo this week, a trip many say is a chance to build new ties between the two countries in the wake of atrocities committed by Belgium during its rule of the country,...
Read full story →
Hundreds of Congolese protesters took to the streets of the capital to protest against Rwanda this week, blaming the neighboring country for allegedly supporting a notorious rebel group responsible for a recent uptick in violence in eastern Congo, Radio France Internationale reported Tuesday. Demonstrators called for...
Read full story →