Yearbook 2007
Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite general elections in 2006, Congo remained worried. Struggles erupted in Kinshasa in March when two losing presidential candidates’ private bodyguards refused to be disarmed. Nearly 600 people were killed, according to UN estimates, in fighting between army troops loyal to President Joseph Kabila and, above all, former Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba’s forces. Bemba sought protection at the Embassy of South Africa, from where he was later escorted out of the country. He went with his family to Portugal, where he remained. When he did not take his seat in the Senate within the prescribed time, the prosecutor requested that the legal immunity of Bemba accused of treason be revoked.
- According to abbreviationfinder: CG is the 2-letter acronym for the country of Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Riots erupted in February in the Bas-Congo province during protests that the opposition-dominated provincial assemblies there and in Kinshasa had elected presidential governors. According to the UN, 134 people were killed in clashes with the army.
In the Senate elections, carried out in January by the provincial assemblies, the party alliance around President Kabila was given a majority of seats. Nevertheless, opposition candidate Léon Kengo wa Dondo was elected President. Kengo wa Dondo was prime minister for several periods in the 1980s and 1990s.
A large number of convictions were handed down for murders and other atrocities committed during the civil war and thereafter. two death sentences and about 20 life sentences. One of the militia leaders from the Ituri region in the northeast, Germain Katanga, was brought to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. When three other Itur leaders surrendered to the army, the conflict was declared there ended. In the province of Northern Kivu, however, unrest continued for much of the year. When the army announced in August that it would suspend operations against the Rwandan hutumilis FDLR, which has been operating in eastern K. ever since the 1994 homeland, Congolese Tutsal General Laurent Nkunda responded by interrupting a short-term ceasefire and launching an attack on the army. Nkunda considers itself struggling to protect the country’s Tutsis and has refused to join the new national army. According to the UN, the fighting in North Kivu with Nkunda, the army, the FDLR and local so-called Mai-Mai militias made 375,000 civilian homeless during the year. In November, the governments of K. and Rwanda agreed to jointly try to stop all irregular militias in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The UN force MONUC promised active support.
In April, the government canceled twenty forest harvesting contracts that were concluded for a number of years. A commission that examined 61 international mining contracts recommended that 37 should be renegotiated and 24 demolished.
According to CountryAAH, Kinshasa is the capital city of Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Chinese state granted Congo a US $ 5 billion loan primarily for infrastructure investments. In return, China was promised access to natural resources, primarily timber, cobalt and copper. At a World Bank meeting held in November, international donors pledged US $ 4 billion for the period 2008-10. Three quarters of the sum was said to be brand new money.
In April, together with Rwanda and Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo decided to revive cooperation in the Greater Zealand Economic Community (CEPGL) which has been down for 13 years.
Climate
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, due to its geographic location, there is an equatorial climate. In most parts of the country there is a very warm, tropical, humid climate with an average temperature of around 20 ° C in the dry season and around 30 ° C in the rainy season. The climate is relatively little influenced by seasons such as dry and rainy seasons. Nevertheless, there are regional peculiarities due to the very large land area.
So there is also a small zone of maritime climate. In the small coastal area in the far west, where the Congo River also flows, the cold Benguela Current lowers the temperature and the amount of precipitation significantly, so that in the city of Boma, for example, there is an average of less than 800 mm of precipitation per year.