Kidnappings have gone down in number during his presidency; in 2000 there were 3,572 kidnappings, but by 2006 this had been reduced to 521. In July 2007 the dramatic rescue of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, along with 14 other hostages, caught the world’s attention and dealt a blow to their captors, FARC. With the paramilitaries he has also had some success, including demobilising 31,000 soldiers, although this was on the condition (heavily criticised by some) that they received comparably soft sentences and were exempt from extradition.
Despite these developments, Uribe’s reign has not been free from scandal. In 2006 some lawmakers within his government were discovered to have links with the AUC. Although this ‘parapolitics’ scandal didn’t embroil the president himself, his cousin Mario Uribe was arrested. Also, despite the government’s efforts, cocaine production and export remains a huge problem, while the guerrilla groups and paramilitaries, if somewhat depleted, remain at large.
Gabriel García Márquez
Márquez is probably the best-known living Colombian. Born in 1928 in Aracataca, a town in the north of the country, he studied as a lawyer but soon switched to journalism. He was sent on a writing assignment to Europe in 1955, and while there one of the Colombian newspapers for which he was writing shut down, prompting him to stay in Paris. He has since lived mostly outside his homeland in a number of different countries, including Mexico, Spain and Venezuela. His novels include One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Where is it?
The Democratic Republic of Congo (as distinct from its western neighbour, the smaller Republic of Congo) is a central African country roughly the size of western Europe that straddles the Equator and includes the vast Congo river basin and the world’s second largest rainforest. It is a land rich in natural resources, including diamonds, gold, cobalt and coltan (an essential component of mobile phone chips).
What is going on there?
A decade-long war in the east of the country between national, local and rebel groups motivated by a combination of racial hatred, power and greed. So far it has claimed the lives of an estimated 5 million civilians, mostly through disease and starvation, making it the most deadly conflict since World War II. The humanitarian crisis accompanying this still-rising death toll is one of the most serious in the world at the time of writing: hundreds of thousands have been uprooted from their homes and forced into the jungle or inadequate refugee camps where aid and food are scarce, child soldiers are forced to fight by all sides, and rape and sexual violence, unprecedented in scale and brutality, is commonly used as a tactic of terror. The UN and various charities are doing what they can, but many have criticised the international community for not doing enough to intervene and bring an end to the suffering.
How did the war start?
The war has its roots in the aftermath of the conflict in neighbouring Rwanda in 1994. This was a civil war between two ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi, which left an estimated 1 million dead in 100 days (April-July 1994). Most of these were Tutsis, killed in a systematic genocide at the hands of Hutu militias. However, Tutsi forces (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) ended up victorious and overthrew the Hutu regime. Fearing retaliatory genocide, around a million Hutus (many of them genocidaires—those who had committed the genocide) fled the country into Congo, which was at the time called Zaire.
What happened then?
The first Congo War, from 1996-7. The Hutu militias (Interahamwe), aided for political reasons by the weakening US-backed dictatorship of President Mobutu, started attacking Congolese Tutsis (Banyamulenge) in the states of North and South Kivu in the east. The Tutsis fought back with the support of Rwanda (which feared an invasion from the Hutus), Uganda and Angola, under the leadership of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a long-time opponent of Mobutu (but not himself a Tutsi). The war culminated in Kabila marching on the capital Kinshasa, deposing Mobutu, declaring himself president and renaming the country the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo).
Then what?
In 1998, Kabila asked Rwandan and Ugandan military forces to leave the country as it was creating tensions and making him look weak. This left the Congolese Tutsis vulnerable, and they formed a well-armed rebel group, the RCD (Rally for Congolese Democracy), backed by Rwandan and Ugandan forces who, having just left the Congo, now invaded to support them. Uganda also set up another rebel group, the MLC (Movement for the Liberation of the Congo), which operated in the north of the country. The Rwandan government claimed it was intervening to prevent a genocide against the Tutsis that Kabila was organising; however, it is equally possible that territorial aspirations in eastern Congo were a motivating factor. In response, President Kabila enlisted the help of Hutu extremists to expel the occupying forces, as well as military support from Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia (and later Chad, Sudan and Libya). The resulting ‘Great War of Africa’ was fought partly over the Congo’s natural and mineral resources, many of which were plundered by neighbouring countries such as Uganda. The war had no outright victor and ended officially when a transitional government was installed in 2003. In 2006 Joseph Kabila (son of Laurent-Désiré, who was assassinated in 2001) was declared president in a democratic election, although his government was ineffective in the lawless east, where the fighting continued and has never really stopped. A UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, was set up in 2000 and is still firmly embedded in the Congo. It is the most expensive UN mission in history, but its 17,000 personnel are limited in their ability to control and contain the situation.
Which groups are fighting there still?
The current situation is very complicated, due to the many breakaway groups and rival militias that have formed in the last decade. There are three main factions: the ill-disciplined and poorly paid Congolese national army, or FARDC; the Hutu extremist FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), many of whom carried out the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and who finance themselves by illegal mining; and the Rwandan-sponsored CNDP (National Congress for the Defence of the People). This Tutsi rebel group fought against both the FARDC and the FDLR until January 2009, when President Kabila, realising that they could not be defeated, made a deal with Rwanda in a rare instance of co-operation between the two countries. He allowed the Rwandan army to enter the country to fight the FDLR directly, in exchange for the arrest in Rwanda of the CNDP leader Laurent Nkunda (’the Butcher of Kisangani’). The new CNDP leader Bosco Ntaganda, also known as ‘the Terminator’, has agreed to integrate his forces into the Congolese army, although at the time of writing they appear to retain a degree of autonomy. Both Nkunda and Ntaganda have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Besides these, there are Hutu splinter groups such as the Rastas, ‘a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way’ (New York Times), and also the Mai-Mai, locally formed militias who believe they possess magical powers and fight, often naked and smeared in oil, against all of the above groups, especially the CNDP.
According to UN reports, Angolan troops are also present, co-operating with the government forces, while 2008 saw the arrival of Ugandan and South Sudanese armies as well. Their aim was to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a cannibalistic cult who have been fighting the Ugandan government for 20 years and are now terrorising north-eastern Congo. Their