To outsiders, those living in the relatively normal conditions of modern democracies, violent incidents like those that took place in Kinshasa yesterday afternoon sound like Wild West stories. Yet, for people of the central African region, military coups, civil wars, massacres are all too real and have been so for the past thirty years. That’s what life is like down here. This morning, as news filtered through, the population of Brazzaville, where many are citizens of the neighbouring Democratic republic of Congo, you could read concern on the faces of the office workers as well as those of the koro-koro (pushcart) men.

Kabila, whose murder comes as a shock but not really as a surprise to those following closely the imbroglio in the ex-Belgian colony, rode into the capital two short years ago as a saviour, the liberator who would emancipate his people after thirty years of corruption and tyranny under ex-ruler Mobutu. It didn’t dawn right away on most of the population that his Rwandan allies who had cleared the road to the top seat for him wouldn’t go away with a drink and a smile. Within six months, the residents of Kinshasa were experiencing the brutality of the young soldiers from neighbouring Rwanda who behaved more like a new breed of colonists than liberating neighbours. Within a year of Kabila’s taking over, the country was split into warring factions conducting vicious regional wars with each other, each side supported by contingents of soldiers from a neighbour country.

And so it went on for months; rural populations being massacred or displaced, the economy disintegrating and exactions of all kinds taking place in a country rapidly sinking into anarchy. That the several attempts at negotiations between various sides never got anywhere was no doubt due to the lack of goodwill on all parts but also to the fact that quite a few senior officers from the Rwandan, Zimbabwean and Ugandan armies were getting so fat from the flourishing diamond trade that they had every interest in keeping the civil war going on.

And what was President Kabila doing while his country was being torn apart? Well, he successfully managed to alienate all those who had helped his march to power, Rwandan and Americans alike muzzled the political forces which had fought against Mobutu’s dictatorship for thirty years and gradually lost the confidence of the civilian’s populations, many of whom were now worse off than under the previous regime. That it was an officer who shot him only goes to show that Kabila’s last power base finally cracked up under his increasingly erratic behaviour. The senior officer who killed both him and his son had been dismissed from his command ten days before, one last bad move by the Congolese ruler. It was becoming obvious to most observers that Kabila and his inflexibility was now the main obstacle to a settlement of some kind in the bleeding nation that the Democratic Republic of Congo has become.

Former club owner, ex-Marxist revolutionary, political opportunist and finally president, Laurent Kabila made it to the top but his legacy will be hard to manage. Here, on the other side of the Congo River, everyone in the street is keeping their ear glued to their small Japanese radios and the conversations in the ngandas (street bars) all revolve around one question: will the new government

manage some kind of peace treaty or will the conflict intensify into a race to the finish and trouble spill over the water.

In Europe, a dispute between a worker and his former employer is usually settled by an industrial tribunal. In this part of the world, firing an employee can sometimes have much more dire consequences.

Victor Headley, Brazzaville Congo, 17/01/2001