After a six-year war in which four million people were killed, the Democratic Republic of Congo is set for its first elections since 1965, writes Felim McMahon
The athletic ambassadors of this soccer-mad nation, the Simbas, are set for next week's African Nations Cup. You would have to be outrageously optimistic to fancy their chances.
A better bet, only perhaps, is that Congo can make a successful transition to democracy after four decades of misrule. But who knows? The Simbas have not missed a Nations Cup since 1992, when their country was still Zaire. If only their politicians were as reliable.
Referendum results, released last week, show 84 per cent support for a new constitution in what is being seen as a massive vote for peace, paving the way for a general election on April 29th.
But can this potentially rich but failed state, beset by corruption and conflict, emerge from this hell? Not, it seems, to borrow words from Seamus Heaney without a "tidal wave of justice".
"It's hard to be confident when we are still governed by warlords," says Prof Georges Nzongolo-Ntalaja, a leading Congolese political scientist. "What we have now is a crisis control process, where we brought in the warring factions to stop them fighting . . .
"We may have some semblance of a democratically-elected government in the future, but whether that is going to succeed in moving the country forward is another matter."
A Congolese aid worker with Irish NGO Goal says: "We feel the transition going okay, that it will end okay, but we can never tell. We don't really know what's going on. War could break out any time.We hope for success because we are sick of this. We want the government to take responsibility."
An east African proverb warns that "when two elephants fight, the grass gets trampled" and in Congo, "elephants" have included slave raiders from east and west, colonialism, the cold war, tribal enmity, warlords, corrupt officials and politicians, the ripples of genocide and jealous neighbours.
The country's first and only democraticallyelected president, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated in 1961 with the backing, reportedly of the US and certainly of former colonial power, Belgium, which in 2002 acknowledged a degree of moral responsibility for his death.
The huge mineral-rich country slowly crumbled under its CIA-groomed army chief, Joseph Mobutu, who robbed it of between $5 and $15 billion.
The last time the Simbas lifted the Nations Cup was in 1974, about the same time Zaire began its long slide into oblivion courtesy of Mobutu.
An eventual attempt to manage his departure would be cut across by invasion from the east and Laurent Kabila would be installed as president in 1997 after what was described abroad as a civil war, but in fact at the instigation of Rwanda and Uganda, with a nod from all Zaire's neighbours.
Kabila's son Joseph left command of the army to take the reigns of power in 2001 after his father was assassinated.
Increasingly authoritarian and corrupt, Kabila tried in 1998 to remove his Rwandan and Ugandan backers from Congo, alienating its large Rwandan-speaking minority and plunging the country into the six-year free-for-all from which it is now emerging.
The so-called power-sharing transitional government that fused the warring parties together in 2002 has largely excluded Congo's traditional opposition - including the country's only broad-based political party, the UDPS.
Huge numbers of Congo's population starved or died of disease during the war, while tens of thousands were bombed, shot, brutalised, kidnapped and raped while foreign armies and local militia pillaged the country's natural resources, finding a global market for diamonds, gold, tin ore and coltan, a mineral used in electronics.
The International Rescue Committee's latest survey of 20,000 homes, released last week, estimates that 1,200 Congolese die every day, and that two-in-five children are malnourished.
The death rate is 40 per cent higher than in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa - suggesting that level of war-related deaths was as high as 175,000 per annum.
Even as the results of the referendum were announced, a handful of NGOs were struggling to feed 50,000 newly displaced people in the southern province of Katanga, after a push by the government's rag-tag army against an array of Mayi Mayi militia, former allies of the government, and about 19 warlord commanders in northern Katanga.
Like the Mayi Mayi, government soldiers live largely off the local population and, each month, 40 to 70 per cent of the money earmarked for their salaries goes missing.
"How can you properly feed an army when you pay them $10 a month?" asks Prof Ntalaja, who facilitates the United Nations Development Programme's think-tank on African governance. "They live by harassing and looting."
UN secretary general Kofi Annan requested 3,000 extra troops to help secure the elections in Katanga, but he was given just over 800.
Overall, the UN force of 17,000 in Congo is dealing with some 150,000 combatants in an area of almost four million sq km, compared to a similar sized force that underpinned the transition in Liberia - one-25th of Congo's size with 5 per cent of its population.
The EU is currently considering sending a Franco-German "battle group" to ease the situation.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of former combatants have yet to be integrated into the new national army or returned to civilian life, posing a further threat to stability.
With a landmass three-fifths of the size of the European Union and 200 ethnic groups, Congo is more of a continent than a country.
However, Prof Ntalaja believes that seven years of conflict have strengthened the sense of nationalism although ethnic tensions remain high in many parts of the country, and its leaders are not above exploiting these.
The UN is asking for almost $1 billion to rebuild Congo as part of a two-year action plan, in 2006 and 2007, but this is unlikely to fully materialise. Last year's appeal for $193 million raised only $92 million by September.
However, the greatest challenge for Congo is to tackle corruption, to impose the rule of law and to create an independent judiciary.
Goal's country director in Congo, Omagh-born chartered accountant Niamh Murnaghan, says: "I think the curse of this country is that it has been through four decades of unadulterated corruption.
"That is going to be very hard to change until there is stability, proper salaries for state employees and transparency about what is going on."
International donors, meanwhile, who fund more than 50 per cent of Kinshasa's budget, are being urged to further tie their aid to issues of good governance.
Perhaps this year the Simbas will indeed lift the African Nations Cup again. A much greater prize, however, would be the return of the country itself, from an equally long decline.
Felim McMahon travelled to DRC with Goal