The capital city, Kinshasa, is located in the far western area of the country. To the north, it is bordered by the Central African Republic and Sudan to the east, by Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania and to the south by Zambia and Angola. The DRC, formerly known as Zaire, is located in Central Africa. Currently the education, healthcare, legal, and road systems are in shambles. However, funds from the sales of these resources has not reached average citizens. DRC has large quantities of gold, copper, diamonds, and coltan (a mineral widely used in cell phones and other small electronics ), which many parties desire to control for monetar y reasons. Some fighting is political, resulting from unrest caused by Hutu refugees from the 1994 Rwandan genocide now living in DRC, while other fighting results from an international demand for natural resources. Today, most of the fighting is taking place in the regions of North and South Kivu, on the DRC/Rwanda border. Rape is being used as a weapon of war, and large-scale plunder and murder are also occurring in efforts to displace people from resource-rich land. The First and Second Congo Wars, which sparked the violence, involved multiple foreign armies, ad hoc militia groups, and investors from Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad, Libya, and Sudan, among others, and has been so devastating that it is sometimes called the “African World War.”įighting continues in the eastern parts of the country, destroying infrastructure, causing physical and psychological damage to civilians, and creating human rights violations on a mass ive scale. The conflict has been the world’s bloodiest since World War II. Since 1996, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC Congo) has been embroiled in violence that has killed as many as 6 million people.
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