Fergal Keane: 'Troubled waters in Congo’s fight to stem flow of venality and violence'

CONGO: Independent observers concluded Martin Fayulu had won the DRC’s presidential election. Photo: AP

Fergal Keane

Outside the river is the same muddy brown expanse, sweeping clumps of vegetation past Kinshasa and Brazzaville and onwards through the Democratic Republic of the Congo towards the distant Atlantic. I am staying in a hotel next to an army base. Scanning from the river to the street below my window, a distance of about 100 metres, I see troops in red berets lounging in the shade of a tree. I have passed them most evenings coming back from the day's reporting. They are polite, not the drunken and dangerous soldiery I have encountered in this country before. But this is the diplomatic district; a better class of soldier is deployed here.

I first saw the river back in 1991 during an attempted coup against the then dictator Mobutu Sese Seko - and had to flee across to Brazzaville to escape the violence in Kinshasa.