Congo (Dem Rep) has many beautiful landscapes, with lakes and forests, waterfalls and wildlife. However, this is a vast country, with an almost non-existent transport infrastructure. It is mired in current conflict and a long and intricate history.

The Belgian Congo was created in 1885 as the personal property of the Belgian monarch, King Leopold II. The Belgians provided nothing other than the minimum infrastructure necessary to support the extraction of the country’s vast mineral wealth, setting a pattern which has dominated this benighted country ever since. The Belgian Congo was eventually granted independence, with minimal preparation, in 1960.

The first post-independence government included an African leader whose radical politics and close relations with the Soviet Union raised serious concerns among Western governments. With the support of the Americans and Belgians, and exploiting the country’s myriad factional, tribal and regional disputes, that government was deposed in an army coup led by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, who later established the regime which ruled Zaire – as the country had been renamed – for the next three decades. Under its self-styled philosophy of ‘Mobutuisme’, Zaire became a byword for gargantuan corruption, nepotism and state-sponsored larceny. Zaire was reduced to penury, barely functioning as a nation state. After the end of the Cold War, the political settlement in South Africa brought the regime to an end.

The military campaign which finally brought down the Mobutu regime was triggered by genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. Once genocide ended, Rwanda's Hutu militia fled into northeastern Zaire. Laurent Kabila then seized control, renaming the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Mobutu left for Morocco, where he died shortly afterwards.) Kabila proved incapable either of handling the multifarious elements in his coalition or tackling the country's huge problems.

By mid-1998, full-scale fighting had broken out between disenchanted former allies and forces loyal to Kabila. The war disintegrated into a complex set of distinct and savage conflicts, with participants as concerned with securing access to the country’s copious mineral and other resources as with stabilising the country. The civilian population suffered, with thousands of refugees desperately searching for food and shelter. The ruined economy, compounded by a lack of medical care and a high rate of HIV/AIDS, contributed to a humanitarian disaster whose scale, by the most conservative estimates, includes at least two million deaths.

Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and his son took over the Presidency. There have been a number of attempts by the UN and the South Africans since then to broker a settlement, most recently in 2003, although fighting has repeatedly resumed. The next election is scheduled for 2006 but sustained peace is, unfortunately, improbable, and it will likely be several decades before the Democratic Republic of Congo is able to function properly.