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Violation of Democratic Rights in Zaire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
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Extract

In a report released on September 16, 1993, Amnesty International came up with an apt description of the current human rights situation in Zaire as consisting of “violence against democracy.” In a violent backlash against the democratization process, the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko has plunged the country into “its worst human rights crisis since the end of the civil war in the early 1960s.” More than 5,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced in ethnic cleansing in the Shaba and North Kivu provinces. Moreover, repeated looting, extortion, and other acts of violence by Mobutu’s army have endangered the lives of millions of people all over the country, particularly in the major cities.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 9 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1994 

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Footnotes

*

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is Professor of African Studies at Howard University and a former president of the African Studies Association. He was a delegate to Zaire’s Sovereign National Conference.

References

Notes

1. Amnesty International, Zaire: Violence Against Democracy, New York: Amnesty International USA, 1993.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., p. 1.

3. Markakis, John, “The Bone of Contention in the Horn of Africa,” in Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges, ed., Conflict in the Horn of Africa, Atlanta: African Studies Association Press, 1991, pp. 19–25.Google Scholar

4. Renan, Ernest, “Qu’est ce qu’une nation?” cited in Emerson, Rupert, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples, Boston: Beacon Press, 1962, p. 149.Google Scholar

5. As stated in the otherwise excellent report by Amnesty International, Zaire: Violence Against Democracy, p. 19.