Bingo, Bango, Bongo, There're Elections In The Congo

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. . .and they please me so. Ninme (to whom curtsy for the link) notes the headline "Heart of Africa:Congo’s warlords are put to shame by the enthusiasm of first-time voters" and asks
Only by that?

She also notes the abject situation of the Congolese
Countless millions of Congolese, four million between 1998 and 2003 alone, have died of wounds or of starvation, millions more have been forcibly displaced, and, so abject is the general poverty, normal life for the 60 million survivors of these decades of carnage and misrule is almost everywhere unimaginably wretched.


in spite of
the presence of 17,600 United Nations peacekeepers.

To be fair, their attentions were divided. There were the child prostitution rackets to run in the Congo and then in Indonesia in the tsunami aftermath. And the Blue Helmets have been in Lebanon since 2000 "dismantling" Hizbollah (Hez, Hers, whatever) by allowing it to dig deep bunkers at the Israeli border. Not to mention letting Hamas tunnel into Israel proper. It takes an awful lot of peacekeeping to let the bad guys get that well prepared for their assualt.