A multibillion-dollar project designed to boost South Africa's diminishing power-generation capacity could be up and running by 2007 if the Democratic Republic of Congo signs an inter-governmental memorandum of understanding by the end of the year. Many have now pinned their hopes on the construction of a $7.3-billion hydropower station at Inga Dam, on the Congo River, as the key to reducing future power shortages.

Simplice Kalunga wa Kalunga, producer and host of the "Nouvelle Donne" ("New Order") show, broadcast on the privately-owned, Kinshasa-based Channel Media Broadcasting (CMB) television station, was summoned for questioning by a Gombe court judge on 19 August 2004. Kalunga was interrogated at length about a 9 August programme during which he had discussed with his guest, well-known Kinshasa lawyer and clergyman Pastor Théodore Ngoy, the various deficiencies of the Justice Ministry's "Nationality Bill", which is currently before Parliament.

Thousands of Congolese refugees in Burundi are to be relocated away from the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an official from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Friday. The announcement comes a week after a massacre of 160 refugees last Friday on a transit camp at Gatumba, which is only 1 km from the border.

Environmental groups have expressed concern at Congo's plans to open up its rainforest for increased commercial logging. The country's government, currently $4.9 billion in debt, has been placing greater emphasis on the growth of the timber industry in the Congo Basin, which has the world's second largest stretches of virgin rainforest after the Amazon in South America. The logging policy has been encouraged by the World Bank - which makes its loans to the government conditional on the forest being opened up.

Despite bouts of insecurity, including inter-militia fighting over the month of July in parts of Ituri District, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), there are signs that the situation in the region is improving, a new report indicates. One of the peace indicators is the "steady and noticeable" return of internally displaced persons (IDPs), according to the July edition of "Ituri Watch". Ituri Watch is a monthly report compiled by the Africa Initiative Programme (AIP) in association with the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response-Africa.

The Writers in Prison Committee has welcomed the release from prison of Lucien Claude Ngongo, deputy editor of the weekly newspaper Fair Play. However, PEN is disturbed that Ngongo continues to face charges for "criminal defamation".

As chilling new details emerged about the gruesome massacre of some 150 Congolese civilians at a refugee camp in Burundi on Friday, the United Nations refugee agency has reported that the country's Government has agreed to authorize a secure camp away from the border for newly arrived refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

More than a year after inter-militia fighting in Ituri district in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo sent thousands of residents fleeing for their lives, many are still holed up in an internally displaced persons' (IDPs) camp near the airport of Bunia, the main town in the district. "I can't return to my home because the militiamen have taken everything I had," said Maki Ayanga, one of the IDPs.

U.N. human rights experts accused all armed groups in Congo's troubled northeastern Ituri province of war crimes and said Rwanda, Uganda, and the former Congolese government contributed to “the massive abuses,” according to a report. At least 8,000 civilians were deliberately killed or were victims of the indiscriminate use of force in Ituri in 2002 and 2003 and more than 600,000 civilians were forced to flee their homes, according to investigations by the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo and other human rights groups.

Sudanese Arab horsemen, whose kin are being recruited by the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, are poaching elephants and endangered white rhinos in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, conservationists say. The poaching raids have halved the world's remaining wild northern white rhino population, threatening it with extinction, said Fraser Smith, head of the Garamba National Park Project, in northeastern Congo.

On 18 July 2004, Deo Namujimbo, a Goma-based correspondent for the international news agency Syfia, based in Montpellier, France, was forced to evacuate his family to Bukavu and go into hiding to "escape from soldiers who [were] searching for him". The soldiers are reportedly aligned with rebel General Laurent Nkunda and are led by a commander known only as "Claude". Goma is the main city in North Kivu province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The UN refugee agency has begun relocating some of the 20,000 refugees who fled fighting in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in June. They are currently crammed in three transit centres along Burundi's volatile Cibitoke border. "We are relocating the bulk of these new arrivals to a better and safer location away from the DRC border once we have agreed with the Burundi government on a suitable site," said UNHCR spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis at a briefing in Geneva.

Burundian government troops have succeeded in repelling an unknown number of Rwandan militiamen who crossed into Burundi from neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, army spokesman Maj Adolphe Manirakiza said on Tuesday. Thousands of Interahamwe militiamen, and Rwandan government soldiers now known as the ex-FAR, fled their country in 1994 fearing prosecution for their involvement in the genocide in which, according to the most recent government statistics, 937,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed.

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo said last Thursday 58 people, suspected to have caught the plague, had died so far this year in the northeastern district of Ituri. They were among the 1,042 suspected plague cases recorded since January, according to a joint Ministry of Health and World Health Organization mission sent to the area from 18 to 26 July.

The main objective of the workshop is to analyse the role that the diaspora plays in peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction in Congo-DRC. The workshop invites papers in English and French that combine empirical and theoretical perspectives on these topics from Economics, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, Migration Studies and related areas.

Oxfam UK

Applicants are sought to manage Oxfam's strategic planning for, and immediate response to, humanitarian emergencies in eastern DRC and to manage emergency response staff in the field. The successful candidate must have at least three years of field experience of humanitarian work, some of it in a management position, as well as knowledge of issues relating to emergency programming, humanitarian law, community involvement and empowerment.

Investigators from the International Criminal Court have arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo to begin their first probe into allegations of serious violations of international law in the country over the last two years, UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said on Tuesday. The investigators are expected to hold closed door meetings with representatives of the Congolese government, civil society, as well as international organisations, she told reporters in New York.

The Security Council has renewed for a second year an arms embargo on all the parties to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and also extended the term of a panel of experts monitoring compliance with the embargo. Resolution 1552, adopted unanimously, says the parties to the Congolese conflict have failed to comply with the embargo, and therefore the sanctions, originally imposed in Resolution 1493 last July, would be extended until July next year.

Together with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Bank is supporting the development of comprehensive new forestry laws in the Congo, as well as the 'zoning' of the country's entire forest area which would imply the logging of some 60 million hectares of tropical forest. According to the Bank's own estimates, as many as 35 million of the Congo's 50 million people depend on the forests for their very survival. All those people could see their livelihood undermined at the best, or even destroyed.

Nearly 20,000 people are in a "critical humanitarian state" in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after fleeing renewed fighting between central government forces and dissident troops around Lake Kivu, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Some 15,000 people have taken refuge along the banks of Lake Kivu, after fleeing the fighting between the DRC's armed forces (FARDC) and dissident leader Gen. Laurent Nkunda. Nearly 5,000 others fled to the High Plateaux region south-west of Minova following abuses by soldiers and armed groups in the Kalehe area.