President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Joseph Kabila has one of the most daunting challenges facing any African leader – how to end ongoing armed violence, achieve political stability and work through the trauma caused by a five-year war that is estimated to have claimed the lives of more than three million people.
This job falls to a 34-year-old whose own father, Laurent-Desire Kabila, was assassinated during the almost ceaseless turmoil that befell the country following the overthrow by the elder Kabila of the Mobutu Sese Seko regime in 1997. Even now the country has not escaped from the threat of renewed war with ongoing violence in the east, threats of invasion from Rwanda, coup attempts in the capital Kinshasa and a faction-ridden and precarious transitional government.
