LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Congo: Belgian Congo
built 232 days ago
Congo's mineral wealth is the mainstay of the economy, but the development of the mining industry has occurred at the expense of commercial agriculture. The economy's growth spurted under Belgian control in the 1950s, slowed considerably during the country's postindependence troubles in the early 1960s, accelerated again in the late 1960s when political stability returned, and has generally declined since the 1970s, when the nationalization of major industries resulted in a reduction of private investment. Since the early 1990s much of the economy has been in a state of collapse, although economic stability improved in the early 2000s.
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Under Leopold II's administration, the Congo Free State became the site of one of the most infamous international scandals of the turn of the twentieth century. The report of the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for cold-blooded killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese natives). Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. In the absence of a census (the first was made in 1924), it is even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Roger Casement's famous 1904 report set it at 3 million. According to Roger Casement's report, this depopulation was caused mainly by four causes: indiscriminate "war", starvation, reduction of births and tropical diseases.
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Established as a Belgian colony in 1908, the Republic of the Congo gained its independence in 1960, but its early years were marred by political and social instability. Col. Joseph MOBUTU seized power and declared himself president in a November 1965 coup. He subsequently changed his name - to MOBUTU Sese Seko - as well as that of the country - to Zaire. MOBUTU retained his position for 32 years through several sham elections, as well as through the use of brutal force. Ethnic strife and civil war, touched off by a massive inflow of refugees in 1994 from fighting in Rwanda and Burundi, led in May 1997 to the toppling of the MOBUTU regime by a rebellion backed by Rwanda and Uganda and fronted by Laurent KABILA. He renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), but in August 1998 his regime was itself challenged by a second insurrection again backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
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In 1960 the Belgian Congo became independent as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gen. Joseph Mobutu came to power in a coup in 1965; he changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko and the country's name to the Republic of Zaire. Mobutu’s corruption-ridden government continued in power until 1997 when rebel forces led by Laurent Kabila—supported by Rwanda and Uganda—took Kinshasa and changed the country's name back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A rift between Kabila and his former allies caused a new rebellion in 1998, backed by Rwanda and Uganda. What became known as "Africa's world war" started as Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, and Chad sent troops to support Kabila. The war claimed some three million lives, with all sides plundering the country's natural resources—especially diamonds from south-central Congo.
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Because he did not have sufficient funds to develop the Congo, Leopold sought and received loans from the Belgian parliament in 1889 and 1895, in return for which Belgium was given the right to annex the Congo in 1901. At the same time Leopold declared all unoccupied land (including cropland lying fallow) to be owned by the state, thereby gaining control of the lucrative trade in rubber and ivory. Much of the land was given to concessionaire companies, which in return were to build railroads or to occupy a specified part of the country or merely to give the state a percentage of their profits. In addition, Leopold maintained a large estate in the region of Lake Leopold II (NE of Kinshasa).
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In 1906 a Batwa tribesman from the Congo named Ota Benga was put in a cage and exhibited alongside an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo. The tribesman first arrived in the United States two years earlier in the care of a South Carolina anthropologist named Samuel Phillips Verner, who had been hired by the St. Louis World’s Fair to bring specimens of authentic African “pygmies” for display there. Ota Benga—whose wife and children had been lost during the Belgian government’s brutal rule in the Congo—remained with Verner until the anthropologist went bankrupt and decided to leave him in the care of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Read More
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Belgian Congo