News stories by Emmanuel Chaco, page 3

Farmers in the southwestern Democratic Republic of Congo are looking forward to increased production after 16 tractors and 200 ox-drawn carts were distributed across three regions in the province of Bandundu.

Floribert Chebeya, executive secretary of human rights group Voice of the Voiceless, was discovered dead in his car early in the morning of Jun. 2. Numerous journalists and human right activists have been killed in suspicious circumstances in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past five years.

A report alleging that government troops summarily executed fifty civilians in early April in fighting around Mbandaka, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo's northwestern Équateur Province has been rejected by the government.

Fighting between 'Enyélé' insurgents and regular armed forces in the northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo at the beginning of April left 18 people dead, including nine rebels, and triggered mass displacements from the region's principal city, Mbandaka.

For some seven million Congolese living in Kinshasa the only meat and poultry they could buy to eat since the 1980s was frozen imports from Western countries, distributed locally by a few local businessmen.

Kinshasa's population needs an estimated 700,000 cubic metres of water per day. The Régie de distribution des eaux (REGIDESO) produces only 425,000 cubic metres - vast neighbourhoods like Kitokimosi and Mpasa receive almost none of this water.

The search continues for the best way to expose the truth surrounding crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), not least in Ituri, in the north-east of the country, a region which where years of atrocities and massive human rights violations have gone unpunished.

Reports from non-governmental organisations and the United Nations on the humanitarian situation in the north-eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) state that over 400 civilians were killed at the end of last month by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel faction with bases in that part of the country.