There is a slight chance that democracy may work in one of the most violent, chaotic, fractured countries of the world, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the final round of presidential elections took place last weekend.
It will take up to two weeks before the results are known and the near certainty is that the incumbent president, Joseph Kabila, will be elected. There is a small chance that his election will be accepted as the democratic choice of the 70 million or so people of DRC and a slender chance that this may end a war that has cost the lives of up to five million people in the last eight years.
Joseph Kabila is president because his father, Laurent Kabila, was president, having ousted the dictator of 32 years, Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.
Mobutu was a creature of America, France, Britain and Belgium. He had been involved with the CIA in the overthrow in 1961 of the democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, and a few years later he was installed as president and kept there in the face of several coup attempts by the grace and favour of his foreign sponsors, who sent in troops whenever his regime was threatened.
Mobutu ravaged Congo. There were 100,000 miles of paved road there whehe became president, there were 8,000 miles of paved road there when he left.
He secreted billions of exchequer funds abroad in accounts under his own or associates' names. He built palaces for himself around the vast country, the size of all of western Europe. His people starved and then they were dragged into a spillover of the 1994 genocide in the tiny neighbouring country of Rwanda. By that time his sponsors had no more interest in him because the cold war had ended and there was no longer an apprehension that his country would slide into the communist camp.
Kabila, the elder, was sponsored by Rwanda which wanted to rout the perpetrators of the genocide who had been given sanctuary across the border in DRC. But shortly after succeeding to the presidency, Kabila abandoned the Rwandans and that led to the second Congo war from 1998 to 2002 in which up to five million died, to the indifference of the rest of the world. Kabila the elder, who was little more than a gangster, was murdered by one of his personal guards in January 2001 and was succeeded by his son, Joseph, who is more impressive and capable. But he was an unlikely president of DRC. He speaks, or did speak, little French which is one of the official languages of the country and the language in which cabinet meetings were conducted. He was educated in Tanzania which is largely English-speaking. He was also very young. He is 35 now and was 29 when he became president.
But he played a distinguished part in his country's peace process and was a signatory to the agreement at the Inter-Congolese Dialogue in Sun City, South Africa, which nominally ended the second Congo war. That agreement provided for an interim powersharing arrangement which worked to a large degree.
He won 45 per cent of the popular vote in the first round of the presidential elections in July of this year, with his main opponent, vice-president and former rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, taking just 20 per cent.
Bemba (44) leads the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), a rebel group turned political party. He is one of the richest men in the Congo, with a huge personal fortune. His sister is married to a son of the former dictator, Mobutu, and his father built up the family fortune through the patronage of Mobutu.
Bemba became involved in an internal conflict in the Central African Republic, where he helped the president, Ange-Félix Patassé, to put down a coup attempt. But Bemba's involvement there has given rise to charges he was involved, along with Patassé, in gross civil rights abuses.
Patassé has since been ousted and the new government is pressing charges against him and Bemba. Bemba has also been accused of appalling abuses in DRC, including allegations of cannibalism.
The problems in DRC are vast. The country has enormous mineral resources but these have been ripped off by foreign exploiters since the days of Mobutu, leaving all but a tiny fraction of the population destitute. There are tribal conflicts, particularly in the east of the country, exacerbated by the wars that have consumed Congo since 1997.
There is almost no surviving infrastructure, no communications, no transport, no health supports, no means even of feeding the millions who are starving. Rebel armies and gangs control vast proportions of the territory.
But there is some hope that some progress can be achieved with this democratic initiative. The United Nations, with (very) modest support from the EU, have tried to help out and in the conduct of the elections it seems it (the UN) has done impressively.
But Congo remains a ravaged country, ravaged by what Belgian colonialism did to it; ravaged by what the agent of the West, Mobutu, did with the support and encouragement of the West; ravaged by the robbers of the mineral wealth of the country and by the spillover from conflicts in neighbouring countries.