Reuters

WHEN your correspondent tried to fly out of Kinshasa seven years ago, rebels attacked the airport and the flight was cancelled. Congo's great war was just starting and there were charred, petrol-soaked bodies on the capital's garbage-strewn streets. Now, millions of deaths later, the war appears to be over. The government has made peace with most of the main rebel groups. The half-dozen foreign armies that ravaged the country have withdrawn, and been replaced by 16,000 UN peacekeepers. Tribal militias still battle and pillage in the north-east, but the UN, after a long and shameful spell of inertia, is finally starting to protect the innocent by shooting or capturing the bad guys. Arriving in Kinshasa today is less fretful than it was. By hiring a retired boxer as an escort, your correspondent passed through the airport without losing any possessions. (The gentleman in question is something of a local celebrity: on seeing him, customs agents smile, mime a left hook and forget to rifle through one's bags.) Like Congo itself, the airport is shabby, dysfunctional and packed with ill-paid, predatory officials. But at least the guns are quiet. The question is, for how long? The war formally ended in 2003, when most of the warring parties came together to form a power-sharing transitional government. This was hardly an ideal solution. None of the new regime's members was elected, few are honest and some are mass murderers. But Congo's weary people were happy to accept gunmen in government as a temporary measure to end the fighting. Under the terms of the peace deal, nationwide elections for a legitimate regime were to be held by June 30th. They won't be. This is partly for logistical reasons. Congo has held no census since 1984, so no one knows how many voters there might be. (The electoral commission guesses 28m, out of a population roughly twice that number.) In a country with no experience of democracy, no functioning civil service and virtually no roads, organising a ballot takes time, even with the best political will in the world. Such will is notably absent. After two years in power, the government only last month got round to approving a draft constitution laying the ground rules for the poll and defining the powers of whatever regime is elected. And that constitution still needs to be approved by a referendum. The electoral commission, meanwhile, has registered no voters and hired hardly any of the 40,000-60,000 electoral workers it thinks it will need, let alone taught them how to use the 9,000 voter-registration machines it finally ordered last month. Realistically, no election can be held this year. The peace accord allows, under exceptional circumstances, for up to two six-month delays. So everything is on track, really, says the government. Many Congolese think this is self-serving baloney. They believe their unelected rulers are postponing the poll for as long as possible because they want another year to carry on stealing.

The leader of the main opposition party, Etienne Tshisekedi, says the government will cease to be legitimate on June 30th, and is calling for its members to stand down then. Probably most people in Kinshasa agree with him. Incendiary leaflets are circulating, and there are rumours of the mass distribution of machetes. In May, a general strike paralysed the town of Kananga and riots gripped the diamond city of Mbuji-Mayi. On June 5th, when one of the country's four vice-presidents attended a football match in Kinshasa, the 90,000-strong crowd chanted “Kill him”.It could blow over. But peace in Congo cannot be taken for granted. Half of Africa's modern wars have reignited within a decade of ending, typically because post-war regimes have not addressed the problems that caused them to flare up in the first place. Congo's transitional government has conspicuously failed to treat the malady that makes the country so war-prone: corruption. The country first fell apart because its rulers stole the cement. The state was looted until the government could no longer control its own territory. Foreign invaders and domestic rebels filled the vacuum. Mending the devastation they wrought will require more statesmanship than the nation has ever known.

Congo is a big place—bigger, for instance, than all the states that voted for John Kerry in America's election last November put together. It shares a border with nine other countries, and touches every sub-Saharan region: central, south, east and west. A stable Congo could be Africa's healthy heart. Arterial roads could be built through it; it has a huge trove of untapped minerals and enough hydroelectric potential to light up half the continent. Conversely, a return to chaos could be a continental heart attack.

Optimists point out that the country's current president, 33-year-old Joseph Kabila, is probably its best since independence in 1960. Pessimists retort that that is not saying much. His best-known predecessor, Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled from 1965 until 1997 and renamed the country Zaire, was a ruthless crook who fitted his palace with a nuclear shelter, hired Concorde for shopping trips and so gutted the treasury that inflation between October 1990 and December 1995 totalled 6.3 billion per cent. He lost control because he and his flunkies filched too much. Unpaid soldiers refused to defend the regime against a rebellion led by Laurent Kabila, Joseph's father, who seized power and restored the country's old name. The senior Kabila turned out to be even worse than Mobutu. He was equally brutal and corrupt, but less intelligent. He had people executed while he was drunk and then forgot that he had done so. He ordered diamond dealers to sell their gems to a state-backed monopoly for near-worthless Congolese francs, and then wondered why the country's largest source of export revenues dried up. He provoked Rwanda, Congo's aggressive neighbour, by arming and supplying the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, who were hiding in eastern Congo's forests. Mobutu had done the same, which was why the Rwandan army helped Kabila topple him. Now Rwanda backed a revolt to topple Kabila, too. That was how the war started in August 1998. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia rushed to Kabila's defence. Uganda sided with the Rwandans, but later fought them. Then it got really confusing. In all, six national armies and dozens of rebel groups and militias joined the fray. All sides plundered Congo's minerals. When Joseph Conrad spoke of “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”, he was describing Congo under Belgium's King Leopold II, but his phrase has not dated.No one knows how many people died. A survey published in December by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a pressure group, put the death toll at 3.8m between August 1998 and April 2004. The IRC calculated this by comparing death rates before, during and after the war and then extrapolating. Almost all the deaths—more than 98% in 2003-04—were from war-induced starvation or disease, rather than from bullets or spears. Clearly, the IRC's guess is open to challenge. But no one has come up with a better one. Amid the mayhem, Laurent Kabila was shot dead by one of his bodyguards. His son Joseph took over, and quickly proved wiser than his father. Under western pressure, he signed a peace accord in South Africa in 2002. Unlike his father, who tore up treaties like old betting slips, he has honoured it, more or less. He welcomed his former enemies into the transitional government that took office in June 2003. Two of his four vice-presidents are ex-rebels, and most armed factions have been given a ministry to mismanage. In theory, all the big rebel forces are to be merged into a single, slimmed-down national army. In practice, most remain under the control of their old commanders, and the process of demobilisation has been worryingly slow. Most of Congo is now calm, although the east is much less so. A hot war continues in the north-eastern region of Ituri, where rival militias (backed by Rwanda and Uganda respectively) have killed at least 60,000 people in a quarrel over border trade and gold fields. The other immediate threat comes from the Rwandan génocidaires who continue to lurk in the eastern Congolese rainforest. So long as they remain, Rwanda could invade again, as it has twice before, to try to eliminate them. Rwanda's president threatened to do so last year. With help from the UN, both of these dangers are being tackled, says William Swing, the head of the UN mission. In Ituri, the blue helmets have started storming militia camps. Mr Swing says the UN's firepower has put the militiamen on the defensive and more than 12,000 have been persuaded to join a disarmament programme, leaving only a hard core of 1,500-2,000 at large. As for the genocide veterans, their main faction agreed on March 31st to lay down its weapons, go home and form a peaceful political party. Not everyone is as optimistic as Mr Swing. By mid-May, the transit camps for surrendering Rwandan guerrillas were still empty. Last week a peacekeeper in Ituri was killed and two employees of the medical charity, Médecins sans Frontières, were abducted. And on June 2nd, Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, issued a fat report on continuing “widespread ethnic slaughter, executions, torture, rape and arbitrary arrest” in the region. Even by the standards of war, some of the atrocities in eastern Congo are shocking. Zainabo Alfani, for example, was stopped by men in uniform on a road in Ituri last year. She and 13 other women were ordered to strip, to see if they had long vaginal lips, which the gunmen believed would have magical properties. The 13 others did not, and were killed on the spot. Zainabo did. The gunmen cut them off and then gang-raped her. Then they cooked and ate her two daughters in front of her. They also ate chunks of Zainabo's flesh. She escaped, but had contracted HIV. She told her story to the UN in February, and died in March.

They've got a good job, by Congolese standards

The new “unified” Congolese army seems incapable of policing the east. When ordered to work together, its soldiers sometimes fight each other instead. So the heavy work is left to the UN.

Yet the show goes on

Nonetheless, the junior Mr Kabila's government is the only show in Congo, so donors have flocked to support it. In 2003, including debt relief, Congo was the largest recipient of French aid and the fourth-largest recipient of America's. The donors' cash buys some influence. At the urging of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mr Kabila has restored economic sanity—inflation fell from 135% in 2001 to 4.4% in 2003, though it has since crept back up. As the violence eases, growth has rebounded, and is expected to hit 7% this year. But the average Congolese income, by the IMF's estimate, is still only $100 a year. That is an unbelievably low sum for a country where food is fairly easy to grow. The true figure must surely be a bit less wretched. But nobody really knows. The country's recovery would be assisted if foreign investors, who mostly fled decades ago, were to return. Some are coming. Adastra, a London-listed mining firm, has signed a joint-venture deal with the government to turn two huge heaps of dirty-white dust into metal. The heaps are by-products of a moribund mine near the once-prosperous town of Kolwezi. Between them, they contain 1.7m tonnes of copper and 360,000 tonnes of cobalt. Tim Read, Adastra's boss, reckons the project has a net present value of $459m.

Freelance mining

Mr Read's firm is betting that Congo will not go back to war, and that its government—which has introduced a generally admired new mining law—will respect property rights, or at least those of big investors. The Congolese government is betting that Adastra will pay taxes and create jobs that are preferable to the local alternative, examples of which can be seen all around the big pile of dirt. Hordes of freelance miners scrabble for ore by hand, wash it in a river and sell it to local smugglers. Many are injured or killed when their tunnels collapse. Your correspondent saw a boy no bigger than his three-year-old son struggling under a half-sack of ore (he was probably older; malnutrition makes Congolese children quite short). Adastra hopes to make a difference. But after the construction phase is over, the firm will employ only 700 people in a town of 250,000 where unemployment is practically universal. A shop assistant in Kolwezi makes $35 a month—less than those desperate freelance miners. The lowest-paid civil servant gets $2 a month. Congo needs many more Adastras, but they will come only when the country looks less daunting. Congo's people have learnt to cope. In the absence of piped water, families in Kinshasa earn a living carrying buckets of it to building sites. A story from the southern town of Lubumbashi offers a snapshot of what works and what doesn't.Veronique, an office worker, was separated from her daughter by the war. When peace broke out, she booked an aeroplane ticket for her (penniless) girl to rejoin her. But before the daughter could board the plane, she was detained. Her yellow fever vaccination card had been stamped by rebel health authorities, and so was invalid, the officials tut-tutted. Alas, she had no money for a bribe. But Veronique was able to send her the equivalent of cash by mobile telephone. She bought $20 worth of telephone cards. These give you a code number which you key into your phone and thereby “recharge” it with pre-paid airtime. Veronique called the obstructive officials and gave them her code numbers to recharge their own mobile phones. It took only minutes to send her bribe across the country—faster than a bank transfer, which would in any case have been impossible, since there is no proper banking system. That's Congo. Private cellphone networks and private airlines work because the landlines do not and the bush has eaten the roads. Public servants serve mostly to make life difficult for the public, in the hope of squeezing some cash out of them. Congo is a police state, but without the benefits. The police have unchecked powers, but provide little security. Your correspondent needed three separate permits to visit the railway station in Kinshasa, where he was stopped and questioned six times in 45 minutes. Yet he found that all the seats, windows and light fixtures had been stolen from the trains. The government offers the usual excuses. Before a British audience in March, Jean-Pierre Bemba, one of the four vice-presidents, stressed that much of the blame for corruption rests with those (ie, western firms) who pay the bribes. But bribery, though rife, is less of a problem than simple theft. For example, the central government is shelling out $8m a month to pay soldiers' salaries, partly in the hope that they will stop robbing civilians. But many soldiers are still not paid. In the east, where the problem is especially acute, observers assume that local commanders are snaffling their men's pay packets. Not so, says one of Mr Kabila's disgruntled advisers. In fact, he says, the money sent out east is intercepted and wired straight back to Kinshasa, where it is stolen by bigwigs. “It's called Opération Retour,” he explains. Supposing Congo weathers the likely storm of protest around June 30th and eventually holds elections, what then? It will depend on two things. First, who will win the presidency? Second, will the next president allow his powerful rivals enough of a stake in government to dissuade them from going back to war? The most likely presidential contender is the incumbent, Joseph Kabila. In the absence of opinion polls, it is impossible to say how popular he is. But he is not personally blamed for any major atrocities, and he has all the apparatus of the state to bolster his cause. Another possibility is Mr Bemba. As the vice-president in charge of the economy, he has colossal powers of patronage. But his patriotism is open to question: he used to lead a rebel army backed by Uganda. And his men are alleged to have eaten people. Mr Bemba dismisses the allegation, but it is widely believed and will not endear him to voters.A third contender is Mr Tshisekedi, the opposition leader. His long and honourable opposition to Mobutu has won him much support in his home region and around Kinshasa. But he has no money to mount a nationwide campaign. It would boost his chances if he could organise big protests against the missed election deadline. Which gives the government another reason to crush any protests. Whoever the next president is, he will have to placate several groups with contradictory desires. The men with guns must be given the right mixture of threats and inducements not to wreck the peace. People must feel they have enough stake in the new regime not to try to overthrow it. And donors must be shown enough progress that they do not walk off in disgust. Somehow, Congo must find a leader who will refute V.S. Naipaul's jibe. “It isn't that there's no right and wrong here,” the novelist once wrote. “There's no right.”