In a report released on September 16, 1993, Amnesty International came up with an apt description of the current human rights situation in Zaire as consisting of “violence against democracy.” In a violent backlash against the democratization process, the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko has plunged the country into “its worst human rights crisis since the end of the civil war in the early 1960s.” More than 5,000 people have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced in ethnic cleansing in the Shaba and North Kivu provinces. Moreover, repeated looting, extortion, and other acts of violence by Mobutu’s army have endangered the lives of millions of people all over the country, particularly in the major cities.