Conference in Kinshasa

The Democratic Republic of Congo has a long history of monkey business - but this time it's in a good cause

The view from my room on the 17th floor of the Grand Hotel, Kinshasa, is superb. As I write, I can see Brazzaville across the wide grey sweep of the Congo river. There are some advantages in this proximity. In the past, for example, diplomats could keep a speedboat ready so that when things got too hot in Kinshasa, they could make a quick dash to the other side.

The Grand Hotel was known then as the Inter-Continental. Former president Mobutu backed its construction in the 1970s and his men didn't hesitate to avail themselves of the worldly facilities it offered.

Sometimes, things got nasty. The story goes that the manager of the hotel showed exemplary heroism in blocking the elevators to the guest floors one night when a party of Mobutu's henchmen arrived at the hotel, set on murder and mayhem. The fact that hotel guests nowadays are not quaking in fear of a sudden banging on the door shows how much things have changed since May 1997, when Mobutu was overthrown.

That doesn't mean that everything in this equatorial garden is lovely. Fifteen months ago, when I last visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we crossed the border from Rwanda. When we drove up a stretch of eastern Congo from Bukavu to Goma, we took armed guards with us and had to endure constant roadblocks. A few days after I left for Kinshasa in the west of the country, a shooting war broke out between rival factions in the east. These factions none the less still manage today to be part of the overarching coalition put in place following an agreement struck in Sun City in 2003 between the Kabila government and its main adversaries.

In Kinshasa, I was invited to meet the president of the National Assembly, Olivier Kamitatu. He took a sanguine view of the troubles. "The movement towards democracy is irreversible," he told me. "The elections will take place as planned."

That was in May 2005. Technically, the Sun City process is still on track because 12 months' grace has been allowed if "special circumstances" require more time to set up a constitution and elections. All of that extra time will surely be needed. Just registering the electorate in this vast land of 60 million inhabitants without an efficient transport system is a gigantic task. We are talking, moreover, about not just one, but a whole series of popular votes, beginning with a referendum on a new draft constitution and ending with the direct election of the president.

Forty or more years ago, the eyes of the world were on the Congo. Some of the most tense dramas of the cold war were played out here. After decades of pariah status, the wheel has come full circle and the DRC has again moved centre-stage.

The international meeting on saving the great apes, for example, which I am attending this week, is a small but significant step in the process of normalisation. Twenty-one African and two Asian countries are represented. Donor nations, including Britain, represented by biodiversity minister Jim Knight, are also present and seem ready to sign up to a practical, funded programme of action.

If hosting this first intergovernmental conference on the conservation of the great apes - gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans - is one way the DRC can show its willingness, and readiness, to rejoin the comity of nations, why should we complain?

Tomorrow, the president, Joseph Kabila, will attend the meeting. What is an honour for us may also be useful for him, given the wide publicity this conference has attracted across the nation. Kabila was 26 when he succeeded his assassinated father, Laurent, five years ago. To prevent him standing in the upcoming election, his political opponents tried to write a provision into the draft constitution restricting presidential candidates to people over 40. The attempt was unsuccessful, but the question of age clearly has a resonance here.

The other night, in the hotel bar, a Congolese friend asked me: "What about Cameroon?"

"What's special about Cameroon?" I asked. Cameroon has a delegate at the meeting who had, I considered, been making a useful contribution to proceedings.

"Isn't he too young to stand for leader of your Conservative party?"

I finally realised what he was driving at. "Oh, you mean David Cameron - you're very well informed! No, of course he's not too young to stand. He's much older than President Kabila!"

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