The people who are often referred to as "Congo" once formed a Liberian political party with the initial name of what?
Americo-Liberians Americo-Liberians, or the Congo people in Liberian English, are a Liberian ethnicity of African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and liberated African descent. The sister ethnic group of Americo-Liberians are the Sierra Leone Creole people, who shared similar ancestry and related culture. Americo-Liberians trace their ancestry to free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans who immigrated in the 19th century to become the founders of the state of Liberia. They identified there as Americo Liberians. (Some African Americans, following resettlement in Canada, also participated as founding settlers in Sierra Leone and present-day Côte d'Ivoire.) Although the terms "Americo-Liberian" and "Congo" had distinct definitions in the nineteenth century, the terms "Americo-Liberian" and "Congo" are currently interchangeable and refer to an ethnic group composed of the descendants of the various free and ex-slave African American, Caribbean, Recaptive, and Sierra Leone Creoles who settled in Liberia from 1822.
Great Lakes refugee crisis The Great Lakes refugee crisis is the common name for the situation beginning with the exodus in April 1994 of over two million Rwandans to neighboring countries of the Great Lakes region of Africa in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide. Many of the refugees were Hutu ethnics fleeing the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had gained control of the country at the end of the genocide. However, the humanitarian relief effort was vastly compromised by the presence among the refugees of many of the Interahamwe and government officials who carried out the genocide, who used the refugee camps as bases to launch attacks against the new government led by Paul Kagame. The camps in Zaire became particularly politicized and militarized. The knowledge that humanitarian aid was being diverted to further the aims of the genocidaires led many humanitarian organizations to withdraw their assistance. The conflict escalated until the start of the First Congo War in 1996, when RPF-supported rebels invaded Zaire and sought to repatriate the refugees.