Cambodia VS Congo what is the difference? Why do certain countries bounce back from utter devastation and others remain failed states?

 Why do certain countries bounce back from utter devastation and others remain failed states?

this  would be  a very interesting  study to make 

Ardu station of Kisangani in Democratic republic Cango Vs the Bamboo train of Combodia.

Following colonial ways slavishly VS using native intelligence, breaking some old rules and making new and more useful rules.
( rules  are  a necessary evil) like  " who should dismantle, when two bamboo trains come face to face"


"The trip began with a ride on the bamboo train, called a norry. After the Khmer Rouge left the transport system in complete disrepair, Cambodians developed this rudimentary system for transporting people and goods. At first, they operated by using poles and muscle but now they have small motors, and the trains are largely used for the tourists."

"Luckily the track is arrow-straight, because when trains coming from opposite directions meet up, both drivers stop and choose one train’s passengers to disembark. The drivers lift the train to one side (seating area, motor and wheels), allow the other train to go by, and then reassemble the other train. It all takes about a minute, and is typically done 5-6 times during one journey."

Anthony Bourdain, CNN

"Whispering, come and find out."

"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings."

"Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence—but more generally takes the form of apathy."

-- Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"

It is the most relentlessly f***ed-over nation in the world, yet it has long been my dream to see Congo. And for my sins, I got my wish. Anthony Bourdain 

Occupying an ungovernable mass of land the size of all Western Europe combined, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be the richest country in Africa. It possesses the equivalent of trillions of dollars in resources: diamonds, gold, coltan (which the whole world requires for cell phones), minerals, timber, probably oil, uranium and hydroelectric power. In short, it has everything that the first world needs and desires. This is its curse.

But from before its beginnings, it has been ravaged by greed.

Stripped of its population by Arab and Portuguese slavers, its tribal societies were devastated. Handed outright to Belgium's King Leopold II for his personal exploitation, nearly half its population were worked to death, whipped, dismembered, executed outright or sent running into the bush to die of starvation and disease in a pitiless quest for first ivory and then rubber.

The Belgians who followed left behind a deliberately uneducated governing class and a few sergeants. The Congolese people then made the very untimely tactical mistake of democratically electing a socialist president in the midst of the nuclear arms race between East and West.

The CIA and MI-6 conspired to assassinate him (whether they succeeded directly is open to debate; what certainly is very clear is that he was killed), eventually installing in his place Joseph Mobutu, a man of spectacular rapaciousness, brutality and megalomania.

At one point, having looted the country of billions and having allowed what infrastructure remained to largely rot into the forest, Mobutu's army complained of not being paid.

The president-for-life's response was to point out that they had guns and to suggest that they take what they needed from the already desperate population. This is an attitude that prevails today.

War in Rwanda, next door, left Congo with hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them genocidal Hutus, living within its borders -- and a neighboring Tutsi government uninclined towards either sympathy or good behavior (as Mobutu had been a staunch supporter of the Hutu, who had enthusiastically slaughtered up to 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbors in a period of only a few short weeks).

Ensuing civil wars have cost the country millions of lives.