Congo's leaders risk losing international goodwill unless they prove their reliability in rebuilding the devastated nation and installing democracy, the president of the European Commission said on Monday. Jose Manuel Barroso said he had come to Congo's chaotic capital Kinshasa to deliver a message of confidence in the future of the mineral-rich country, which is recovering from a five-year war that sucked in six neighbouring states. His visit came ahead of planned demonstrations this week over the transitional government's failure to organise elections and end fighting in the east of the former Belgian colony. "If, by the end of the transition, the Congo has not become a reliable partner for the rest of the world, I worry deeply that it will lose, for a long time, the high place it enjoys today on the international agenda," Barroso said. "That is what happened to Somalia a few years ago and I would not want that," he told ministers, parliamentarians, senators and members of the diplomatic community. --More 2259 Local Time 1959 GMT
