KINKALA, Congo (AFP) – Before the new road, drivers took up to eight hours to cover the 62 kilometres (38 miles) between Brazzaville and Kinkala in the conflict-racked Pool region south of Congo's capital.

“This road is a historical milestone,” the district administrator in the Pool, military doctor Jean-Michel Shanga, said with pride. “Today, you can sleep in Kinkala and work in Brazzaville.
“This is a peace road, laid down without clashes or trouble,” he said.
After 34 months of work, the “peace road” has been finished, with the goal of opening up the Pool, cut off by years of insurgency in a densely forested region in central Africa, where rebels known as the Ninjas battled government troops between 1998 and 2003 at the cost of thousands of lives.
Shanga said the new road has already “given an economic boost” to the Pool by connecting it with the capital of the former French colony, at a cost to the European Union in development finance of 30.5 billion CFA francs (46.5 million euros / 64 million dollars).
Jean-Didier Bemba, 42 with five children, was taken on with almost 400 other construction workers to build what he regards as a highway of hope.
During the war, “we stayed a long time in the forest. There, we suffered all kinds of humiliation,” Bemba told AFP. “Now that's an old memory.”
The French company that oversaw the road project, Dragages, “came to give us the will to live and to hope,” said Bemba, who has gone into small trade since the work finished at the end of March. He saved up enough while working on the road to set himself up selling rubber sandals.”
“Without the road, Kinkala was only an enclave abandoned to its sorry fate. With this road, the economy has been boosted because businessmen now come here,” said the sub-prefect of Kinkala, Joseph Kitsadi.
“This is a major asset for the whole Pool. With this highway, vegetables can even be sold at the front door of the house. Our ordeal is thus over. In the past, people with wheels rarely came by and it took four days walking to get to Brazzaville,” Albert Moussakanda, an evangelical preacher and market gardener agreed.
One of the local dignitaries, member of parliament for a Pool constituency Auguste Passi Mouba, pointed out that much still remains to be done, since “the Pool has been declared a disaster zone.
“All the schools, the hospitals and other infrastructure has been destroyed. In six years, very little of it has been rebuilt.”
Both the government and NGOs estimate that about 15,000 people perished in the civil wars in Congo between 1993 and 2003 and several thousand of those lost their lives in the Pool, which also emptied of part of its population.
As peace slowly returned, so did displaced residents, and humanitarian agencies say that the population grew from 186,000 inhabitants in 2000 to 362,000 habitants in 2005, and is still getting bigger.
The Congo, an oil-producing nation, has less than 2,000 kilometers of tarmacked road in the whole country, towns included. Brazzaville and the economic capital on the Atlantic Ocean, Pointe Noire, are currently linked uniquely by the 500 kilometers (310 miles) of the Congo-Ocean railway.
A road link, considered vital for the future, has only just begun, with a first stretch of 70 kilometres due to be inaugurated in 2010 and the end of the job not expected before 2015 or 2016. That road between the two cities will also pass through part of the Pool, east of Brazzaville.
The fighting may be over and the first new road built, but another big task remains -- clearing the Pool of illegally held weapons. A Swiss non-governmental organization, Small Arms Survey, carried out a study in 2005 and estimated that most of some 34,000 arms still in circulation were in the Pool.