"Ethiopia. Kenya. Zimbabwe. Ivory Coast. There is a lengthening list of
very different African countries that have imploded, at great loss of life,
because of disputed elections. And Congo is far more volatile and violent
than all of those"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/world/africa/in-congo-elections-fraud-is-expected-and-violence-is-feared.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=congoelections&st=cse&scp=2
November 26, 2011
In Coming Elections in Congo, Expectations of Fraud and Fears of Violence
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
KINSHASA, Congo — A sense of menace hangs over the long, dirty boulevards
of this African metropolis.
Riot police officers with face masks, helmets, Kalashnikovs and
black-plastic shin guards prowl the neighborhoods. Columns of heavily armed
trucks roll through town, the business ends of their cannons pointing at
the populace. These are the last line of defense, the red-bereted and much
feared Republican Guard, the president’s closest men.
On Monday, Congo is scheduled to hold presidential and parliamentary
elections, only the second time in this troubled country’s history that the
entire population has been able to vote. And no one here thinks it is going
to be smooth.
Already, several people have been killed at political rallies, including
two men who were smashed with rocks on Saturday. The security forces of
President Joseph Kabila have been widely accused of torturing opposition
supporters. The opposition, for that matter, is hardly faultless, and
Etienne Tshisekedi, a 78-year-old rabble rouser and the leading
presidential challenger, recently declared himself president and stirred up
his supporters to break their comrades out of jail.
There have been delays, myriad logistical problems and growing accusations
of fraud. More alarming, analysts say, is the possibility that the
presidential race will be close, seriously testing this country’s
dangerously weak institutions.
“People are scared,” said Dishateli Kinguza, who sells baseball caps from a
rickety stand here in Kinshasa, the capital. “Actually, I’m scared. If
people don’t accept who wins, it’s going to be bad.”
Ethiopia. Kenya. Zimbabwe. Ivory Coast. There is a lengthening list of very
different African countries that have imploded, at great loss of life,
because of disputed elections. And Congo is far more volatile and violent
than all of those.
This enormous nation in the heart of Africa plunged into war in 1996 when
rebel fighters and Congo’s neighbors teamed up to overthrow one of the most
corrupt men on the most corrupt continent, Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo’s former
dictator who ran this country into the ground during three decades of
kleptocratic rule.
Congo has never really recovered, especially in its staggeringly beautiful
eastern region, where the real spoils are: the gold, the diamonds, the tin
ore, the endless miles of towering hardwood forest. Brutal rebel groups
still haunt the hills, pillaging minerals and killing and raping at will.
But it is not just the east that is lawless. A witch doctor recently led a
revolt in the northwest of the country. In February, rebels besieged the
airport in Lubumbashi, in the south, thought to be Congo’s most promising
city. Even here in Kinshasa, home to about 10 million people, bands of
wiry, adolescent street children wielding iron bars routinely set up
roadblocks and steal money from helpless motorists.
There are few other places on the planet where politics are as disconnected
from reality. For example, one of Mr. Kabila’s campaign billboards shows
him grinning next to a high-speed, Japanese-style bullet train. But Congo
does not have any high-speed trains; actually, there are few working trains
at all. Most Congolese say the rail network was in far better shape 70
years ago, when the Belgians ruled. These bullet-train billboards are all
over Kinshasa, most often rising above crumbling streets that reek of
uncollected garbage.
Congo’s stagnation or even worse, its reverse development — this year the
United Nations ranked it dead last of the 187 countries on the Human
Development Index — is driving many people to vote against Mr. Kabila, who
has been in power since 2001.
“I don’t see any changes in my life,” said Angel Nyamayoka, a single mother
of seven children who scrapes by on $2 a day. “We have to vote for anyone
but Kabila.”
Many analysts say it is hard to see how Mr. Kabila could win this election
fairly. Mr. Tshisekedi, a veteran Congolese politician still revered for
standing up to Mr. Mobutu, is very popular in Kinshasa. He is also seen as
a father figure of the Luba ethnic group, one of Congo’s biggest, and is
expected to carry the populous Kasai regions in the south and pick up
anti-Kabila votes across the country.
Mr. Kabila, 40, has never been well liked in Kinshasa, where many people
view him as an outsider, possibly even foreign born, who does not
comfortably speak Lingala, the lingua franca. In 2006, the last election,
Mr. Kabila relied on eastern Congo to win the presidency. But this time
around, eastern Congo has its own champion running for president — Vital
Kamerhe, the well-educated former speaker of the national assembly who
hails from the city of Bukavu and is expected to draw votes away from Mr.
Kabila.
Many analysts say that the government knows that it needs to use every
trick in the bribery and repression handbook to hang on. Witnesses in
Bukavu said that the president’s party recently packed a stadium full of
women from the market and handed them each the equivalent of $5, what many
earn in a week.
A recent United Nations report described a “general climate of
intimidation” with opposition supporters “threatened, beaten or arrested”
and noted an episode in July in which Republican Guard soldiers set up a
roadblock in a central Congolese town and warned residents that a new war
would break out if they did not vote for Mr. Kabila.
But Congo is becoming the land of no consequences, as this election shows.
Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka is the commander of a militia that last year, in the
span of three days, raped scores of women — including some in their 70s and
80s. The Congolese government has issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Sheka,
but he is now running for Parliament, in the same area where the rapes took
place.
Similarly, Bosco Ntaganda, a former rebel leader, has been accused of war
crimes by the International Criminal Court. But Mr. Ntaganda has been
promoted to a top government army job in the east, and his forces are
reportedly strong-arming people into voting for Mr. Kabila.
Human rights advocates despair about Congo and say this election especially
worries them.
“If it is close,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher at Human
Rights Watch, “the chance for significant unrest is high.”
But there is a crucial difference between this election and 2006, when
intense gun battles erupted on Kinshasa’s boulevards between Mr. Kabila’s
forces and the militia of Jean-Pierre Bemba, the presidential runner-up.
This time around, most opposition supporters are not part of a militia and
therefore do not have guns.
Western diplomats predict that Mr. Kabila, who this year pressured the
Parliament to change Congo’s Constitution and eliminate a second round of
voting, will win a thin plurality, spurring opposition protests in Congo’s
biggest cities. But many Congolese say their country has become so
exhausted and jaded that the protests will not degenerate into all-out
rebellion and that they will eventually fizzle out.
“We’ll take to the streets and burn some tires and the police will shoot at
us and we’ll throw rocks,” said Mr. Kinguza, the vendor of baseball caps.
“But that will probably be about it.”
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Received on Mon Nov 28 2011 - 10:47:41 EST