HUGH NEVILL, Kinshasa | Wednesday
THE Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is to swear in as president Joseph Kabila, the young and politically untested general who inherits the war-torn chaos of this huge African country a day after his murdered father and predecessor was laid to rest.
Kabila was hurriedly appointed as the country’s leader after a bodyguard assigned to protect his father Laurent shot the former president dead on January 16.
The swearing in ceremony comes a day after hundreds of thousands of emotional supporters turned out for the burial of his father in a Kinshasa mausoleum close to the Congo River.
The burial of the former Marxist guerrilla came as the central African country faces a regional war that has split it in half, and the possibility of dangerous divisions in the armed forces following the strongman’s death.
The young Kabila, who spent several years with the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front which won that country’s vicious 1994 civil war, was trained in China and is little known to the DRC public.
After the funeral ended, General Kabila went into talks with his allies, presidents Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, Sam Nujoma of Namibia and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, officials said.
Meanwhile, neighbouring Malawi is gearing up for a possible influx of war refugees following rising tension in the war ravaged DRC.
Malawi disaster preparedness commissioner Lucius Chikuni said the country was preparing contingency plans for a possible influx of people fleeing expect violent political rivalry in eastern DRC while Kabila’s son and heir, Joseph, attempted to consolidate his hold on power.
Malawi currently hosts 1 176 registered DRC war refugees, 424 of whom have been granted official refugee status while 812 others are still classified as asylum seekers pending evaluation by Malawi officials and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
Chikuni stressed, however, that thousands of illegal refugees lived in squatter camps around Malawi and were beginning to intermarry with local residents in an attempt to guarantee permanent residence. – AFP/African Eye News Service