Traffic resumed on the Congo River and markets were busy with morning shoppers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) capital, Kinshasa, on Monday, a day after assailants attacked four key military sites in an apparent coup bid.
Before dawn on Sunday, in what Information Minister Vital Kamerhe called ”simultaneous” attacks, assailants began an assault on the Kokolo and Tshatshi military barracks, the Ndolo air base and a naval base on the River Congo, all located north of Kinshasa.
The assailants were eventually pushed back to Ngobila Beach, which was closed to river traffic as fighting raged for the better part of Sunday.
One police officer who did not wish to be named said the attackers had disembarked from boats from Brazzaville, the capital of Congo, which lies across the river from Kinshasa.
The river was closed to traffic as the capital was rocked by 12 hours of fighting, but on Monday cross-river boats were operating normally.
Along the banks of the river, most ferry and barge companies were open for business, including at Ngobila Beach, from where boats set off for Brazzaville.
About 20 suspects had been arrested and 18 were still at large, the authorities said. They paraded 17 of the suspects before journalists as well as about 20 weapons, some grenades and more than 1 000 cartridges.
In a televised speech late on Sunday, President Joseph Kabila described the assailants as ”terrorists”.
General Sylvain Buki, the head of the army, has dubbed them ”bandits”, while police said they were former soldiers from the Zairean Armed Forces of the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
Many of Mobutu’s elite 3 500- to 4 000-strong special guards fled to Brazzaville when Laurent Kabila, father of the current president, ousted the dictator in a 1997 rebellion.
Two government soldiers were killed in the fighting, while casualties on the assailants’ side were unknown as of Monday.
Several Kinshasa newspapers said the attack was a failed coup.
”Failed coup” headlined L’Avenir, Le Palmares and Le Phare, while Forum des As wrote that the assault ”hinted strongly” at a putsch (coup).
”The assailants’ acts appear aimed at shaking up the current transition process in favour of a new order,” wrote the Forum, but wondered ”who was behind it?”
”Who would be crazy enough to mount a coup against the established institutions?” the paper asked.
”Capture Kinshasa to lead which country?” it added, saying moves to reunify the vast DRC after a complex, five-year war were still far from completed.
DRC was the theatre of Africa’s worst modern war, which formally ended last year when Kabila enacted a peace pact that set up political institutions and an interim government, tasked with guiding the country to its first elections since those held on independence from Belgium more than 40 years ago.
During the war, an estimated 2,5-million people died, most of them civilians, either directly through combat or indirectly through disease and hunger.
Kinshasa has been relatively free of political violence since last year, but ethnic violence continues to plague several provinces in the far east of the vast former Zaire.
”Every time the DRC makes progress in its transition, something happens to try to make us stop,” a government minister said, on condition of anonymity. — Sapa-AFP
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