The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) President Joseph Kabila was joined on Monday in Parliament by his South African counterpart, Thabo Mbeki, for an official ceremony to pass a post-war Constitution for the country.
The full Parliament’s adoption of the new Constitution, which South African peace mediators helped to bring about, is a formality but still a major symbolic step in giving the vast country a new basis for democratic rule after the first free elections since independence in 1960.
The DRC has since 2003 been emerging from the last and most gruelling of a series of conflicts, and currently has a transition government including former rebel leaders and opposition politicians.
The DRC’s National Assembly on Friday passed the draft Constitution as part of a process sponsored by Mbeki and aimed at restoring stability in the Central African nation, where unrest still wracks some eastern provinces.
Kabila was set on Monday to address both the lower and upper Houses of the transitional Parliament gathered in plenary session, but even after Monday’s ceremony, the new basic law still has to go to a referendum.
Tensions have mounted in Kinshasa in recent weeks because the transitional process, following a conflict over the mineral-rich but devastated country that began in 1998 and drew in the armies of six other African countries, is most unlikely to be achieved by the target date of June 30.
Mbeki, accompanied by South African Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz Pahad, arrived on Sunday for talks with Kabila, the DRC’s vice-presidents, other key political players and the chairperson of the country’s Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference, the Archbishop of Kisangani, Laurent Monsengwo.
He also met with Antoine Gizenga, who leads one of the main of scores of opposition parties, the Unified Lumumbist Party, but not Etienne Tshisekedi, a veteran former prime minister and central bank governor who heads the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UPDS) and has been both part of and a thorn in the side of successive regimes.
Tshisekedi is insistent in proclaiming the ”end of the transition on June 30”, though he was among the signatories to a global accord signed by politicians in South Africa in December 2002, which provides for a six-month extension, renewable once — thus until June 2006.
There is nevertheless considerable pressure from many quarters to have the process completed swiftly, not least because it has required the very costly deployment across the country of a multinational United Nations peacekeeping and monitoring mission, currently comprising about 16 700 civilians, soldiers and police.
Kabila repeated on Monday a pledge to ”lead the Congolese people to elections within the timeframe” specified by accords on the transition.
Kinshasa residents on Monday ignored tracts from the UPDS calling for strikes and stay-aways as part of a two-day ”dead city” scheme to up the pressure further.
Press reports said a UPDS official in possession of such tracts was arrested on Saturday in Matadi, chief town of the Bas-Congo province south of the capital. — Sapa-AFP