Millions of Congolese voted enthusiastically in their first free elections in over 40 years on Sunday, hoping to end years of war, corruption and chaos that have brought the mineral-rich African giant to its knees.
United Nations officials and foreign observers said turnout was high and voting was mostly orderly and peaceful at the landmark polls, aimed at turning the page on a 1998-2003 war that sucked in six neighbouring states and killed 4-million people.
After polls closed, officials counted ballots by lamplight into the night at about 50 000 voting stations across Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Official results from the war-ravaged nation the size of western Europe were due only within three weeks.
”All of us are happy about this vote because we are suffering in this country: without food, without homes,” said Miriam Kawanga (35) in the town of Goma in the DRC’s lawless east. ”We need to elect somebody who is going to help us.”
Protected by the biggest peacekeeping operation in the world, the presidential and parliamentary polls in the vast, former Belgian colony were the most complex and expensive ever organised by the United Nations, at a cost of $460-million.
President Joseph Kabila is regarded as favourite to win a five-year term. His main rivals, former rebel chiefs Jean-Pierre Bemba and Azarias Ruberwa, criticised ”irregularities” on Sunday, raising the prospect they may question the result.
From the sprawling capital Kinshasa to the jungles of the Congo River basin and the mist-shrouded peaks of the east, voters braved threats of violence from marauding rebels, bureaucratic hitches and rain to cast their ballots.
”We believe the enthusiasm being shown at this election shows the willingness of the population to move ahead, to move out of 40 years of misrule and misery,” said Ross Mountain, the UN deputy special representative for the DRC.
”To imagine a successful, stable Africa with an unstable Congo is a little hard to do,” he said.
Long queues and busy polling stations
In the southern West and East Kasai provinces — the stronghold of a major opposition party which boycotted the elections — youths destroyed several polling stations after voting was over. In the south-east town of Lubumbashi, students protested when they found they were not registered to vote.
But these appeared to be isolated incidents.
”I have witnessed long queues and busy polling stations,” European member of Parliament Richard Howitt, one of more than 1 200 international observers, told Reuters from Lubumbashi.
Turnout was heavy in the violence-plagued east, a stronghold of 35-year-old Kabila. Initial counts from some individual polling stations there showed a strong lead for the president, who took office when his father Laurent was killed in 2001.
Standing against Kabila were 31 challengers, including several former rebel leaders who fought in the five-year war that devastated the Central African country already crippled by 32 years of misrule under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
If no candidate wins more than 50% of Sunday’s vote a run-off between the two leading candidates will be held on October 29, the national electoral commission said.
UN peacekeepers — 17 000 of them, backed by 1 100 European Union troops — and Congolese police guarded the schools, churches and tents used as polling stations. Many of the more than 25-million registered voters got up early to cast their ballots. Others waited patiently in line for hours.
”This is a great event. I’m 44 years old and this is the first time I’ve ever voted,” said Zawadi Unega in Kinshasa.
More than 9 700 other candidates were bidding for 500 Parliament seats in the polls.
The DRC has one third of the world’s cobalt reserves, as well as copper, gold and diamonds. However, it has known little but war and dictatorship since independence in 1960. – Reuters