Businesses reopened and people reappeared on Kinshasa’s streets on Wednesday as fighting appeared to have ceased following three days of clashes between troops loyal to the two presidential candidates in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) capital.
The United Nations worked on Tuesday to broker a ceasefire between the two factions — supporters of President Joseph Kabila and ex-rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba who started fighting on Sunday when results from DRC’s historic election showed the two would face each other in a run-off vote.
Fourteen people were reported killed in Sunday’s violence, but no casualty figures were available for ensuing days. The fighting began to calm on Tuesday as the European Union sent in reinforcements and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged Kabila and Bemba to meet.
”The ceasefire is holding, so far,” UN spokesperson Kemal Saiki said on Wednesday morning. ”Transportation is back to normal.” There were cars on the streets, though much fewer than normal.
Vendors opened their stalls and people walked along the streets around the vice-president’s house that on Tuesday were the scene of fighting.
UN envoy William Lacey Swing is trying to broker peace talks, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in New York.
DRC’s war-battered people denounced the fighting between the candidates’ supporters in the post-war military, saying they wanted democracy rather than more armed struggle.
Fighting raged for hours on Tuesday until the UN, with 17 500 peacekeepers in DRC, demanded a halt to hostilities.
Witnesses said Kabila’s special presidential guards, who wear black uniforms and red berets, had withdrawn from outside Bemba’s house, where Swing and other diplomats were meeting with Bemba on Monday when fighting erupted outside the compound. EU and UN troops evacuated the foreign envoys.
Aides said Kabila ordered his loyalists back to barracks and that Bemba, who is vice-president in Kabila’s national-unity government, had also done so with his loyalists.
Bemba, who was in the protection of the UN, wasn’t immediately available for comment.
About 1 000 EU troops are already in DRC, on hand to help the UN peace force overseeing the first elections in 45 years of coups, corrupt rule and war.
Even with the possible end to fighting that saw Kabila’s forces using tanks against Bemba’s fighters, wearing olive-drab uniforms and red bandanas, deep-rooted enmities remain in DRC’s armed forces. DRC has about 100 000 troops.
With 16,9-million votes cast in the July 30 ballot, Kabila won 45% of the votes against 20% for Bemba. The UN and its partners have spent more than $500-million on the vote, setting up 50 000 voting stations in a country the size of Western Europe with few paved roads.
The elections are meant to end years of unrest that began shortly after independence from Belgium in 1960. DRC’s last multiparty vote for a leader was in 1961. The winner was killed as military regimes took power. — Sapa-AP