As ballots are counted from Sunday’s historic vote in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), rhetoric from candidates and false poll results circulating via e-mail and SMS have prompted warnings from electoral officials. Authorities fear a repeat of first-round election violence related to news of results.
The weekend vote will decide whether incumbent President Joseph Kabila or Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba is to become the first democratically elected leader appointed in this war-ravaged country in more than four decades.
Ahead of the ballot, Western diplomats and the United Nations, which has its largest peacekeeping mission deployed in the DRC, repeatedly warned against the release of false and unofficial poll results that could incite supporters of the two candidates to violence.
First-round election results, issued in August, sparked three days of fierce battles between troops loyal to Kabila and Bemba on the streets of the Congolese capital, Kinshasa — leaving at least 40 dead.
The violence was the worst in the Central African country since the end of civil wars that took place between 1996 and 2002, claiming millions of lives. Peace deals ended the most recent civil conflict (1998-2002) by giving warring rebels senior positions in a transitional government, which should be replaced by a permanent administration after the elections.
Concern
The head of the DRC’s Commission Electorale Indépendante (Independent Electoral Commission), Apollinaire Malu Malu, expressed concern about the ”false and premature statements on … results”, saying the distribution of false results could ”create a climate of useless and dangerous tension”.
In fact, rumours of vote rigging were being spread even before citizens went to the polls on Sunday. A week before the second-round run-off, an e-mail circulated with alleged election results, claiming the poll had already been fixed in favour of Kabila.
Electoral commission spokespersons have said that the official outcome will be made known on November 19. Vote counting is a time-consuming process in the DRC, as ballots have to be delivered from remote, rural provinces under difficult conditions, and then sorted and tallied. Years of misrule under long-time head of state Mobutu Sese Seko, toppled in 1997, left the country with little in the way of transport or telecommunications networks.
To date, the Congolese media have been relatively subdued on the matter of poll results, in stark contrast to the situation that prevailed after the July 31 vote, when newspapers, radio stations and television channels proclaimed their own outcomes.
Representatives of both Kabila and Bemba have signed an agreement prohibiting the use of violence to settle poll disputes, but tensions between the two camps are evident, with Bemba’s supporters already having accused Kabila of large-scale vote rigging.
”We have evidence of massive fraud,” said Francois Muamba, a senior official in Bemba’s party, who claimed Kabila’s party had used fake identity cards, paid voters for support and stuffed ballot boxes. ”We will follow official and legal procedures to contest such irregularities. For now, we are watching and waiting.”
An aide to Kabila dismissed these allegations.
”The ballot boxes will speak, and we should refrain from such pre-emptive statements and claims,” said Chikaya bin Karubi. ”Bemba’s men are engaging in exactly the kind of talk we need to avoid if our country is to advance to a democracy.”
Violence
Violence after Sunday’s elections led to a repeat vote on Wednesday in the eastern town of Fataki in the Ituri territory, where a soldier killed two electoral agents and provoked a riot that destroyed 43 polling stations and burned as many as 25 000 marked ballot sheets.
UN spokesperson Leocadio Salmeron said the soldier seemed to be drunk, while the Congolese army announced it had sentenced the soldier to death by military tribunal. Eastern parts of the DRC remain volatile, even though the civil conflict there has officially been brought to an end.
Another repeat vote due to election violence was held in Bumba. According to the UN’s Radio Okapi, one person was killed in Bumba and another in Lisala during poll violence. The clashes were apparently related to allegations of ballot box stuffing in favour of Kabila.
Both towns are in the northern Equator province, a Bemba stronghold. It had earlier been reported that two people were killed in Lisala, but full details about violence in Equator emerged only days after the vote.
Despite these incidents, election monitors from South Africa, which sent one of the largest observer missions to the DRC, released a statement on Tuesday saying the vote had been ”democratic, peaceful, credible and transparent”.
The mission said it ”did not observe any major incidents or irregularities with the voting process”, and that the media watchdog, the High Authority for Media, had been more successful in clamping down on rhetoric around Sunday’s vote than it had been during the first round.
Troop pull-out
Also on Tuesday, European Union foreign affairs chief Javier Solana said that European troops would leave Kinshasa on November 30, as planned — in spite of warnings from UN officials and analysts that pulling soldiers out of the DRC too soon after the vote could endanger peace. The EU sent in an extra 2 000 troops to beef up security for the poll, while the UN has deployed more than 17 000 peacekeepers in the country.
Kabila won 45% of ballots in the first round and Bemba 20%. Electoral rules called for a second-round run-off if no candidate won the majority of votes cast initially, but Kabila remains the firm favourite to win the poll.
The president is popular in the Swahili-speaking east, which bore the brunt of the recent civil conflict, while Bemba draws support in the Lingala-speaking west, from where he hails.
Much of the politicking during the first round of voting centred on claims that Kabila, who spent part of his youth in exile in Tanzania, was not Congolese.
Whoever wins leadership of the DRC will inherit a country with substantial mineral wealth that has proved more of a bane than a blessing: competition to control reserves of gold, diamonds, coltan, copper and other resources has been at the heart of fighting in the eastern DRC over recent years. — IPS