Opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba left the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Wednesday, ending three weeks holed up in South Africa’s embassy after his forces were routed in two days of fighting that killed 600 last month.
A Reuters witness said Bemba boarded a private jet bound for Portugal, where he is due to have medical treatment.
A convoy of around 15 armoured vehicles belonging to the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission in the DRC (Monuc) carried Bemba in a convoy across the dark, deserted streets of the riverside capital Kinshasa in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Tanks and blue-helmeted riot police stood guard at the N’Djili airport outside the city, but there were no crowds or violence. The only onlookers were a small group of reporters.
”Upon the request of Congolese authorities and following authorisation to leave national territory … Monuc assisted in [Bemba’s] departure,” the spokesperson for the UN mission, Kemal Saiki, said in a statement.
Bemba, who led a Ugandan-backed rebellion against the Kinshasa government in the DRC’s 1998 to 2003 war, lost a presidential run-off in October to incumbent Joseph Kabila in the vast, mineral-rich Central African state’s first free polls in more than 40 years.
The DRC’s Senate granted him authorisation to leave the country late on Monday on the condition that Bemba, who is popular with Kinshasa’s eight million people, provide a written commitment not to engage in political activities while in Portugal.
Last year’s polls were intended to draw a line under the war in Africa’s third biggest country, which killed nearly four million people through violence, hunger and disease.
Ethnic militias still operate in some eastern areas and Bemba’s and Kabila’s forces have clashed several times on the streets of the capital.
Government officials initially said a warrant had been issued for Bemba’s arrest on charges of high treason for his part in the March 22/23 clashes, but said later such a warrant could not be issued unless the Senate lifts the immunity he enjoys as a member. It has not done so.
Bemba and his family have visas to travel to Portugal, where he is due to have medical treatment for an old leg injury that was previously treated there, but Portugal had demanded written permission from the authorities for him to travel.
Portuguese diplomats have said Bemba’s visit will not be a long-term exile.
‘Miniature Mobutu’
One diplomat in Kinshasa said Bemba’s ”medical exile” would pave the way for a ”restructuring” of the political opposition in the DRC, at a time when the situation in the capital remains extremely tense.
Bemba’s Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) had issued a statement last weekend complaining about the continued occupation of its headquarters by Kabila’s troops.
The party also condemned what it called ”arbitrary arrests” and ”acts of intimidation” it said were aimed at destroying the opposition.
It said recent searches of party members’ homes had been carried out without proper warrants.
Last year’s presidential elections were the first in the war-shattered DRC for more than four decades and the first since independence in 1960 to be considered free and fair.
Bemba was born in 1962 in north-western Equateur province to an extremely wealthy family close to then dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
After studying in Belgium, the former colonial power, he returned to take over the family business and went on to set up his own mobile telephone company, two television stations and an airline to transport goods.
Known on Kinshasa streets as the ”Miniature Mobutu”, Bemba abruptly left the capital when the dictator was ousted by Laurent-Desire Kabila in 1997, and he spent five years as a rebel leader in the forested north.
At the end of an anti-Kabila war that raged between 1998 and 2003, Bemba was made one of the four vice-presidents in the regime set up to usher in democracy. – Sapa-AFP, Reuters