Elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Elections are coming up in March in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they could prove to be a crucial turning point. The country (formerly Zaire) has seen a lot of trouble in recent years. In my post on conflicts in Africa, I briefly described how the current leader, Joseph Kabila, came to power.

Mobutu Sese Seko was president till 1997. His rule was exceedingly corrupt. Civil war began in 1994, and Mobutu was forced out of power in 1997 by Laurent-Désiré Kabila. He was corrupt as well, and a rebellion began in 1998. Kabila was assassinated in 2001, and his son Joseph Kabila now rules. There has been a shaky peace since 2003, but unrest remains, and there are challengers to Joseph Kabila's rule.

A constitutional referendum was held last December, and passed by a wide margin. This was seen as an encouraging sign. A report from the PINR describes the results and the implication for the coming elections this way:

The referendum was considered a test to see whether general elections could take place in a successful way (former Zaire and the D.R.C. have not held an independent election in over 40 years), and the outcome has generally been deemed positive. Despite the huge difficulties in organizing and participating in the vote, nearly 25 million Congolese were registered and half of them went to the poll stations. The E.U. and other international observers said the referendum was free and fair. Additionally, the threat of violence and armed attacks from the bands of militiamen was limited and did not affect the regularity of the operations.

The international community's judgment on the whole electoral process testifies that there are hopes for the development of an institutional transition system in D.R.C., acknowledging that the Independent Electoral Commission has demonstrated its ability to handle what the U.N. repeatedly defines as "the most complicated elections it has ever been involved in." Most of the burden in the coming months will be on the transitional government's shoulders. Kabila, although very young at 33, has shown great ability in maintaining the government's power and in dealing with the many obstacles coming from the transitional process, the internal political arena and the critical situation in the eastern regions of the country. Therefore, Kabila is widely expected to win the presidential poll.

What emerges clearly is that Kabila appears to have gained solid support from the international community, and mainly from Belgium, South Africa, France and the U.S. Both the United States and France have been crucial actors in the shaping of the geopolitical balances in the Great Lakes region, particularly since the end of the Cold War; Washington and Paris have been fighting a long "underground" struggle to obtain a sort of political supervisory role in this area but their attention is now oriented toward more strategic areas of the continent, such as the Sahel region, the Gulf of Guinea, Sudan and the Horn of Africa.

There are two serious trouble spots, however. One is the Katanga region, in the southeast corner of the country. The region is divided by conflicts and rivalries between locals, outsiders, and militias. A report from the International Crisis Group looks at this region. From the executive summary:

The home province of President Joseph Kabila and many other senior Kinshasa politicians is divided by three conflicts: tensions between southerners and northerners, between outsiders and natives, and between Mai-Mai militias and the national army.

The north-south competition has become pronounced since Laurent Kabila, a northerner and father of the current president, Joseph Kabila, seized power by overthrowing the Mobutu dictatorship in 1997. The south is one of the most mineral-rich areas of the continent, whose copper and cobalt deposits have prompted Katangan politicians – mainly northerners – to cultivate personal networks in the local security forces to protect their interests and threaten their rivals. These officials are resented by southerners, who feel excluded from the wealth of the province. This rivalry has triggered violence. In October 2004, for example, the army killed over 70 civilians while suppressing a rebellion by a ramshackle militia in the mining town of Kilwa. In May 2005, officials alleged a secession plot in Lubumbashi and arrested south Katangan politicians and military officers. Both operations appear to have been prompted by Kinshasa politicians eager to protect their mining interests and to squash opposition.

The election campaign has reignited conflict between native Katangans and immigrants from Kasai province. Under Belgian rule, many Luba from Kasai came to run the mining companies and state administration, creating tensions manipulated by politicians, who in 1992-1993 organised militias to ethnically cleanse the province. More than 5,000 Luba were killed. The Union of Congolese Nationalists and Federalists party (UNAFEC), which is run by some of the same figures who led the violence in the early 1990s, is using its youth gangs to intimidate its opposition, who are often Luba. Leaders of the party’s youth wing have called for “necklacing” opponents with burning tyres.

The violence in the remote areas of northern Katanga is tightly linked to actors in Kinshasa. During the war, Laurent Kabila created Mai-Mai militias in the region to stem the advance of Rwandan-backed rebels. These militias, bolstered by arms from officials in Kinshasa as recently as 2004, have not been integrated into the national army and are fighting each other and the army over poaching and taxation rights.

The other trouble spot is the Kivu region, on the eastern border with Rwanda. Severe fighting has displaced tens of thousands, and humanitarian needs are great.

Thousands of people continue to flee their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as fighting continues between the Army and dissident forces in the eastern part of North Kivu province, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said today.

UN and other humanitarian agencies are particularly concerned about people whom have fled the Kiberezi area to surrounding hills and forests and are surviving in the bush with no shelter, water, food or access to assistance.

Much of the fighting is between the government army and rebels that come over from Rwanda. As the PINR report says:

In Kivus, the Rwandan Armed Liberation Forces (F.D.L.R.) still constitute a military menace; after negotiations in Rome in March 2005 with the Kinshasa government and the Sant'Egidio community, the F.D.L.R. announced that it would return to Rwanda peacefully; however, after one year the process of disarmament and demobilization is in jeopardy. The threats toward the institutional transition in D.R.C. come not only from the F.D.L.R.'s 8,000 combatants, but also because their presence in the border zone between D.R.C. and Rwanda provides the Kigali government with an alibi to intervene in the defense of its interests, mainly directed to the arrest of some of the F.D.L.R.'s leaders accused of a central role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

And according to this news account:

Most of the FDLR rebels fled Rwanda following the 1994 genocide, for which they have largely been blamed. According to the Rwandan government, some 937,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed during the genocide.

The rebels, most of them Hutus, formed the FDLR in 1998 and the Congolese government initially used them to fight the Rwandan army, which withdrew from the Congo in 2001. The DRC banned the FDLR in 2002 after it signed a peace deal with Rwanda.

Close to 8,000 FDLR fighters have been demobilised and returned to Rwanda under a MONUC voluntary repatriation scheme. The remaining FDLR elements in eastern Congo continue to fight the Congolese army, looting and raping civilians in the process.

As mentioned there, rape has been a tragic problem in the area.

Incidents of rape have risen sharply along the Kanyabayonga-Kayna road in the Democratic Republic of Congo's North Kivu Province, where fighting between the army and renegade soldiers has displaced at least 70,000 people, according to humanitarian workers.

"We are witnessing a quadruple increase in rape cases in the Kanyabayonga-Kayna axis this week, where victims have been treated by [Medecines Sans Frontieres] MSF-France," Patrick Lavand'homme, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Goma, the provincial capital, said on Thursday.

Kanyabayonga, Kibirizi and Kayna are towns in North Kivu's Lubero Territory. Those blamed for the rapes are suspected to members of the army and the renegades.

Confirming the increase in the number of rape cases reported to their mobile clinics, the head of the MSF mission in Kayna, Jean Guy Vataux, said, "The number of rape victims has reached 23 especially, in the Kibirizi area."

A lot is at stake for the upcoming elections. With much human suffering taking place, the elections could go a long ways in bringing stability to that country. The PINR report concludes this way:

D.R.C. is going to face one of the most crucial and delicate situations in its recent history. If the coming elections finally take place and the result is judged and accepted as free and fair by the majority of the political parties, rebel groups and militias that will take part in the reconstruction process, the situation could improve. The local vote scheduled for March and April will be a significant test, not only for the effectiveness of the whole electoral process, but mainly because it could draw the basic lines of the future political and institutional structure of the country. Indeed, D.R.C. may be too large of a territory to be considered a single political and administrative unit.

Security appears to be the key word in the coming months, with a pivotal role for the international community, both at the U.N. level (with the M.O.N.U.C. military contingent) and for the single actors -- the U.S., France, Belgium and South Africa -- to deploy their political and diplomatic influence and provide their financial support.