DR Congo struggles to avoid election reigniting war

Electoral officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) backed by riot police faced down stone-throwing boycotters to allow voters a second chance, underlining the challenge to democracy in Africa: keeping ethnic, regional and political disputes from reigniting into war.

While polls were opened an extra day yesterday in central DRC, it appeared that few voters took advantage in what officials agreed was a massive boycott called by one candidate.

The party of another candidate, a former rebel leader, meanwhile claimed a lead in over 50% of the nation’s provinces, while decrying alleged irregularities across the vast Central African country.

The Congolese Liberation Movement said Jean-Pierre Bemba, a vice president in the post-war administration, had a firm lead in six of the country’s 11 provinces and was confident of victory. “I can't say for sure, but it’s an eventuality,” party official Moise Musangana said.

Final results were not expected for several weeks, though none of the 33 presidential candidates was expected to win the outright majority needed to avoid a run-off, which would likely be held in October. No partial results were being announced, but local results were being posted in 60 districts, and various groups were doing their own tallies.

Electoral commission Chairman Appolinaire Malu-Malu called for restraint in the private compilation of results in the restive country.

“Be modest in your declarations,” he said in a news conference. “Don’t fool the population.”

Several leading election candidates are former rebels who still command private armed militias, and could pose a real threat to peace after the elections.

Bemba has become a front-runner while campaigning on a message that he is a true son of Congo, while his main competition and current president, Joseph Kabila, was born in exile in neighbouring Rwanda. The message touches on a sore point of ethnicity in a country that has nine neighbours carved out by colonial leaders who took no account of ethnic divisions in drawing borders.

Voting was largely peaceful on Sunday, however, and the European Union and the DRC’s former colonial ruler, Belgium, said isolated violence had not kept the elections from being free and democratic.

Some 17,600 UN peacekeepers and 2,000 EU troops are deployed to help ensure peace during the vote in the central African nation, where wars in 1998-2002 attracted troops from eight nations in a regional battle to control vast mineral resources, including diamonds, copper, gold and coltan, used for mobile phone chips.

In Mbuji-Mayi, the DRC’s second-largest city and a diamond-mining centre, officials said they were reopening 174 of the 1,041 polling stations yesterday after registering a turnout of just 5-15% Sunday. But few voters were seen going to polls.

It was unclear how many had turned out throughout the rest of the country.