Eye on Africa

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele. Kabila supporters celebrate victory in Kinshasa.

In an alarming piece Reuters’ David Lewis wrote the following:

"A pledge by Congo’s defeated presidential candidate to enter the opposition peacefully came as a relief to many on Wednesday, but concerns lingered that President Joseph Kabila may deny his party a meaningful role.

Fears of a violent backlash were allayed on Tuesday when former rebel Jean-Pierre Bemba vowed, in the name of peace, to lead the opposition rather than challenge a Supreme Court decision confirming Kabila as president.

But hope that polls, meant to draw a line under a 1998-2003 war, have ushered in a new era for the Democratic Republic of Congo were matched by fears that a Bemba-led opposition could be marginalised and even forced back onto the streets.

Kabila’s majority in the new parliament has allowed his law makers to alter procedures for choosing members of key commissions, charged with leading investigations and audits.

"This still worried us a lot. If it is not corrected, it will prevent us from playing our role as the opposition," Thomas Luhaka, executive secretary of Bemba’s MLC, told Reuters on Wednesday.

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele - Kinshasa

In an address to the nation Bemba conceded defeat and said he would go into political opposition after his presidential election defeat "to preserve peace and save the country from chaos and violence". The former presidential candidate said he was disappointed with the Supreme Court’s decision, but vowed to continue the democratic course. "However, in the higher interests of the nation, to preserve peace and save the country from chaos and violence, today I pledge before God, the nation and history to lead … this struggle for change as part of a strong republican opposition," he said.

Read the full concession speech

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele — Pygmy voting in Wenji-Secli, Equateur

Amidst all the brouhaha about fraud allegations and the Court’s verdict, let us take a look at the Carter Center’s findings. According to its third statement about the election runoff, the Carter Center has found evidence of significant abuses of electoral procedures committed in favor of both candidates, including:

the abuse of supplemental voter lists through the excessive and irregular exploitation of voting by exemption
faulty implementation of the lists of omitted voters
questionably high turnout rates in some areas

These abuses occurred primarily in certain regions of the country and, while they were important in principle, the overall number of votes resulting from them is not of a decisive scale.  The manipulation we have found was perpetrated by supporters of both candidates and the geographic distribution of the abuses did not benefit one candidate significantly over the other.

The Carter Center’s concerns regarding the use of votes by exemption, and relating to voter participation rates, as well as our analysis of the lists of omitted voters and recorded blank and invalid ballots, are explained in further detail.

Read the full statement

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele - Kinshasa.

Now that the Supreme Court has rejected UpN’s charges of widespread electoral fraud and confirmed Joseph Kabila’s victory, the time has come for Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo to concede defeat.

To be sure, this electoral process has been plagued with a number of problems, from lack of voter education to uneven access to finance to questionably high turnout rates in some areas on Polling Day. In the justices’ judgment, however, these irregularities did not constitute ground for the cancellation of Kabila’s victory. There is no more legal recourse for UpN.
 
As the election’s results show, Bemba has fought a good fight – winning 42 percent of the votes. In a way, the UpN has lost a battle – not the war. Bemba himself, like the Congolese people, has traveled a long way. In five years, he evolved from fils à papa to rebel leader to vice-president to become the main challenger against an entrenched Kabila regime. He denied Kabila’s AMP victory in half of the country (including Kinshasa), forcing the so-called East-West divide. UpN’s victory in the West, and the popular and strident anti-Kabila discontent it represents, weakens President Kabila’s mandate.

****Photo MONUC

When my friend Mzee in Washington told me Jean-Pierre Bemba’s partisans had set the Supreme Court offices on fire, I did not believe it. I thought it was a joke, bad humor. He said he had called Kinshasa and confirmed with his contacts in town, and it was true. I still refused to believe it.

“How could anyone set the Supreme Court on fire?” I asked. “I cannot understand it.”

See, if you had visited Kinshasa recently, then you would understand my disbelief. Primo, the neighborhood around the Supreme Court, which is close to Bemba’s residence, has been protected by MONUC troops, guarded with UN armored vehicles and heavily armed Uruguayans and EUFOR elements stationed every so many meters. One could not help, but feel under siege when driving around the court. The area felt like a war zone. I remember seeing one or two armored vehicles parked right outside the court.

So how did a crowd of partisans force its way to the building and set it on fire? I know the Congolese do not like facing the barrel of a gun, let alone armored gunships. Perhaps I miss something.

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele - Mbandaka, Equateur

Watch the report at  http://tv.wafbu.com/tv5.php

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele - Pakistani troops, Tubimbi, South Kivu

When Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1990 and during the subsequent 1994 independence and elections in South Africa, the United States displayed a dramatic commitment to the democratic movement in Africa that has not been in evidence since. That seemed to change, however, with the U.S.-sanctioned arrest of Liberia’s former president, Charles Taylor, on March 29, 2006, for human rights violations in neighboring Sierra Leone.

The United States, which helped broker the 2003 political arrangement that offered Taylor safe haven in Nigeria and shielded him from prosecution, reversed its position and demanded his extradition to Sierra Leone. In a rare departure, the United States held itself and its African allies, such as Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, to Jeffersonian standards and ideals of justice and freedom.

Africans have fought for the respect of human rights for the past 50 years with limited success. During the last two decades, however, they have instigated several initiatives to end impunity, including special tribunals in Ethiopia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Arusha), attempts to prosecute Chad’s former president, Hissen Habré, and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. With the exception of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Sudan peace accord, which benefited from American activism, the United States has shown little enthusiasm or support for these initiatives.

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele - Mbandaka, Equateur

***Photo Mvemba Phezo Dizolele - Children on Voting Day in Bongonde, Equateur.

ELECTION RESULTS AS THEY COME IN FROM CEI.