Congo Presidential election: Not Yet Uhuru

The Supreme Court of the Democratic Republic of Congo has declared Joseph Kabila the winner of a controversial presidential run-off election held on 29 October. After the elections, Jean-Pierre Bemba filed an electoral fraud petition with the Supreme Court and asked it to nullify the vote. After reviewing the petition, the court rejected Bemba's objections, on grounds of insufficient evidence. Peluola Adewale argues that “to avoid a serious post run-off election crisis, foreign diplomats were reportedly trying to persuade both presidential contestants to agree to grant a measure of personal, financial and legal protection to whoever loses. This is to assure the would-be loser and perhaps, his backers, that their share of the looted mineral wealth of the Congo will not be lost.”

Voters in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) went back to the polls on 29 October 2006 for the run-off presidential election. The contest was between Joseph Kabila, the incumbent, installed in 2001 after his father Laurent was murdered by a presidential security aide, and Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former warlord and one of four vice presidents in a power-sharing government that was set up to end a five year war. The 30 July election did not produce a clear winner out of 33 presidential candidates. Kabila got 45%, while Bemba got 20% of the votes on a 70% turnout.

‘The Economist’ magazine (London, October 26, 2006), described the choice the Congo’s voters had to make in the run-off election as choosing between “cholera and the plague”.

The provisional results for the second round of elections, released on 15 November, suggest Kabila has won the election. Kabila won 58.05% and Bemba got 41.95%. Bemba however, alleged there was fraud, with more than one million fake votes for Kabila and filed a complaint at the Supreme Court of Justice. This means that the final results will not be ready until November 30 when the court is expected to give its verdict on the election.

The results, like those in the first round, reflect the sharp division along ethnic lines, between the East of the country, where Kabila has the upper hand, and the West, including the capital, Kinshasa, where Bemba has a big following. This is ominous for the post-election situation.

Many Bemba supporters believe the UN and Western powers financed and organised the elections to establish Kabila as president and to have a ‘legitimate government’. The powers hope this will allow giant corporations to fully exploit the Congo’s natural wealth, as well as allowing EU States a pretext to stop refugees fleeing the Congo from entering Europe.

After the first round of elections in August, 30 people were killed in gun battles. For the second round, UN and EU troops tried to gather weapons in Kinshasa, and used armoured vehicles and helicopters to patrol the city’s streets.

However, the people of the Congo apparently expect the electoral process, the first in more than four decades, to provide relief for a country whose only history is that of rapacious and ruthless colonialism, parasitic dictatorship, official corruption and brutal war. The country, which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe, has only 300 miles of paved roads! Yet, the Congo is potentially one of the richest countries in Africa, due to its enormous natural resources and mineral wealth.

For 32 years (1965 - 1997) the country (formerly known as Zaire) was ruled and ruined by a staunch ally of the West in the Cold War era, Mobutu Sese Seko, who plundered the economy and repressed the people.

Mobutu so personified corruption that it was for his government the term ‘kleptocracy’ – a combination of kleptomaniac (compulsive thief) and autocracy - was originally coined. Mobutu was installed with the support of the US and Western European powers, which earlier supervised the overthrow and killing of Patrice Lumumba, the left-leaning first prime minister of post-colonial Congo after winning independence from Belgium in 1960. As was the practice in the Cold War era, the Western imperialist powers enthroned Mobutu to secure Congo for continued imperialist exploitation and to act as a launching site against “communism” in the region, particularly Angola. The USA provided more than $300 million in arms and $100 million in military training for the dictatorship. Western imperialism also provided Mobutu with loans that plunged the country into a serious debt burden, even when they knew that Mobutu accumulated money for self-enrichment. The dictator amassed a personal fortune estimated at $4 billion and ran up a $12 billion external debt.

The removal of Mobutu from power, in 1997, by Laurent Kabila-led guerrilla insurgents, not only failed to provide a solution to the terrible poverty facing most people in the Congo, but, in reality, set the stage for worse disaster. The 1998 insurrection by rebels linked to Rwanda and Uganda triggered a war involving six other nations. Between 1998 and 2003, the Congo was plunged into what was described as the bloodiest conflict since the Second World War. Over four million people were killed in the conflict, which was termed “Africa’s world war” because it involved six other African countries; Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Kabila has had his own army since the 1990s, while Bemba has had an armed force since the early 2000s, when he ruled parts of northeast Congo.

The war led to the United Nations’ (UN) biggest and most expensive mission, involving an 18,000-strong peace-keeping force and expenditure of $1.1 billion a year. However, a journalist, Aidan Hartley, described ‘Monuc’ (as the UN force in Congo is known), as an ill-equipped ‘Third World’ army, which had to make do with old American and Soviet aircraft dating back to the Vietnam era. He also queried the morality of the UN using contingents from a military dictatorship (Pakistan) and from monarchies (Nepal and Morocco) to ‘help’ Congo become democratic. Hartley wrote that the UN’s approach in the Congo was similar to the disastrous US-led mission in Somalia, in 1993. During that conflict, the imperialist powers sub-contracted the task of stabilising the crises to their allies in African and other developing nations while ensuring their continued exploitation of Africa.

The Congo war was fuelled by the country’s vast mineral wealth with all sides, including multinational corporations from the West, taking advantage of the anarchy to plunder the natural resources. The resources were also used to finance the conflict. The country is rich in diamonds, water, coltan, copper, timber and other natural resources. A 2001 UN Security Council report on the illegal exploitation of natural resources in the Congo, estimated that Rwanda, alone, might have gained at least $250 million over a period of 18 months from the pillage of coltan. This was said to be substantive enough to finance the war. Burundi and Uganda were also seriously indicted by the report. Coltan is used in high-tech industries as a key component in the manufacture of mobile phones, computers, stereos and VCRs. Its price soared substantially in 1999 and 2000 when the world supply was decreasing and demand was increasing, thereby leading to a large increase in production of coltan in the Congo.

The US, Belgium, Britain and France are also implicated in the Congo conflict. They manipulated the conflict for their economic interests and supplied millions of dollars of weapons to different sides in the conflict. Large quantities of arms were transferred by US and Britain to the Congo, via Eastern European countries.

Perhaps more than any other country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) deserves peace, having known only exploitation and crisis - economic, social and political – since its inception as a state.

The ‘Independent’ newspaper (London, 28 July 2006) described the country as “the most blighted nation on the earth”. But the November election will not bring the peace so yearned for by working people in the Congo, if events since the first election round are anything to go by. The results of the first round elections in August, were greeted by three days of fighting between the armies of Kabila and Bemba. Less than a week before the 29 October election, violent clashes took place daily. Between August and late October over 30 people were killed in street battles. Fighting, which left two people dead, broke out on 13 November, after the second round provisional results put Kabila ahead.

To avoid a serious post run-off election crisis, foreign diplomats were reportedly trying to persuade both presidential contestants to agree to grant a measure of personal, financial and legal protection to whoever loses. This is to assure the would-be loser and perhaps, his backers, that their share of the looted mineral wealth of the Congo will not be lost.

The long-suffering masses of the Congo desperately yearn for an end to war. But ‘peace’ established under the auspices of former warlords and imperialist powers will not end poverty, joblessness and all the other abundant social ills facing working people. Only a policy of transforming the devastated economy, including building adequate infrastructure, and fundamentally improving living standards, could allow the poor masses to expect to see light at the end of the tunnel. But this will not happen as long as the Congo is run on the basis of anti-poor, neo-liberal policies, as dictated by the IMF/World Bank, and for as long as the Congo’s huge mineral wealth is plundered by the multinationals.

To free up resources to guarantee basic needs, like education, health, water, electricity and proper roads, the huge natural resources of the Congo have to be taken into public ownership, under the democratic management and control of working people. Disastrous neo-liberal economic policies have to end.

Transforming the lives of the mass of people in the Congo is impossible under capitalism, which sees it remaining a neo-colonial country under the stranglehold of imperialism.

Whether the presidential election ends conflict or not, and irrespective of whether Kabila or Bemba is in power, under capitalism workers and the poor of the Congo will discover that their living standards cannot be meaningfully improved, despite the enormous resources of the country. This can open up possibilities for the ideas of mass struggle in opposition to the local rulers and imperialism, and the growing support for a socialist alternative. Of course, workers’ organisations are weak, due to years of dictatorship and devastating war, but only by building independent organisations of workers and the poor can the grip of the local looters and imperialists be broken in the DR Congo.

• Peluola Adewale is the editor of the Socialist Democracy, Lagos Nigeria.
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