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Congo (Kinshasa): Dubious Mandate, Uncertain Future
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Dec 21, 2011 (111221)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
Joseph Kabila was inaugurated for his second term as
president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on
December 20, with representation from Western countries
limited to ambassadorial level. African countries, including
Congo's neighbors, were represented at prime minister or
foreign minister level, with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe the
only foreign head of state in attendance. But despite
unresolved doubts about massive fraud in the election, the
"international community" (both African and non-African) is
unlikely to mobilize any significant pressure to reexamine
the results.
While opposition candidate Etienne Tshisekedi continues to
claim that he won the presidential election, planning a
rival inauguration for Friday, there are likely to be no
foreign diplomats present for this event, even if security
forces allow it to take place. There is no doubt about
widespread popular dissatisfaction, particularly in Kinshasa
and in Tshisekedi's home area of the Kasai provinces. But
whether this will result in significant peaceful protests,
in violence, or in accommodation for the time being, is
highly uncertain. What is certain is that the legitimacy of
Kabila's second term will remain in question.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a short critical
statement released by a number of observer groups and
individuals just before the inauguration ceremony, and a
longer background analysis in testimony presented by Mvemba
Dizolele to U.S. Senate Hearings on December 15. Additional
testimony at those hearings, as well as a video webcast, are
available at http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/
Critics such as those in these statements have called
particularly for more substantive action by Western
countries. But it is notable that there seems to be little
discussion (except among the Congolese diaspora) of the fact
that African countries, including Congo's neighbors and
fellow members of the International Conference for the Great
Lakes Region (ICGLR)and the Southern African Development
Community (SADC), have conspicuously failed to raise
questions about the election.
For continuing thoughtful and informed commentary on the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, AfricaFocus recommends
http://dizolele.com, http://congosiasa.blogspot.com/, and
http://blog.lesoir.be/colette-braeckman/
Another very useful source of updated commentary, from the Friends of the Congo, one of
the leading pro-democracy organizations of the Congolese diaspora,
is http://congofriends.blogspot.com.
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/congokin.php
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AfricaFocus Bulletin will be taking a break following this issue,
and will resume in late January.
Automatic updates of news feeds on the AfricaFocus website
(http://www.africafocus.org) will continue during the break.
There will also be occasional updates of links of interest
posted to the AfricaFocus Facebook page
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on the AfricaFocus twitter feed at
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Thanks much to those AfricaFocus readers who have sent in
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Best wishes for the new year to all AfricaFocus readers, for
your hopes for yourselves, your families, your work, and
justice for Africa and the world.
-- William Minter, Editor, AfricaFocus Bulletin
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
Statement on Congolese elections
Below is a statement released by a group of concerned
individuals and organizations this morning, ahead of
President Kabila's inauguration.
December 20, 2011
We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, are
deeply troubled by the lack of critical engagement that the
international community has shown throughout the electoral
process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Carter
Center, the European Union, the Catholic Church and other
national election observation organizations found that the
elections held on November 28, 2011 were deeply flawed and
marred by widespread irregularities. In order to prevent
further violence and provide legitimacy to the government,
we call on the United States and other members of the
international community to take these immediate steps:
- State clearly that they do not perceive the election
results as legitimate and call on President Kabila to delay
his inauguration ceremony until steps are taken to address
these serious allegations. If the inauguration proceeds as
scheduled, the United States and other international
missions should consider non-attendance or at a minimum send
a lower ranking diplomatic officer instead of the
Ambassador.
- Immediately ask for the deployment of an independent
international mediation commission formed under
international and regional auspices. The Commission will
have a mandate to review the technical aspects of the
electoral process and facilitate a solution to the crisis.
- Call on the appropriate authorities to immediately halt
the counting of the parliamentary election ballots until
clear guarantees are put in place to ensure the credibility
of the tallying process.
- Make clear statements that the U.S. and other members of
the international community are determined to ensure
accountability for perpetrators of electoral and postelectoral
violence in the appropriate international or
national fora. Call on Congolese state security forces, in
particular the Republican Guard, to cease immediately all
abuses against civilians.
The following organizations and individuals support this
statement:
Eastern Congo Initiative
Enough
Humanity United
International Crisis Group
Open Society Foundations
Anthony W. Gambino, Fellow, Eastern Congo Initiative
Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution
Jason Stearns
Testimony
Mvemba Phezo Dizolele
Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and
Peace
Improving Governance in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on
African Affairs
http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/
Chairman Coons, Ranking Member Isakson, and Members of the
Subcommittee on African Affairs: Thank you for the
invitation and honor to testify before your committee today.
I greet you on behalf of the millions of Congolese in the
homeland who look up to the United States of America as a
beacon of democracy. I would also like to thank you on
behalf of the Congolese community of the United States for
your interest in the alarming developments in the Democratic
Republic of Congo. Thank you.
My name is Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, a native Congolese and a
naturalized US citizen. Let me note that I received my
American citizenship through service in the United States
Marine Corps Reserve, where I was a non-commissioned officer
and served in infantry, intelligence, training and public
affairs positions. I am a writer, foreign policy analyst,
independent journalist, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover
Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford
University.
Over the last decade, I have returned to Congo several times
as a journalist, researcher, businessman, vacationer, and
election monitor. In 2006, I was embedded with United
Nations peacekeepers in Ituri, Lake Albert and South Kivu as
a reporter. I also covered the first round of the election
that summer and returned in the fall to serve as an election
monitor with the Carter Center. In March 2007, I was
stranded at the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa for four days while
troops and militiamen loyal to President Joseph Kabila and
Jean-Pierre Bemba fought each other in the city streets and
around the hotel. I recently returned from Congo where I
observed the contentious presidential and legislative
elections that have led to the current legitimacy crisis
between Joseph Kabila and his main challenger, Etienne
Tshisekedi.
Today, however, I represent neither the Marine Corps nor the
Hoover Institution. I speak on behalf of the Congolese
people. While I do not represent all 70 million Congolese, I
am confident that I speak for a good many of them. Still,
the views expressed in this statement are my own.
The most widely accepted narrative of U.S. Congo policy
defines the predicament as a humanitarian crisis through the
binary prism of sexual violence and the so-called conflict
minerals. This narrative has now become the standard
perspective through which Americans view Congo, and most
NGOs, activists, academics and policymakers build their
efforts around this prism. Not only is this narrative wrong,
it has led to misguided initiatives, which have effectively
turned U.S. Congo policy into a Kivu policy.
Tremendous efforts have been devoted to sexual violence and
Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which contains an
important resolution on Congo's conflict minerals. This
narrative oversimplifies the problem and makes American
taxpayers believe that if only the challenges of sexual
violence and conflict minerals were solved, then Congo will
get back on track and peace will follow.
Nothing, however, is farther from the truth. The Congo
crisis is first and foremost political and requires
political solutions. Sexual violence and the looting of
natural resources are ramifications and symptoms, not the
causes of the political crisis. Focusing U.S. Congo policy
primarily in the eastern province, particularly the Kivus,
which are but a fraction of the country, has not helped the
people of Congo solve the bigger problem. This would be akin
to designing a US-India or US-Pakistan policy based on the
conflict in Kashmir.
The disproportionate attention that policymakers directed to
sexual violence and conflict minerals distracted them from
the many other important core issues, such as governance,
security sector reform, mining sector reform,
decentralization, and the elections.
The result has been catastrophic for the Congolese. For
instance, nowadays, nowhere are crises more predictable than
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And yet, when they
unfold as anticipated, Western policymakers and diplomats
always seem caught off guard -- raising questions about the
competence, willingness, and commitment of the Kinshasabased
diplomatic corps and the United Nations mission to
discharge their responsibilities.
Nothing underscores the apathy and inconsistency that
characterize Western diplomacy in Congo more than the
current impasse between incumbent President Joseph Kabila
and veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, each of
whom has claimed victory in the Nov. 28 presidential polls.
The legitimacy crisis threatens to trigger another round of
civil war in a country that has already lost over six
million of its people to the repercussions from a long and
senseless conflict.
On Dec. 9, Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, chairman of Congo's
Independent National Electoral Commission, declared
President Kabila winner of the contentious election, with 49
percent of the votes. Tshisekedi, the main challenger,
placed a distant second with 32 percent. Tshisekedi has
rejected the results, called Mulunda's statement a
"provocation of the people" and declared himself presidentelect.
The main opposition parties have rallied behind
Tshisekedi and are calling on the international community to
help solve the impasse.
The opposition has a strong case. A day after Mulunda
declared Kabila the winner, the Carter Center's election
monitoring mission issued an unequivocal statement charging
that the results announced by the electoral commission
lacked credibility. The observers noted that the
mismanagement of the vote tabulation process compromised the
integrity of the election, which was fraught with damning
legal, technical, and logical deficiencies from the outset.
The Carter Center cited serious irregularities, including
the loss of nearly 2,000 polling station results in
Kinshasa, a Tshisekedi stronghold, representing as many as
350,000 voters. Another 1,000 polling station results were
mysteriously lost elsewhere in Congo, representing 500,000
voters.
Meanwhile, according to the Carter Center, multiple
locations in Katanga province, a bastion of Kabila
supporters, reported impossibly high rates of 99 to over 100
percent voter turnout, with all or nearly all votes going to
the incumbent. The observers also noted that a review of
locations with similar high percentage votes for Tshisekedi
did not reveal the same coincidence of perfect collection of
polling station results and extremely high voter turnout -
meaning that voter turnout in Tshisekedi's strongholds was
within expected norms. The Catholic Church, arguably Congo's
most influential institution, which deployed 30,000 election
observers across the country, backed the Carter Center's
statement. Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo, Archibishop of
Kinshasa, told journalists the electoral commission's
results conformed with neither truth nor justice. "These
observations pose a serious credibility problem for the
election," the cardinal said.
Kabila waited nearly three days to hold a news conference
and react to the Carter Center's statement and Tshisekedi's
rejection of the results. He conceded that there had been
problems with the process, but dismissed the mission's
conclusion that the results were not credible. "The
credibility of these elections cannot be put in doubt," the
president insisted, as he accused the Carter Center of going
beyond what was expected. Throughout the process, the
electoral commission had maintained that the role of
monitors was only to observe, not to ask questions.
While Kabila remained silent, his government was reacting
swiftly and forcefully, unleashing armed anti-riot policemen
and elements of the elite presidential guard into the
streets of Kinshasa to confront Tshisekedi's partisans.
Several people have been killed in clashes between state
security agents and the protesters, and an unconfirmed
number of young men have been abducted from their homes by
these same agents and driven to undisclosed locations.
The bustling capital of nearly 10 million has turned into a
ghost city, as the people are afraid to venture out of their
homes. The government has cut off text-messaging services,
and Internet access is now limited, slow and intermittent.
The diplomatic community has exhorted Tshisekedi's
supporters to refrain from violence, but has not condemned
abuses by state security agents. As of this writing, the
Limete neighborhood where Tshisekedi's residence and party
headquarters are located is under heavy police siege. The
movement and activities of his supporters are curtailed by
state security agents who harass and manhandle them at
checkpoints, provoking them into violence.
In the meantime, Tshisekedi is threatening to appoint his
ministerial cabinet and Congolese diaspora communities have
taken to the streets in Pretoria, Brussels, Washington D.C.,
and Toronto to protest these abuses and demand that the
international community respect the will of the people as
expressed through their vote. Some exiled groups, however,
are speaking of potential armed insurrection.
How did we get here? The root cause of the crisis can be
traced back to bad policymaking by the pro-Kabila
presidential majority in parliament. After Jean-Pierre
Bemba, former presidential hopeful and Kabila's main
challenger in the 2006 election, was arrested by the
International Criminal Court in 2008 for crimes committed by
his soldiers in Central African Republic, Kabila's
reelection in 2011 seemed all but certain. Tshisekedi, who
had boycotted the 2006 election, was old, sick, and seeking
medical care in Europe. No other potential candidate had
either the stature or the funds to compete with Kabila.
All that changed when Tshisekedi decided to return home in
December 2010 and announced that he would run for president.
With thousands of supporters turning out to greet him at the
airport, his cortege took eight hours to travel 10 miles to
his party's headquarters in Limete. Kabila's advisers
panicked, and the president's parliamentary majority passed
a hasty constitutional revision in January that scrapped the
two-round voting process in favor of one round within one
week.
Without the possibility of a runoff, Kabila -- with his 10
years in office, an organized network of parties, and
substantial government funds not available to the opposition
-- gained a disproportionate advantage as the incumbent. The
constitutional revision meant that the president only needed
to garner the most votes of all 11 candidates, rather than a
majority.
Opposition parties along with civil-society groups denounced
the constitutional revision, calling it irresponsible and
dangerous for the security and stability of the country.
Major powers in the West, however, especially the United
States, France, and Belgium, wrote off the power play as an
internal affair.
For reasons that elude Congolese analysts, Western diplomats
feel more comfortable with Kabila, whom they see as the
defender of stability and peace in Congo. It is true that
the government in Kinshasa has recently made economic gains.
The country coasted through the global financial crisis
relatively unscathed. In 2010, the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank approved a $12.3 billion debt relief
package to help alleviate Kinshasa's financial burden, which
was part of the Mobutu legacy. And largely because of
investment in the country's extractive sector, particularly
copper, the World Bank expects Congo's economy to grow over
the next several years at around seven percent annually, one
of the fastest economic growth rates in Africa. But over the
last decade of Kabila leadership, little has changed for the
average Congolese -- who is worse off than he or she was in
the previous decade. With a chronically weak state, Congo
has consistently performed poorly on human development
rankings and continues to place at the bottom of most
indexes.
These same diplomats view Tshisekedi as intransigent and
difficult, and often dismiss him as irrational. In private,
they point to his uncompromising positions and the
statements he made last month in South Africa (declaring
himself president) as signs of an unsuitable personality for
the nation's highest office. But many Congolese see him as
the father of the modern democratic movement. His partisans
revere him as a messiah -- in part, no doubt, because he is
everything that Kabila is not: He has no money, no militia,
and no state machinery behind him.
A former close associate of the late President Mobutu, Sese
Seko, Tshisekedi broke off with the strongman to fight for
democracy in 1982 when he co-founded the Union pour la
D??mocratie et le Progres Social (UDPS). He has built a
loyal and committed base over three decades. Over the years,
Tshisekedi was imprisoned, tortured, and deported to his
native village by both the Mobutu and Kabila regimes. But he
never relented.
Western diplomats' bias notwithstanding, the crisis also
stems from the inadequate performance of Congolese leaders,
who waited until March 2011 to set up the electoral
commission, known as the CENI, to carry out the vote. The
delay -- the law mandated that it be established in 2007 -
undermined the complex operations ahead. Just days before
the election, ballots and boxes had still not made their way
to all of the country's polling places.
Tshisekedi's Democratic Union for Social Progress sounded
the alarm in July about potential problems with the process
and filed an official complaint with the CENI about what it
called massive fraud and corruption of the voter registry.
UDPS alleged that the CENI had been stocking voter rolls
with potential Kabila supporters. They also alleged that
more than 2 million voters listed in areas favorable to
Kabila were either redundancies or phony names. For its
part, the CENI has repeatedly rejected UDPS's call for a
transparent, independent audit of voter lists.
As grievances and disputes over electoral law arose, the
CENI failed to provide an adequate forum for dialogue with
the opposition, holding meetings on an ad hoc basis, driven
by events or crises, not by a set schedule. As a result,
UDPS staged weekly street protests in Kinshasa to demand
that the integrity of the electoral process be reinstated
through an independent audit of the voter registry. Police
and security services cracked down on the protests and
intimidated members of the opposition.
The CENI consists of four members from the majority,
including Chairman Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, and three
representatives of the opposition. But, the independence of
these commissioners has been called into question as the
CENI has regularly shown bias against the opposition.
Mulunda is very close to President Kabila and the other
commissioners rarely took a public stance on the electoral
debate to assert their independence. The media landscape
also tilted heavily in the president's favor.
In its preliminary report on the election, the European
Union Election Observation Mission noted that state-run
radio and television channels did not grant opposition
parties equal access to programming time as required by law.
During the news slot, Kabila received 86 percent of the time
consecrated to presidential candidates, Kengo Wa Dondo
received 7 percent, Vital Kamerhe received 3 percent, and
Etienne Tshisekedi received 1 percent. Indeed, the state
media made no effort to hide its bias: Gigantic posters of a
smiling Kabila hung (and still hang) on the two fa??ades of
the national radio and television headquarters. In Kinshasa,
the road from the airport to downtown was (and is still)
saturated with billboards of Kabila. All of these violations
were ignored.
Throughout all of this, Western embassies appeared content
to look the other way. Diplomats from the United States,
France, Britain, and Belgium have praised the CENI for
enrolling 32 million voters, no doubt an impressive feat
considering the enormous logistical challenges. But voter
enrollment was the first step of an electoral process -- not
the end. These same international actors remained silent
about the allegations of fraud and irregularities, even as
Congolese and international human rights organizations
denounced violence and abuses. Their silence has helped
spawn a crisis that could have easily been averted.
Inexplicably, even with the strong statements by the Carter
Center and the Catholic Church, Western diplomats -- from
the U.S. State Department to the French and Belgian
ministries of foreign affairs to the United Nations --
remain ambivalent. They continue to hedge their positions,
hesitant to speak in the strongest of terms in favor of a
transparent, credible, and fair process. They further worsen
the crisis by consistently blaming street violence on the
opposition even as they ignore the massive human rights
abuses by state security agents. This blatant bias in favor
of perpetrators of gross human rights violations erodes the
fig leaf of credibility the international community has in
the eyes of the Congolese voters and opposition.
At stake is nothing less than the stability of a country of
70 million people. Unless the international community takes
its responsibility to protect the Congolese from conflict
seriously, Congo will slide into greater post-election
violence. A mixed panel of highly respected Congolese and
outside negotiators should be selected with the full support
of the United States, France, Belgium, and other relevant
powers to review and address the inconsistencies that have
caused this crisis. The alternative is to let the Supreme
Court certify Kabila's provisional victory and hand him
another five-year term. In which case, watch out: The
opposition will reject this victory, but an emboldened
Kabila, with questionable legitimacy, will assert his power
with greater popular repression, triggering a cycle of
violence with untold ramifications.
After decades of mismanagement and chronic conflict in
Congo, this election presented the people with a chance to
rebuild their country. With its vast natural and human
resources, Congo has the potential to be a regional power,
as it once was, providing stability and leadership in an
area known for turmoil. But if the Congolese are robbed of a
fair and honest say in their national politics, such
potential will remain but an illusion.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic
publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on
African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and
international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by
William Minter.
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