17 November 2006
editorial
The Union for the Nation coalition of Jean Pierre Bemba has rejected preliminary results in the October 29 presidential election run-off in the DR. Congo.
At least one prominent individual, the Roman Catholic Cardinal in that country, Frederic Etsou, also shares the suspicions of Bemba - that their country's Independent Electoral Commission is manipulating the release of poll results in a manner tilted to condition the public into accepting incumbent Joseph Kabila's 'victory'.
The sum of these charges, which have been met by rejection from the people who managed the elections and Kabila himself, is that those tensions which flared during the campaign period are threatening to boil over.
This is a situation which the Congo least deserves to find itself in. It had been hoped that the election would close the chapter on the tentative attempts to reconcile this vast central African country in a peaceful manner. That hoped should not be in vain.
The 17,500-strong United Nations peacekeeping force along with that small contingent of European Union peacekeepers are doing their best to keep the forces of Kabila and Bemba apart, even as the electoral commission holds provisional results which show the former leading with almost 60% of counted ballots.
For the two politicians now is the time for them to show a level of statesmanship and leadership. Bemba and Kabila should demonstrate to the region and wider world that they will not betray the perseverance of those who have invested so much time and resources in this peace process ending the 1998 - 2003 war.
For 40 years the Congolese have suffered varying degrees of humiliation by either dictatorial or simply incompetent administrations. It would almost seem that the country has consequently lurched from humanitarian crisis to humanitarian crisis -- sometimes caused by war and then by nature's vagaries like volcanic eruptions.
The process in Kinshasa had hoped to end the impunity and bring some sunshine into lives of the traumatised civilian population. That country's politicians must not let the process down if only to stop the human suffering.
Political differences should be controlled and the primary actors in the destiny of Congo should be the Congolese people themselves since international and marginal regional support may only be relied upon in that context.
The Congolese have to realise that it is they who will bring their long unruly nation under some control. This is mainly because external influences, solicited or unsolicited, have aggravated the situation in the past.
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