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Congo-Kinshasa: In a Governmental Vacuum, Yearnings for a Lost Empire
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Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)
21 March 2008
Posted to the web 23 March 2008
Michael Deibert
Matadi
On a broad hillside high above the meandering flow of the Mpozo River, a handful of policemen guard a ruin.
The flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) flutters weakly over scattered bricks and broken crockery, mute witness to a power struggle that has erupted in this western corner of the country, pitting a sect seeking to restore a lost ethnic kingdom against a government that seems determined to crush any challenge to its authority.
"Here are their arms, their fetishes, you can see them here," says Edmond Bunga, a local commander of the Police Nationale Congolaise (Congolese National Police, PNC), pointing towards what he claims are poisoned arrows used to attack police in the devastated compound of the Bundu dia Kongo (BDK) or "Kingdom of Kongo", as Congo is spelled in the local Kikongo language.
The BDK, led by Ne Muanda Nsemi, a member of Congo's parliament who hails from the region, have stated that their goal is nothing less than to reunify the Kingdom of Kongo. Made up of the Bakongo people -- found in the DRC and neighbouring states -- this empire existed in various incarnations for nearly 500 years until the early 20th century, encompassing swaths of what is now Angola, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and the DRC.
However, the government accuses the group of attempting to mount a rebellion in the Bas-Congo province, immediately west of the nation's capital, Kinshasa.
With state authority largely absent in many parts of the province, the BDK's feared enforcers -- known as "makesa" -- have been credibly alleged to act as something of an unofficial police force, handing out punishments that include floggings for infractions such as adultery.
Local police also charge that the group has regularly tortured its opponents; those suspected of witchcraft are even said to have been burnt alive.
But residents of the neighborhood of Belvedere in Matadi, the capital and largest city of Bas-Congo, look out on where the Bundu dia Kongo compound once stood, and paint a somewhat different picture of the now three-week old crackdown.
"It wasn't a conflict, it was an attack -- an attack by the police -- and it went on for about 40 minutes," says Adolphe Nkuti, referring to fighting that took place on Mar. 8, as he and his family stand in front their home, which has been pock-marked by large calibre bullet holes.
"The police stole our television, our table, even a handbag from the bedroom," says his neighbor, Pelé Mwanda, pointing to more bullet holes where the projectiles threaded their way through his family's fragile tin roof.
An internal report on this month's violence from the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, seen by IPS, noted that at least 68 people have been killed in the clashes -- and suggested that elements other than local PNC forces were used in the assaults against BDK compounds throughout Bas-Congo.
The DRC has the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, numbering nearly 17,000.
Traveling in Bas-Congo, IPS frequently met men dressed in PNC uniforms speaking Lingala, the lingua franca of Congo's army, who said that they had been sent from the capital to contain the unrest. At one country crossroads, two lorries each containing about 30 armed officers paused briefly; many of the troops were equipped with UZIs, some with their bayonets fixed as if preparing for close-quarters combat.
A local emergency co-ordinator with the humanitarian aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Matadi told IPS that many BDK members had "fled to the bush" in the wake of the conflict.
The violence in Bas-Congo has to do with more than nostalgia for a past kingdom, however. It also has distinctly political dimensions as the BDK seeks not only to promote ancestral beliefs, but also to assert political supremacy in the Congo as it currently exists.
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While the DRC's eastern regions voted heavily in favour of President Joseph Kabila in the country's 2006 elections, Congo's western regions supported his rival: a warlord-turned-businessman, Jean-Pierre Bemba.
The ballot that returned Kabila to power was a violent one which saw at least 20 people killed in clashes between Bemba loyalists and Congolese government forces, while fighting between the two sides in March of last year claimed some 300 lives, the United Nations said in a recent preliminary report.
A slew of BDK candidates stood for office in Bas-Congo, but lost amidst allegations of vote rigging, sparking clashes between BDK militants and the government that left 10 security personnel and over 100 civilians dead.
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