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| Author: | Stephanie Hanson |
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Updated: August 21, 2006
(Editor's Note: Official results of the July 30 election in the Democratic Republic of Congo gave incumbent Joseph Kabila 44.81 percent of the vote, under the 50 percent he needed to win the election. Kabila’s closest rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba, had some 20 percent of the vote. A run-off election is scheduled for October 29 amid concerns about violence erupting between rival candidates’ camps. The evening the results were announced, soldiers loyal to each candidate fought gun battles in the capital, Kinshasa.)
The following is the text of CFR.org's guide to the election, published on July 27, 2006.
On July 30, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, will hold its first multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections since winning its independence from Belgium in 1960. The Congo has been ravaged by decades of conflict, from the corrupt U.S.- and French-backed regime of army general Mobutu Sese Seko to the spillover of Rwanda’s genocide in the late 1990s, which precipitated a regional war costing some 4 million lives. A peace deal signed in 2002 created a transition government in the Congo and limited stability. But the government is considered widely corrupt, while its hold on security remains fragile at best. Experts agree that given logistical challenges, security concerns in Congo’s eastern provinces, and a boycott by a central opposition party, success will depend on whether or not the Congolese people accept the poll’s results.
The elections are more about establishing stability and sovereignty than any particular issue, experts say. “There’s no difference between the candidates on issues,” says Jason Stearns, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Congo. “[The election] is personality based.” Much of the population has never voted before and the country’s poor infrastructure means that very few candidates could launch a national campaign. Experts say the aim is for an accountable government to emerge that is able to take steps toward stabilizing the country and sustaining economic growth to lift Congo, one of Africa’s poorest countries, out of poverty.
In 2002 a transition government was created in which power is shared among President Joseph Kabila and four vice presidents—named by Kabila’s former government, the political opposition, and two rebel movements, the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), and the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC). The same groups appointed members of a bicameral parliament. In the upcoming elections, Congolese voters will elect members for a 500-seat parliament, out of which the cabinet and prime minister will be selected by the president-elect. Members of the second legislative body, the national senate, will be elected indirectly; after provincial elections, local legislators will elect governors as well as members to the national senate. According to an International Crisis Group (ICG) report, corruption cripples every sector of the government, from customs to the army to state-run companies to the courts.
The army poses a particular problem. As part of national reconciliation, rebel militias were supposed to disband and reorganize into a national army and police. Thus far, eleven of the eighteen newly integrated brigades due to be set up before elections have been created. But many experts, including Indiana University’s Osita Afoaku, say this process is far from complete. “The army is shaky and unprofessional,” Afoaku says. CFR Senior Fellow Princeton N. Lyman agrees that security sector reform has not proceeded very well, adding that the UN peacekeeping force, MONUC, has been unsuccessful in monitoring the trafficking of arms to rebel groups in the eastern Ituri area.
The UN peacekeeping force (MONUC), which includes 17,000 troops at a cost of roughly $1 billion a year, is the world’s largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation. Primarily stationed in the volatile eastern provinces of Ituri and North and South Kivu, MONUC has increased their raids on rebel groups in the past six months. Some experts say the elections, which were delayed several times because of security concerns, hinge on MONUC’s presence. Afoaku says without MONUC, “you cannot even talk about elections taking place at this point in time.” But others point to the drawbacks of MONUC operations—the displacement of entire villages and the chaos of launching joint-operations with poorly paid and ill-trained government soldiers. The UN peacekeeping mission is currently investigating reports that its forces contributed to a massacre of civilians during joint operations with the Congolese army. As a UN official told Reuters, “The bottom line is that our joint operations have failed.”
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) coordinated voter registration and election preparations in a joint initiative with MONUC. The program is the largest and most complex electoral-assistance mission the United Nations has ever undertaken.
Some presidential hopefuls could not enter the race, which required a $50,000 registration fee. The thirty-three candidates who did had only four weeks to campaign, a limitation that adds to Kabila’s advantage as an incumbent. The sheer number of presidential candidates means Kabila is unlikely to win the simple majority necessary to claim outright victory. A second-round election would be a run-off between the top two candidates.
Optimism hardly abounds. There will be some 1,300 international election observers, hundreds of Congolese observers, and several thousand election witnesses—monitors who belong to political parties and have the ability to launch an official complaint if they witness irregularities. But most observers will be concentrated in the urban centers, says Stewart, as it is very hard to get out to the more-isolated areas of the country. In addition, international observers are always deployed in pairs, and the United Nations, which has offered to provide emergency evacuation if there is trouble, will only do so out of the sixty-two compilation centers. These sites will be “stacked high” with observers, Stewart says, but with some 49,000 polling stations throughout the country, Stearns says that “hundreds if not thousands” of them will be without observers or witnesses on Election Day.
No date has been announced yet. If there is a presidential run-off, provincial elections will be held at the same time, likely in late October. Because the Congolese government is designed to be decentralized, with the provincial legislatures controlling local natural resources, some experts say those elections are more significant than the presidential and parliamentary polls. Stearns says “most Congolese are placing more hope on the provincial elections than the current ones. If you look at the federal budget, only 2 percent is programmed for outside Kinshasa, so they are very skeptical about what the government can do for them.” Lyman adds that the provincial elections are “very important because it’s in the regions that the resources are and much of the unrest has taken place.” The provincial legislatures are also responsible for a set of indirect elections; they will elect governors as well as members to the national senate, the second parliamentary body.
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