Des manifestants sur l’échangeur routier de Limete, à Kinshasa, la capitale de la République Démocratique du Congo (RDC) |
Civilian massacres,
decapitated police officers, bloody crackdowns, and resurgent armed
groups, were fed in part by a national political crisis. The resulting
instability has sparked fears of triggering the kind of regional war
that scarred central Africa at the turn of the century, and has sent
ordinary Congolese scrambling for safer pockets of the country.
"DRC's largely
forgotten crisis in central Africa superseded all other crises in terms
of the number of people forced to flee their homes," Ulrika Blom, the
Norwegian Refugee Council's country director in Congo, said in a
statement. "Even Syria or Yemen's brutal wars did not match the number
of new people on the move in DRC last year."
More than 922,000
Congolese were internally displaced due to conflict in 2016 - the
highest recorded globally, according to a report published by the
Internal Displacement Monitoring Center on Monday.
Analysts attribute part of these ills to an enduring election crisis.
President Joseph
Kabila stayed in power after his constitutionally mandated two-term
limit expired last December, citing heavy costs and incomplete voter
lists for the delay in holding elections that were due last November.
"The political situation is chaotic," said Augustin Kabuya, a spokesman for the main opposition UDPS party.
Indeed, recent
months have seen violent street demonstrations, media shutdowns, and the
arrests of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists.
The government and
the opposition coalition, known as the Rassemblement, engaged in two
rounds of talks last year to resolve the crisis. The first, mediated by
the African Union, a key regional player, failed after criticism that it
excluded much of the opposition.
A second deal,
brokered by the Catholic Church on New Year's Eve, called for elections
before the end of 2017 and a transitional government. But that agreement
too has been stuck after many quarrels - the most fractious being the
nomination of the prime minister.
Kabila picked Bruno
Tshibala, a dissident who had split from the Rassemblement, for the
post in April, angering the opposition, who said the accord had been
violated.
Natural resource curse
If you count the
years since the overthrow of kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko by Kabila's
father Laurent in May 1997, the family has been in power for two
decades. Joseph Kabila began to rule the country in 2001, after his
father's assassination.
Despite this long
period of time in the public eye, not many Congolese are familiar with
the media-shy Kabila, said Fidel Bafilemba, a former Mai Mai rebel
turned NGO consultant.
"We just woke up one day and he's the president," he said.
A Bloomberg News
investigation last year found that the Kabilas have "built a network of
businesses that reaches into every corner of Congo's economy and has
brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the family".
"The reality is
that [the] natural resource potential we have tends to be a curse," said
Bafilemba, who also coordinates GATT-RN, a coalition of 14 civil
society groups that acts as a watchdog for oil, gas, timber, gold, and
other minerals. "All it has done is invite predators, not just
foreigners but also the government and on top of it Joseph Kabila."
A government
spokesman was unreachable by phone and text message, but the Kabilas
have routinely denied any suggestion of wrongdoing.
Opposition woes
In February,
Etienne Tshisekedi, the charismatic leader of the opposition UDPS, died
in Brussels. The Rassemblement has since been riven by infighting and
suspicions that some members are hand-in-glove with Kabila.
Even Tshisekedi's
body has become a source of political tension. The government has not
agreed on a location to bury him in Congo and the body has remained in
Brussels, raising speculation that the delay is to staunch protesters
from rallying around the corpse.
"We want to bury
him, but Kabila doesn't want it," said Kabuya, the UDPS spokesman, later
adding: "They are illegally shutting down the offices of opposition
political parties; they are burning down offices; opponents are being
arrested because of their opinions."
"UDPS, which is the
core of this country, the engine that turns the wheels of democracy and
freedom in this country, it's being hunted, tracked down by the
political family of Joseph Kabila," he added.
More troubling perhaps for Kabila's opponents, few takers have emerged to fill the void left by the death of Tshisekedi.
Moise Katumbi, an
opposition leader, remains the most popular choice by far, according to
an opinion poll conducted this year. But Katumbi remains in exile. Less
than a quarter of the survey's respondents had a favorable view of
Kabila.
Tinderbox
While political uncertainty grows, reports of new violence have proliferated in recent months.
In the central
Kasai region, hundreds have been killed - including two UN investigators
in March - since armed clashes broke out last August between the
Congolese army and a local militia known as Kamuina Nsapu.
UN investigators found about 40 mass graves in the area, according to its emergency aid coordination body, OCHA.
"The Kamuina Nsapu
militia, which is loyal to a local customary chief killed by the army on
12 August last year, has been accused of recruiting hundreds of
children into its ranks, and targeting state agents and symbols,
including government premises, schools, hospitals, police stations, as
well as churches," a statement from the UN agency noted.
But the notion that
the Kamuina Nsapu is on the rise and that Congo is facing some kind of
new emergency is challenged by some who see it as a politically
expedient narrative for Kabila and the ruling party.
"This story is a
fiction of the majority in power to avoid as far as possible the holding
of elections," said Kabuya of UPDS. "The image that is presented of
these people does not correspond with reality."
"Today, you learn
that they are in one corner, tomorrow they are in an another place: No!
It's a fabrication," said Kabuya, adding that if officials were sincere
about countering the group, they would entrust the case to international
investigators.
In previous years,
the vacuum of the state has allowed the rise of armed groups in lawless
corners of the country where no public infrastructure or civil society
exist.
Critics fear a
failure to transfer power peacefully could be an opportunity for other
countries to interfere as they have in the past. Congo's rich resources
and location - surrounded by nine countries in the heart of Africa -
makes it a tinderbox.
"The time that I
started my activism, the president was legal," Rebecca Kabuo, a
23-year-old activist from the youth movement Lucha, which raises
awareness about citizen rights and grapples with Congo's long legacy of
conflict, told IRIN. "But now he's ruling illegally. He's not supposed
to be a president at this time."
Ghislain Muhiwa,
27, another Lucha activist, said free speech doesn't exist in Congo.
"They want to block all voices. They don't want people to be conscious,
to know their rights. It will bring people to revolt."
"Never-ending cycle"
Congo, which ranks
176 of 188 countries on the world's human development index, is home to
hundreds of international aid agencies, some of which have been around
for decades.
Despite this, "the
crisis is still going on... poverty, insecurity is still raging," said
Bafilemba. "It's kind of a never-ending cycle."
The World Bank
ranks Congo 184th out of 190 countries in terms of the ease of doing
business there. A slump in commodity prices and staggering 25 percent
inflation has further pummelled the economy.
"There hasn't been a
collective strategy," Baraka Kasali, country manager of the Eastern
Congo Initiative, an advocacy and grant-making NGO, said about the
international community's investment in the country.
"I think that this piecemeal effort has actually produced an environment where reform isn't at the top of the agenda."
Congo boasts the UN's largest peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, but stability remains a problem.
And critics paint a
cynical portrait of MONUSCO, saying it's in the mission's interest to
do little to combat armed groups in order to justify staying in the
country for years.
"No more FDLR [rebels], no more job for MONUSCO," said Bafilemba. "No more chaos, no more job for MONUSCO."
Séverine Autesserre, a researcher and author of the book, "The Trouble with the Congo", disagrees.
"Yes, there are
lots of problems with NGOs and with peacekeepers but they also provide
very important services to the population," she said. "It makes armed
groups think twice about whether or not they're going to harass the
population, whether or not they are going to commit atrocities."
Although African countries could perhaps address the crisis, Congolese have so far watched them with suspicion.
The Congo Research
Group poll found that neighbours such as Rwanda and Uganda, with whom
Congo has had a fractious past, are not viewed favourably. Angola, a
migration destination for Congolese, is viewed in a better light, but
European governments and the United States are seen most favourably.
Previously, the
United States and the EU have deployed targeted sanctions in Congo.
President Barack Obama's US administration, in particular, pressured the
government about constitutional term limits and human rights.
That is now likely
to change. President Donald Trump has barely cast an eye on Sub-Saharan
Africa. Indeed, Kabila saw Trump's victory as good news. Hours after
Trump won the vote, Kabila praised him for his "brilliant election".
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