CONGO: Congolese police in Kinshasa fired live bullets in the air yesterday to break up a protest calling for a No vote in tomorrow's referendum on a new postwar constitution for the vast central African state.
Dozens of riot police also used batons and tear gas to disperse the demonstration before leading away Theodore Ngoy, the leader of a No campaign.
From its chaotic capital, Kinshasa, to the war-torn "Wild East", the referendum is widely seen as a stepping-stone towards lasting peace. It is designed to approve a new constitution to govern a series of elections to install a new government by the end of June.
The promise of peace should be enough to carry Congo's first free vote in 40 years, and to bring out a fair proportion of the country's 24 million registered voters to 40,000 polling stations.
The No campaign is driven by discontent over widespread corruption, the lack of basic services and the fact that most of those in power fought their way into the government. But it is unlikely to prevail, according to Jason Stearns, the senior Congo analyst of the International Crisis Group (ICG). "All the main parties are supporting a Yes vote, and people in the east of the country, who actually lived through the war, are likely to vote Yes because they feel that a No vote will bring them more trouble, whereas they want elections."
An estimated four million people have died since the Democratic Republic of Congo erupted into violence in August 1998, after relations soured between Laurent Kabila's government, which fought its way to power in 1996, and its backers in that campaign, the comparatively small states of Rwanda and Uganda. Congo's civil war quickly embroiled seven African armies as Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola and Chad backed the government side.
Congo should have a new constitution by next week, and an electoral timetable soon after, but the success of the transition hangs very much in the balance in this nation of 200 tribes, more of a continent than a country. Two-thirds the size of western Europe, Congo is divided between a bewildering array of armed groups with shifting loyalties, and lucrative business/crime connections.
According to the ICG's latest briefing on Congo: "Extensive embezzlement has resulted in inadequate and irregular payment of civil servants and soldiers, making the state itself perhaps the largest security threat to the Congolese people." It is often joked that Article 15 of the Congolese constitution reads "débrouillez-vous" meaning "sort it out yourselves".
In the east, where Congo's woes and wealth are concentrated, commanders have been reluctant to relinquish control over trade in natural resources. It is estimated that $46 million worth of tin ore left Congo untaxed via Rwanda in 2004, while $50 million in Congolese gold exited the country via Uganda.
Goma, which made a bigger media splash than the war after it was partially destroyed by a lava flow in 2002, is the power base of Congo's Rwandan-backed rebels, the Congolese Rally for Democracy, drawn largely from the country's Rwandan-speaking Tutsis and Hutus.
The city's properties are demarcated by stone walls made from chunks of black lava. Overhead, ancient Antonov cargo planes, overloaded with tin ore, struggle noisily into and out of the sky, crashing frequently.
In the jungles of South Kivu, after flying over what seems like 300km of uninterrupted forest, I met a wily survivor called Riziki, a jack-of-all-trades including farming, teaching and the artisanal mining of that same ore. He explained the system of "taxes" and trade that allows locals from this former mining village to eke out a living from the area's abandoned mines. Once, almost everyone here worked in mining.
The company's chief engineer, meanwhile, earns a living by grinding manioc flour using a generator rescued from the factory, which lay hidden in the forest, along with much of the population, during times of trouble.
"Our greatest wish is for the responsible government to take responsibility," I was told by the senior doctor at the local hospital which, like most of the Democratic Republic of Congo's health structure, is entirely dependent on foreign aid, in this case the Irish NGO Goal.
Not far away there are as many as 8,000 Rwandan guerrillas hiding in the jungle, the remnants of the Hutu army that fled after the 1994 genocide and are accused of perpetrating atrocities in Congo since then. They provided the pretext for Rwanda's Congo interventions, but they are still here, two invasions later.
Fighting between Congo's ragtag national army, backed by UN troops (Monuc), and their wartime allies, the Mayi Mayi resistance, has displaced more than 270,000 villagers in the surrounding countryside.
The conflict is still claiming 31,000 lives a month. In the words of the Commission for Africa: "There is a tsunami every month in Africa. But its deadly tide of disease and hunger steals silently and secretly across the continent. It is not dramatic, and it rarely makes the television news."