Analysis: Threat of violence looms large after Congo elections

Late yesterday, four of them called for Monday’s entire vote to be annulled, claiming it was so obviously rigged that no result would be credible enough to give anyone a valid mandate.

Despite claims democracy is sweeping Africa – most recently from Tony Blair, during a trip to South Korea this week – it now appears automatic that likely election losers allege fraud, incite their supporters on to the streets, and end up in a coalition government as pay-off for restoring calm. It happened in Kenya and Zimbabwe in 2008, and in Ivory Coast last year.

But in Congo, one of the world’s most fragile states, the threat of post-election violence spiralling into something altogether more sustained is worryingly higher.

It would appear yesterday’s complainants have good cause to protest, after a chaotic day of voting which left up to eight people dead, 15 polling stations burnt down and reports of widespread fraud including pre-stuffed ballot boxes and fiddled voter lists.

Even before the polls, a significant minority of the supporters of the ten candidates hoping to remove incumbent, Joseph Kabila, were itching for a fight. They felt – after their leaders suggested as much – that the sitting president has already stolen the vote. He oversaw a constitutional change that made it far easier for him to win, has been accused of denying his rivals media airtime and has most of the army on his side.

Congo is the continent’s largest country south of the Sahara and borders nine other nations vulnerable to the knock-on effects of their giant neighbour stumbling back towards conflict.

During the last war, which ended in 2003, the armies of six African nations fought on Congo’s soil. More than five million people died, mostly from hunger and disease, making it the deadliest conflict since the Second World War.

Already, sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world, virtually entrenched in the psyche of armed groups as a legitimate weapon of war.

And a Congo at war with itself could block supplies of minerals crucial in Western electronics, from mobile phones to games consoles.

But it is easy – and rather lazy – to connect isolated outbreaks of election violence to gloomily predict an all-encompassing inferno. Congo is so vast that trying to prophesy the future there is a fool’s game.

If fighting breaks out in Kinshasa, the capital, close to the Atlantic Ocean, it is not a given that it will spread all the way east to Bukavu – which is closer to the Indian Ocean than to Kinshasa – or south to Lubumbashi, the mining town on the border with Zambia.

Politically savvy and connected mobs in the cities are far outnumbered by the vast majority of the country’s 60 million people, who live deep in the hinterland, cut off from communications and struggling to survive. They may have more pressing needs than rioting against an election result that would have had little impact on their lives anyway.

But there is strong support in each corner of the nation for each presidential candidate in this, only Congo’s third election since independence from Belgium half a century ago.

Disunited in the election campaign – a fact that benefited Mr Kabila – opposition rivals may join together in contesting the election results, due in less than a week.

Diplomats and human rights campaigners have called for calm, and for everyone to avoid inflammatory statements.

But these are the words from Vital Kamerhe, widely seen as the second-strongest opposition candidate, in an open letter published yesterday: “There can be no doubt as to the scale of the fraud, deliberately planned by those in power with the connivance of the national election commission.”

Etienne Tshisekedi, Mr Kabila’s leading challenger, has made similar statements.

It is difficult to imagine these men’s supporters staying at home and awaiting results they have already been told have been bodged.

None of Mr Kabila’s rivals have any faith in the country’s justice system to sort out concerns over the results legally. It is difficult to see any immediate future for this mighty African nation other than deadly outbreaks of violence.

• Mike Pflanz writes for The Scotsman from Nairobi