Congolese election and big capital

The winner in the second round of voting for president in the Congo on Oct. 29 is scheduled to be announced Nov. 19. The voting dispute has broken out into violence between militias loyal to the current president Joseph Kabila and those loyal to Jean-Pierre Bemba, his opponent.

The most recent clash Nov. 11 in Kinshasa, according to a French radio reporter, saw heavy mortar and machine gun around Bemba’s residence. Some of the 18,000 United Nations troops in the Congo and the 2,200 European Union troops (EUFOR) in Kinshasa stepped in to “end” the fighting.

After the first round of voting in August, the forces siding with Kabila and Bemba fought for a few days in Kinshasa until the U.N. “peace keepers” imposed a truce.

The delay in counting reflects the disintegration of the Congo’s infrastructure due to centuries of colonial and neo-colonial rule. It has less than 300 miles of paved roads for a country the size of Western Europe and ballots often took days to get to a central counting station.

According to unofficial, partial results, Kabila has 60 percent of the votes tallied to Bemba’s 40 percent. The U.N. and the international financial community are hoping that this election will put an end to the civil wars in the Congo, which caused between 2 and 4 million deaths from 1997 to 2002. But it’s not really saving people’s lives that concerns them.

According to a widely printed AP story, “The biggest challenge facing Congo’s first elected government in nearly 50 years is bringing order to a chaotic mining sector whose riches provoked a regional war that killed millions.”

The financiers of big capital say that the Congo has $300 billion worth of mineral resources that could be tapped into over the next 25 years. They hope that the outcome of the election will bring about political stability to pave the way for them to more easily super-exploit this wealth that rightfully belongs to the Congolese people.

Bemba and Kabila campaigned around the same program—to improve the living standards of the Congolese people, to end their devastating lack of economic development, education, health care and so on.

What distinguishes them is their backgrounds. Bemba and his family became multimillionaires under the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, who was kept in power by U.S. and French imperialism from 1965 until his death in 1997. Kabila’s family lived in eastern Congo and in exile because his late father, Laurent Kabila, was one of the leaders in the struggle against Mobutu.

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