28日のコンゴ大統領選挙：無茶苦茶な状態に注目を

28日にコンゴの大統領選挙があるのですが、前回と同様に無茶苦茶な状態で、腹正しい感情をすっかり超えています。選挙の状況がどれだけ「腐っている」のか、下記のようにまとめてみました。
 
１．アフリカで2番目に面積が大きいコンゴは、186,000の投票箱が必要なのですが、それらは全て中国でつくり（！）、先週の時点では12,000個しかコンゴに届いていないそうです。これらをコンゴに輸送するために、飛行機16機が必要なのですが、それだけの予算があれば、国民の生活改善に使ってほしい！！と思うのは、私だけでないはずです。なぜわざわざ中国から投票箱を「輸入」するのか？国内で製造できないからではなく、野党やジャーナリストから遠く離れたところでつくることにより、カビラ政権が不正操作できる確率が高いからです。ちなみに投票用紙は2006年の選挙同様に南アで印刷しています。日本のODAが投票箱と用紙の輸送費に使われているのか（そもそも選挙にどれくらい貢献しているのかわからない）わかりませんが、こんなに無駄な援助はありませんよね！
 
２．大統領候補は11人、そして何と国会議員の候補が18,855人も！無職のコンゴ人が多く、政治家になれば、仕事をしなくても給料がもらえるために、誰もが立候補しているのだそうです。選挙キャンペーンでは、金がない候補は友人や親せきの車を借りるなどやりくりしているとか。ちなみに、私が以前勤務していたコンゴ東部の北キブ州の州大臣の給料は月約4,500ドルで、ジャーナリストの給料（30－80ドル）よりはるかにいいんですね。政治家しか生きる道がないのかと思うと、ため息が。。
 
３．先週末から、国内・海外のメデイアによる有力な野党党首のチセケディ氏【78歳】へのバッシングが悪化しています。彼は、モブツ政権とも長年闘い、国民にも人気者です。メディアはカビラ大統領を保護しているのが明らかで、中立的な報道はしているとは思えません。例えば、チセケディ氏が「自分は大統領である」と宣言したり、「刑務所にいる政治犯を解放するために、48時間内に刑務所を破壊するように」と国民への呼びかけたのですが（実際に破壊はしていないが）、ICC（国際刑事裁判所）でさえ選挙関連の犯罪を起訴すると脅しています。そもそも政治犯が独裁的に逮捕されていること自体おかしいことですが、その説明は現政権からありません。チセケデイ氏の行為が「口頭の暴力」としてバッシングがされているのですが、なぜ同様のことをカビラ政権に対してしないのでしょうか。人権活動家やジャーナリストを数名殺害したという「悪意の行為」の責任者であるはずなのに！ それだけでなく、選挙関連の犯罪であれば、カビラ大統領もかなり関与しています！野党党首らが国内で選挙キャンペーンをするため、飛行機で地方を回らないといけないのですが、飛行機の着陸の許可書を現政権がボイコットしています。
 
４．国内外のメディアや市民団体が「コンゴに公平で平和な選挙を」と呼びかけていますが、その前に候補者の背景を確認する必要があります。下記のNYTimesにも、「疑わしい候補者（元武装勢力のリーダー）がいる」と書いていますが、戦犯罪人であるカビラ現大統領はもっと疑わしいのです！（参照は『世界最悪の紛争「コンゴ」』をご参照ください。
 
ということで、民主主義へのロード（であるはず）の「選挙」という単語に振り回されることなく、しっかり情報収集して現状分析をしましょう。私も時間を見つけては情報を共有します。
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/world/africa/unruly-election-campaign-mirrors-congos-instability.html

November 10, 2011
The New York Times
 
NAIROBI, Kenya — First, Cmdr. Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka ordered his militia to join an attack on a group of villages in eastern Congo, where the fighters gang-raped at least 387 women, men, girls and boys, according to a United Nations report of the atrocities.
 
 
One of the candidates in Walikale is accused in a mass rape.
 
Now he wants the villagers’ votes.
 
Commander Sheka, who is wanted by the Congolese government for his involvement in the 2010 mass rape, in the Walikale area of eastern Congo, is one of the most vivid symbols of Congo’s lingering insecurity and impunity as the country prepares for its second general elections since the end of its civil war.
 
Even with an arrest warrant hanging over his head, Commander Sheka, the leader of the Congolese rebel group Mai-Mai Sheka, is running to represent Walikale in Parliament.
 
More than a week into the campaign season, violence and controversy are bubbling up. Many analysts expect President Joseph Kabila to win another five-year term in a relatively peaceful vote on Nov. 28, though he has lost a lot of support in the country’s troubled east. Beyond that, logistical delays and a suppression of human rights are endangering the process, the United Nations says.
 
“The kind of intimidation, threats, incitement, arbitrary arrests and violence that we have documented is unacceptable,” the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said Wednesday in conjunction with a report on the election.
 
Much of Congo’s ballot materials, papers printed in South Africa and China, have yet to arrive.
 
One of Mr. Kabila’s leading challengers, Etienne Tshisekedi, has lingered in South Africa as well. On Monday, he referred to himself as “president” in an interview with a Congolese television station and called on the government to release his jailed supporters.
 
“Or else I will call on fighters across the country to break down prison doors and release their comrades,” Mr. Tshisekedi was quoted as saying.
 
The African Union has grown worried over Congo’s election, with the group’s chairman, Jean Ping, visiting the capital, Kinshasa, this week and calling for peace leading up to vote. Political violence has already erupted in different corners of the country.
 
In Kinshasa last week, armed men opened fire on campaign representatives for Mr. Tshisekedi. In the southern city of Lubumbashi on Saturday and Monday, his supporters clashed with another opposition party, leaving more than a dozen people injured. And in the eastern city of Goma last weekend, gunfire broke out after a popular musician singing campaign songs for the opposition was abducted and his fellow ethnic Hunde protested.
 
“The vote will be subject to much greater local variation, depending on the popularity of local leaders, priests and customary chiefs, who are allied to different political parties,” making the outcome “difficult to call,” said Jason Stearns, an author and Congo analyst.
 
“The election will be very close,” he added, with “a high probability of urban unrest.”
 
Congo’s election includes a number of dubious candidates, some suspected of being criminals. One presidential candidate, Antipas Mbusa Nyamwisi, is a former rebel leader whose militia carried out a massacre at a hospital and the surrounding area in 2002 during Congo’s civil war. The fighters slaughtered any patient who looked to be from the Hema and Bira groups, killing more than 1,000, according to Human Rights Watch. After the war, Mr. Nyamwisi became Congo’s minister of regional cooperation.
 
Another candidate is François-Joseph Nzanga Mobutu, the son of the former dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who was overthrown in 1997.
 
As for Commander Sheka, he is one of about 19,000 candidates for Congo’s National Assembly, the lower and main chamber of Congo’s Parliament. Commander Sheka, listed as a “trader” on Congo’s election Web site, is one of 65 running in Walikale.
 
“Congolese authorities should be arresting Sheka for mass rape whether he is running for office or not,” Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a news release. “The failure to arrest someone who is out publicly campaigning for votes sends a message that even the most egregious crimes will go unpunished.”
 
Despite numerous peace treaties and reconciliation with neighboring Rwanda, Congo faces widespread instability and a vacuum where a governmental presence is lacking. There may be no symptom of the country’s struggles quite like Congo’s rape epidemic, a chilling example of which took place in Walikale.
 
Between July 30 and Aug. 2, 2010, Commander Sheka’s troops, along with two other rebel groups, moved through 13 villages in Walikale, raping hundreds of villagers, including children and elderly women, and abducting 116 people.
 
Congolese authorities supported by the United Nations tried to arrest Commander Sheka in July while he was spending the night at the home of a friend in the Congolese Army in Goma, Human Rights Watch said, but he escaped, apparently after he was tipped off. In September, he registered as an independent candidate for the National Assembly.
 
“We were a bit surprised when we heard about Sheka’s registration as a candidate for the National Assembly,” said Hiroute Guebre Sellassie, the top United Nations official in North Kivu Province, where Walikale is located. According to Congolese law, Commander Sheka would be immune from prosecution if elected, Ms. Sellassie said, but that “does not mean that he is not going to face justice at one point,” arguing that immunity could be lifted.
 
Congo’s elections, particularly the presidential race, may be a barometer of how well drastic geopolitical changes in Africa’s Great Lakes region have been received in Congo, especially concerning Congo’s relationship with its neighbor Rwanda.
 
Mr. Kabila won the 2006 presidential election almost entirely on votes from eastern Congo, where he is from and where he has remained popular for his nationalistic and confrontational stance against Rwanda during years of tension between the nations.
 
But in 2009, Mr. Kabila invited Rwandan troops into Congolese territory to help root out Rwandan rebels in the area in exchange for renewed diplomatic relations, leading many in eastern Congo to believe that Mr. Kabila had betrayed them.
 
Still, a constitutional amendment passed this year says that a candidate does not have to win more than 50 percent of the vote to be elected.
 
“The big difference between the last elections and this year’s is one of motivation,” said Mr. Stearns, the Congo analyst. “Kabila has lost a lot of his support in the east, his voting base during last elections,” but “he has been able to stitch together a strong network of influential leaders and has been able to divide the opposition vote.”