PPRD office ransacked by UDPS members
"Violence by UDPS goons"
Kinshasa, Monday, September 5, 2011
Photo: John Bompengo/Radio Okapi
Etienne Tshisekedi’s “Plan-B” is now clear, according to pro-Kabila media: to put the international community in front of the fait accompli of the supposedly dictatorial regime of Kabila, with an unsustainable (in human toll, that is) campaign of “Tunisia-zation” of Kinshasa.
An “Intifada” or a tropical remake of the “Arab Spring.” These aren't just words I'm tossing around: they came from the mouths of Tshisekedi, UDPS leaders and oppositionist politicians at the Easter Sunday rally Tshisekedi held at Stade Tata Raphael. I was in Kinshasa, on Oshwe Avenue, in Kalamu Commune, less than one hundred meters from the entrance of the stadium when I sent a short post that summed up the mood (or the plan) of Tshisekedi that Easter Sunday: "Tshisekedi warned that if a new president isn't sworn in by December 6, the constitutional deadline, his party would take to the streets to kick the Rais out..." By the way, according to the revised timeline published by CENI, the president-elect will only be sworn in on December 20. What would Tshisekedi then do? Take to the and kick government out?
This campaign of attrition, according to this reading of Tshisekedi’s plan, would force the hand of the international community, by compelling it, by proxy of its enforcement instrument on the ground—MONUSCO—to take charge of the situation and follow this course of action:
1) to step in between the “belligerents” in order to separate them;
2) Point (1) in fact amounts to suspending the sovereignty of the DRC (already merely nominal with the very presence of blue helmets; a country the politically-correct-inclined people call "post-conflict" and those with no qualms describe as "failed state" and others "banana republic": in such a place, anything goes! );
3) to delay elections indefinitely; and
4) to draw all the political stakeholders for rounds of interminable negotiations that would eventually lead to power-sharing and caretaker TRANSITIONAL schemes between political parties… And damn the people and their votes!
Then, Tshisekedi, smart as a whip, though certain to lose the upcoming November presidential election any other way one could look at it objectively, would emerge as the inescapable leader of this band of thieving heathens just by the sheer "license" of his seniority (as it turns out, old age, like sexism, is still an unshakable privilege this side of the jungle of the Congo Basin)… The old geezer would then step in center stage, by the fiat of the deus ex machina of the international community, without bothering to go through the cumbersome process of the universal suffrage.
In other words, Etienne Tshisekedi has just embarked on a course that logically leads to a coup d’état staged by one political party—namely the UDPS, and the other parties in its cartel. And he’s staging this coup d’état in broad daylight. With the tacit approval of all the suckers of this world…
Brilliant, isn’t it?
In my view, this isn’t a conspiracy theory at all. This is the plan hatched by Thisekedi and his associates who’ve been busy these past few months attempting to destabilize and destroy CENI by what I’ve called a campaign of (pointless) urban guerilla skirmishes.
In these urban donnybrooks that have now turned bloody, the government’s or the incumbent’s side can’t win. Though Tshisekedi is clearly the nasty villain in this story, he is somewhat cast as the victim and Kabila as the bogeyman.
Just consider the slant taken by the international and some national media as well as rights groups in reporting or denouncing the events of the last 48 hours. Two UDPS activists killed by the police; a dozen others seriously injured; an office of the UDPS torched; an opposition television station set ablaze; and riot cops firing tear gas canisters in residential neighborhoods! Journaliste en Danger (JED) was the first rights organization to cry murder: it demanded that the government bring to justice the perpetrators of these unspeakable acts of arson and vandalism... committed against RLTV... Period! Forget the rest. Forget the PPRD office. Forget the small businesses that were looted by Tshisekedi's mob.
Reading the report of the event on the portal of Radio Okapi, for instance, there’s no way one would know that the story is picked up in media res—or into the middle of things. The whole beginning of the story is cut out, edited, redacted. One has the impression that one camp—the presidential majority and, incidentally, the other leaders of the opposition who aren’t party to Tshisekedi’s madness—just woke up one morning and decided to kill willy-nilly UDPS members! Fortunately, for Radio Okapi, its ubiquitous photojournalist, John Bompengo, toured all the scenes of the clashes and thanks to him we can thus piece together the story from its beginning—by checking out the basic element: the old fashioned calendar date (day, month, and year) when the photographer snapped those shots…
A simple question one should put to the Lider Maximo: what’s the point of dragging your whole village to the headquarters of CENI where you only had to individually expedite a few formalities? On their way back from CENI offices, UDPS goons who accompanied the Lider Maximo—does the old geezer even know this used to be the moniker of a dictator called Fidel Castro?—destroyed property and businesses, burned cars, and ransacked PPRD offices. Well, PPRD has its own hooligans too, who were bound to retaliate, or take matters into their own hands--a counter-violence to match the initial violence.
Burned UDPS office in the same neighborhood as in the photo on top
"Counter-violence by PPRD hooligans"
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Photo: John Bompendo/Radio Okapi
I reread today with a creepy sense of uncanniness—pardon the tautology!—a post I wrote in Kinshasa on February 15 and sent by email via BlackBerry to this blog. I had entitled it “Etienne Tshisekedi as a ‘despotic buffoon.’”
Though some elements contained in the post are dated and a few political actors have changed positions and alliances on the political stage, the gist of my argument remains pertinent today—and, especially, the Lider Maximo is still the same zany old geezer. So allow me to quote at some length that post:
“Opposition leaders Jean-Claude [Vuemba] and Frank Dionge have just been trying to have the whole of the opposition back Étienne Tshisekedi's presidential bid. But some other leaders were instead pushing for US-style primaries at which one leader would be elected as the opposition standard bearer.
Meanwhile MP François Muamba, the President of the MLC bloc in Parliament, was sending mixed signals all along. For Muamba, the MLC wouldn't be committing itself before the party's congress in April, when MLC party members also expect Jean-Pierre Bemba to be freed by the International Criminal Court (ICC)! Where they got this notion of a "not-guilty" verdict for Bemba is anybody's guess...
Muamba was also saying that the MLC is the strongest opposition force in Parliament. Besides, its candidate--Bemba--got 42% of the votes in the second round of the 2006 presidential election, whereas the strength of Étienne Tshisekedi's UDPS can't be clearly ascertained as this party chose at that time not to participate in the presidential and legislative elections. What's more, Muamba insists that in this day and age political leaders aren't chosen for their charisma but on the strength of their political program.
Then, this week, in an interview with Radio France Internationale (RFI), Tshisekedi stated: "I didn't fight for 30 years only to give my place to someone else." He (…) added that whatever the opposition decides he'll stand as a presidential candidate in November.
This shattering statement means that the "sacred union" contemplated by the opposition in November is yet another pipe dream and, if anything, it confirms the charge of autocratic tendencies leveled at Tshisekedi aka Lider Maximo from within his own already splintered party. Even more damning, opposition leaders now consider Tshisekedi as a "despotic buffoon"--an expression René Lemarchand used to describe Mzee Laurent-Désiré Kabila.”
In Africa, “despotic buffoons” are a dangerous breed. Remember Idi Amin?…
Riot cops in Limete Quarter
Kinshasa, Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Photo: John Bompengo/Radio Okapi
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