Presidential candidate François Nicéphore Kakese Malela
Chairman, Union pour le Réveil et le Développement du Congo (URDC)
At a press briefing held on Sunday, September 25, Presidential candidate François Nicéphore Kakese Malela took a swipe at Kabila for saying in his address at the UN General Assembly on September 22 that “peace and security reign in the entirety of my country.”
Kakese pointed out that on the same day that the president was making his comments in New York, a deadly bank robbery was occurring in Kalemie, in Katanga (according to a Xinhua news agency wire, the robbers at TMB bank killed 2 people, including a cop, critically wounded several bystanders, and made off with an undisclosed amount of cash); and atrocities continued to be perpetrated in the east of a country that has turned into the “kingdom of violence.” He went on to say that the Raïs should cease boasting of “theoretical plans,” adding that “a government that has its population reeling from domestic and external insecurity, from food insecurity, [a government that plunges its people] into darkness [for lack of electricity supply] and unemployement cannot continue to defend [its record] with empty speeches.”
Kakese also took issue with the two-day forum on peaceful elections in the DRC sponsored by the AU and organized by the Ethiopian Institute of Peace and Security Studies (IPSS) scheduled to be held in Addis Ababa from September 26 to 27. Congolese representatives of political parties and civil society are attending the meeting. Radio Okapi reports that, according to Kinshasa AU President’s Special Representative Emmanuel Mendoume Nze, the forum is supposed to come up with a memorandum, to be signed by the Congolese delegations, which will ensure the “good conduct” of all in the upcoming elections.
Kakese called this trip to Addis Ababa useless and wasteful “tourism” that showed the “infantilism” of the Congolese political class incapable of finding solutions at home.
At an earlier press briefing, Kakese called for presidential debates prior to the elections.
President Joseph Kabila Kabange
Delivering his address at the UN General Assembly
New York, September 22, 2011
2) MONUSCO Force Commander Gen Chander Prakash lays down elections’ security contingency plan
Lt. Gen Chander Prakash
MONUSCO Force Commander
Photo: Biliamino Alao/MONUSCO
I was directed to this story yesterday by a tweet from @MONUSCO, which I retweeted.
Alain Likota, of MONUSCO press services, caught up in mid-September with Lt. Gen Chander Prakash who was on an inspection tour in the Kivus where the Indian senior military officer also held meetings with Gen Pacifique Masunzu, Commander of FARDC 10th Military Region, and Col. Delphin Kahimbi, commander of the counterinsurgency “Amani Leo” operations. Gen Prakash met these FARDC senior officers in order “to brief them on MONUSCO’s plans to provide security during the elections.”
Answering a question put to him by Alain Likota, Gen Prakash elaborated on MONUSCO's elections security plan:
“The main objective of the contingency plan is to prepare ourselves, and be ready for any situation that may or may not occur in the next six months. As you know, our resources are limited, and there are challenges such as inaccessibility to various areas in the country; there are challenges related to the lack of infrastructure in some parts of the country. There are also challenges related to limited administrative support. So we studied the various situations that we may be confronted with, elaborated strategies on how best to react to unforeseen emerging situations, the backbone of all this being the protection of civilians, strictly in accordance with the new mandate, as you know, the 1991 [UN Resolution].”
3) Catholic Bishops Conference to mobilize 30,000 election observers countrywide
Mgrs. Javier Katata (Caritas) and Nicolas Djomo Lola (CENCO President)
Photo: John Bompengo/Radio Okapi
The 3-day training of trainers of election observers/civic educators, begun on September 23, ended on September 26 at the conference hall of the Catholic high-school Collège Boboto, in downtown Kinshasa. This project of the Catholic Bishops Conference (CENCO) was co-sponsored by the American evangelical NGO World Vision. Participants came from Bandundu, Bas-Congo, Equateur, and the Kivus provinces. CENCO plans on deploying 30,000 election observers countrywide.
The ambitious project of CENCO goes beyond mere election monitoring; it plans on carrying out civic education of both voters and politicians.
Said Mgr. Nicolas Djomo Lola, CENCO president:
“We are undertaking consciousness awakening of all citizens: those who will have to vote and those [running to be] elected. What we’re aiming at, is the improvement of living standards of the Congolese. And in order to do that, the essential condition is peace. When you have peace, you give a chance to democracy, to economic growth [to take off].”
4) Questions about Rwandan citizenship of Vital Kamerhe dog presidential hopeful again
UK-based Maman Alphonsine mwa Nkingi and her son, Vital Kamerhe
Congress of Union pour la Nation Congolese (UNC)
Kinshasa, Thursday, July 28, 2011
Try as he might, Vital Kamerhe can’t succeed in distancing himself from his erstwhile boss and current nemesis, Joseph Kabila. These two political leaders seem to be twins joined at the hip. First, there were rumors that Kamerhe is Kabila’s stalking-horse, an accusation that envenomed Kamerhe attacks against Kabila. To no avail...
Now, just as Joseph Kabila has been accused of being a Rwandan Tutsi, claims of Kamerhe’s Rwandan citizenship have resurfaced and intensified! And these claims seem to have been spread by the Kigali regime in 2002 during the negotiations at Sun City, in South Africa, where Kamerhe was one of the mouthpieces of the Kinshasa regime.
At the time, the publisher of Le Soft, MP Tryphon Kin Kiey Mulumba, was the spokesman of RCD. In the issue 788 of March 26, 2002, of Le Soft, Kamerhe is presented not only as a Rwandan Hutu citizen born in Cyangungu, but also as the cousin of Hutu Gen Grancient Kabiligi, one of the “planners of the Rwandan genocide, arrested on July 18, 1997 by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and [extradited] to Arusha, in Tanzania.”
What’s more, confronted by the press over this allegation of his Rwandan origins, Kamerhe defiantly exclaimed: “So what’s the big deal of being a Rwandan?” To this day, Kamerhe has still to address his kinship with Gen Grancient Kabiligi.
Right now, everywhere Kamerhe goes—Canada, Washington DC, at CSIS (see video below)—he is dogged by this disquieting issue of his Rwandan citizenship. In February this year, at CSIS in Washington DC, Kamerhe failed to answer squarely the following question a concerned Congolese citizen posed him: Given that all Zairians had to shed their Christian first names by presidential decree in 1972, by what miracle was Kamerhe allowed, had he been a Zairian, to have his name Vital—a “foreign” name—written on his college diploma obtained in the 1980s?
Well, we all had to officially shed our Christian names. Mobutu himself showed the way by taking a kilometer-long “authentic” name. Only foreigners living in Zaire could keep their Christian names. Kamerhe couldn’t give a plausible answer to that question. Instead, he lashed out at his "inquirer," a so-called “political analyst” who, by the way, thought the word “originality” meant “origins”!...
A line of defense Kamerhe used at CSIS is also untenable: arguing that the fact that his father worked everywhere in the DRC in the national savings agency CADECO (or CADEZA) somehow establishes his bona fide Congolese citizenship. Now, people from the African Great Lakes worked freely in those three countries (Burundi, Rwanda and Congo had the same currency under Belgian rule)—especially in post-independence Congo, with its open-border policy. In fact, Barthelemy Bisengimana, a Rwandan Tutsi, was even the chief of staff of Mobutu for many years. Kamerhe also doesn’t help his case when he insults the people raising this issue, which isn’t going away.
Another big mistake of Kamerhe is to throw at people’s faces the so-called “royal” tribal lineage of his mother! As if people care about such meaningless and stupid things. Does Kamerhe forget that the DRC is a republic? A mistake compounded by Kamerhe calling in his “royal” mother from her permanent home in the UK to come and parade at the congress of his party. This alienated many poor voters resentful of rich people sheltering their families in Europe and America, then going back to wreak havoc in a country they’ve deemed to be the boondocks from which they’ve exfiltrated their own families.
Kamerhe’s citizenship quandary has become so serious that the Belgian-based non-profit Dialogue des Peuples, whose collaborators are laity close to the Catholic Church and which also contributes to the running of the influential Brussels-based CongoForum, had to weigh in, through its email-circulated newsletter Dialogue (issue no. 39 of this week), in a long-winded article penned by the Kivu academic native coincidentally named Vital Barholere and entitled “The perennial question of Congolese nationality: The Vital Kamerhe Case” (pp. 13-17 of Dialogue).
The article purports to defend Kamerhe, though the author is also baffled by the “seeming fuzziness that [Kamerhe] may be maintaining about his origins.” The article is academic, and as such, convoluted, and worse, it speculates that Kamerhe may well have a Rwandan uncle [the Hutu army general génocidaire]: “it seems normal to me that Kamerhe might have an uncle, [and] siblings in Cyangungu (Rwanda), as these lands used to [belong to the] Shi [ethnic group].”
And worse still:
“By ignorance of history, the Bashi of Congo have ended up no longer recognizing the Bashi of Rwanda as their own [kin]. For them, they are Rwandans. Now, in the old days, when we were young, it was not smart to be considered a Rwandan. It was even insulting. The younger Kamerhe might have learned to dissemble, all the more so as he might have frequented other Bashi (like [Mobutu’s minister] Mushobekwa) who have long suffered of this rejection. Thus is made the history of peoples and identities! This being said, nothing excludes the fact that when [Kamerhe] could have taken advantage of this ambivalence he could have done so.”
This kind of speculation is another nail in the coffin of the political career of Vital Kamerhe in a country permanently in the throes of primeval anti-Rwandan nationalism. Kamerhe appears to think that he’d put this controversy behind him; in fact, his official campaign website posted the video below and thinks that it would stand as a final explanation on Kamerhe’s Rwanda-gate. Kamerhe and his campaign can’t be more wrong!
Strangely, Kamerhe thinks that these attacks are coming from the Kabila’s camp—a misreading that shows that he may not see what may hit him next (in politics, they call that a lack of acumen). If anything, he and Kabila are on the same boat on this one, though his case is arguably worse than his former boss’.
The conclusion of Vital Barholere’s article, however, is very clear as to the source of the smear campaign against Kamerhe:
“if Tshisekedi or another candidate wants to beat Kamerhe and Kabila in the Kivu, it would be more reasonable to use more rational and convincing arguments, i.e. the balance sheet of the actions of these two candidates.
Pushing too far the Rwanda issue risks (and it’s already the case) having people ask Etienne Tshisekedi to explain why he signed agreements in Kigali, at the harshest moment of the occupation of the Kivu by the RCD. Beware of the swing of the pendulum, the boomerang effect.”
For those interested in reading the full article in French, I uploaded Dialogue on Scribd here.
KAMERHE AT CSIS, Washington, DC (February 21, 2011):
0 comments:
Post a Comment