Chalupa at Kinshasa Makala Prison, Monday, July 30, 2012)
***
The Kafkaesque nightmare of White Congolese opposition leader
Pierre-Jacques Chalupa took a turn for the worse Saturday, October 6,
when the Magistrates' Court of Ngaliema, a Commune of Kinshasa, found
him guilty and sentenced him to 4 years behind bars for forgery and
use of forgeries.
The hope his family and supporters entertained that he might be
cleared and released in the run-up to the Francophony Summit that will
be held in Kinshasa (October 12-14) has thus just been dashed by the
Magistrates' Court.
The prosecution alleged--and the Court just concurred--that Chalupa,
64, obtained Congolese citizenship and a voter's registration card
under criminally false pretenses.
Chalupa was born in Uvira, South Kivu, in 1948 to Portuguese parents
and has since never lived anywhere else in the world.
Chalupa is the founder and chairman of the radical opposition
political party "Action pour la Démocratie et le Développement au
Congo (ADD-Congo)"--or Action for Democracy and Development in the
Congo.
ADD-Congo belongs to the political plank that rallied around Etienne
Tshisekedi's UDPS.
Elected MP in the 2006 legislative elections in the Kinshasa
constituency of Lukunga, his parliamentary mandate was mysteriously
invalidated a few months later.
Chalupa ran again unsuccessfully in 2011 in the same constituency,
though critics of the regime claim he'd in fact won.
Chalupa has been an inmate of the Kinshasa Makala Prison since
February 2, where he was transferred shortly after his arrest in late
January.
His wife, Mireille Akamia Chalupa, told the press after sentencing
that her husband is being hounded for his "political convictions."
The rights group Voice of the Voiceless (VSV) sees in the saga of
Chalupa yet another evidence of the relentless "harassment of
oppositionists" by the regime.
And yesterday, in an interview with Radio France Internationale (RFI),
one of Chalupa's lawyers, Hubert Efole, angrily exclaimed: "The
misfortune of Chalupa is to have been born White!"
In Kinshasa streets and on Congolese blogosphere, people are shaking
their heads in disbelief.
They point to other so-called Congolese politicians and members of the
military--like Azarias Ruberwa, Bizima Karahamwetu, Moïse Nyarugabo,
Jean-Bosco Ntaganda, and Laurent Nkandabatware--who are known to have
been born in Rwanda, and yet were or are still left unmolested by the
powers that be.
Hence the conclusion that Pierre-Jacques Chalupa is a "political prisoner."
Mireille Akamia Chalupa and her husband's lawyers have vowed to appeal
this iniquitous verdict.
--(With radiookapi.net, rfi.fr, Congolese blogosphere, & Kinshasa
Radio-Trottoir)--
***
PHOTO CREDITS: John Bompengo
Via: radiookapi.net
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