DRC Elections: End of a long day

Twelve hours after voting was supposed to open at the Jean Calvin school, the courtyard was still full of people, waiting. “They brought some voting papers around two o’clock” one man told me, “but they ran-out again by 4”. As rain drizzled down and the light faded, a small man hurried past, carrying a stack of ballot papers into the officials’ office. People waited, patiently, their arms folded, to exercise their right to vote.

Across town, where the prescribed twelve hours of voting had passed, offices were closed-up. Occasionally, someone would arrive and hammer on the door, claiming that they hadn’t been able to vote (this station, too, ran out of papers it seemed).

But the urns were opened, emptying the ballots onto the floor for the counting to begin. It would a long night, under the light of small lamps.

And it had been a long day: attacks on trucks delivering ballot papers, attacks on a voting station, with many unable to vote due to logistical problems. The calls of fraud were already becoming audible by disgruntled election-witnesses, unable to perform their job, they claimed.

DR Congo election day attacks

“I’ve got to go, there is some shooting going on not far from here” were my parting words as I hung up the phone to the London office. I’d just finished filing the morning pictures, and was clarifying the caption to a small piece of video I had shot when the crack-crack of small arms fire rang out.

This was not something I was expecting with the election coverage, at least not outside of the capital, Kinshasa.

Out in the street, people were running from the direction of the gunfire. I have to get there. The driver didn’t agree. More gunfire, some of it heavier. A rush of adrenaline that I hadn’t felt since Libya surged through my veins.

After what seemed like an age, we were in the car, scanning the streets. A column of soldiers were walking down the road. I stepped out of the car to take a photo, but the commander shoved me back in. “No photos” he said, and wasn’t in the mood to discuss. I was still new to Congo, and didn’t know how far I could push these guys. A rocket launcher passed by.

In the Bel Air cemetery—where the white colonialists used to bury their dead—a stage had been set for The Final Confrontation between the gunmen and the army. Soldiers and armed police stood on the road. Occasional bursts of gunfire rang out from inside — everybody ducked.

After some negotiation, I joined them. Skirting along the wall towards the entrance I came across a group of soldiers taking cover behind a wall. Camera held high, I approached them. They weren’t keen to have a civilian there, but did agree to show me something.

As we crossed some open land, another column of soldiers strafed across the grass a hundred metres ahead of us. Our soldiers called out, and they had turned and trained their guns on us. Shouting in a language I didn’t speak. They eventually turned and continued towards the cemetery. And then I was directed towards a lone body, lying on the grass, trousers around ankles and the skin missing from the side of the face; burned off. This is what they wanted to show me. “Rebel” they said, in French, but that’s all they could give me. The gri-gri on his arm suggested he was a member of the Katanga secession group, but nothing was sure. He had been dragged from where he was shot dead, so there was no way to know if he had been involved in the fighting or not. An unidentified dead man lying in a field.

The day becomes more complex.

DR Congo election day

The ballots were due to open at 7am. At the polling stations, an hour or so beforehand, the queues were already forming, but it would prove to be far too optimistic. Huddled under umbrellas, voters waited for what would be only the second democratic elections in four decades, and the first one to be organised by the Congolese; the previous elections were largely organised by the international community and the United Nations.

Officials at a school-cum-polling station said that they were still awaiting election materials: not only the ballot papers themselves, but voting booths and urns.

This was not the case throughout the city. At the largest voting station in the Lubumbashi—DR Congo’s second city—voting opened as small queues trickled into the many classrooms that had been transformed into voting offices. The maze of striped plastic tape marking out queuing lines for each office seemed a little optimistic.

Then came news of the first of the day’s incidents. In the early hours of the morning, a convoy of pick-up trucks delivering voting materials had been attacked, leaving two burning by the side of the road, their ballot papers smouldering.

We raced over there, and found a crowd of people. Cautiously, I approached as my colleagues from the BBC and RFI spoke to people standing around; I hoped the mob would not turn angry.

I was accosted by people showing me burned ballot papers, amidst cries in French of fraud. Every now and then, a “pre-marked” ballot paper would be held out, but after several minutes of photographing them, I began to question their veracity. Different pens, some crosses, some ticks, a few with thumb prints on them. And none of the papers still burning in the trucks showed evidence of tampering. The local populace, who had rushed the scene, had done this themselves I concluded, after conferring with the radio folk.

It was 9am, and already, there were several angles to cover in the day’s voting. This was going to be a long day.

Preparing for the Vote

Tomorrow is going to be chaotic, confusing and exhausting. Already, the voting stations are full of people trying to find their names on the sheets of registered voters, many unsuccessfully.

There has apparently been an attack on an army depot, although getting in there to find anything out (let alone photograph) proved impossible.

Outside the offices of the National independent electoral commission, a mass of people wait for their voter registration cards - without which they won’t be able to vote.

The polls are scheduled to open at 7am. We’ll see.

Freedom of the Press

Freedom of the press

I appear to be one of three international journalists in town, the other two being for Radio France International and the Beeb, and leaving me the only man on the wires. It feels a world-away from the safety net of covering South Sudan’s independence.

On the plus side, I’d like to think of myself as a little less biased as these guys. Today is the last day of campaigning for Monday’s elections, and here you have a whole bunch of cameramen, all sporting Kabila garb, filming his campaigning followers, whilst riding around with the police.