re: announces significant increase in indicated r are you...

re: announces significant increase in indicated r are you talking about the same congo as below. Guns rule Kinshasa
By: Barry Sergeant
Posted: '23-AUG-06 05:00' GMT © Mineweb 1997-2006



JOHANNESBURG (Mineweb.com) -- On Sunday, the Commission Electorale Indépendante announced that Joseph Kabila, incumbent president of the transitional government in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had won just 45% of the vote. His main opponent, Jean-Pierre Bemba, a charismatic rebel leader, won 20%.
The outcome has forced a presidential run-off, scheduled for 29 October, but by Sunday night, the guns had started lining up on a villa in Gombe, northeastern Kinshasa. Some very big guns started lining up. On Monday night, the bombardment of Bemba’s villa continued, and commenced again on Tuesday morning. Dozens of people have been slaughtered and palls of black smoke hang over the stricken city where the ghosts of Henry Morton Stanley and King Leopold II haunt forever.
Kabila, who holds much power over the eastern part of the Congo, enjoys the private services of 12,000 soldiers. On Monday night, Congolese police seized Kinshasa’s international airport and a Belgian airline, among others, cancelled flights there. The developments served as an absolute reminder that business is politics in the Congo, and that politics is business. Kabila was supposed to win more than 51% of the vote, cancelling the need for a run-off.
General elections were held in the Congo on 30 July, the first multiparty elections in the country after decades of brutal and corrupt dictatorship under Mobutu and two wars (1996-1997 and 1998-2003) in which four million deaths have been documented. Kabila was meant to win convincingly and the attack on Bemba was not supposed to have happened.
The attack on Bemba has left the world truly devastated. For one thing, the UN Mission des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo (Monuc) literally occupies the Congo with around 17,000 peacekeepers and troops. Monuc’s main donor countries, such as the US, Japan and Germany, invested in hoped-for peace and stability. The Security Council had established Monuc to facilitate the implementation of the Lusaka Accord signed in 1999. With a budget exceeding $1bn a year, Monuc is the largest and most expensive mission in the UN’s Department of Peace Keeping Operations. The recent DRC elections were financed separately, also from abroad, with costs running into hundreds of millions of dollars.
It has all ended in tears and the spin-doctors are silent. The world needs to recognise, and accept, that guns rule the Congo. Beyond that, Monuc has been increasingly frustrated by its mind-boggling costs, and its crying need to move to Darfur, a region the size of France on Sudan’s remote western border with Chad.

*********There is universal consensus that the Congo needs to be turned around, also for the sake of Africa. The Congo, the size of Western Europe, borders on nine countries, and is home to around 60m people. It hosts one-third of the world's cobalt reserves, two-thirds of its coltan (columbite-tantalite used in mobile telephones), one-tenth of its copper, along with extensive deposits of diamonds, gold, oil, silver, timber, uranium and zinc************

The Congo’s immense river system and mighty cataracts, strategically dammed, could provide hydroelectric power for the entire continent. Yet the Congo, which hosts 50% of Africa's natural forests, ranks as one of the very poorest nations in the world, at 167 out of 177 in the relevant UN ranking system.

There are powerful elements in the Congo’s ruling elite who never wanted the election, or, failing that, were working on destroying the election process. The spin woven around these sinister underground truths was wonderfully successful, up to a point. A European businessman who returned from Kinshasa last Thursday stated that it was a “very interesting and pleasant trip. Most conceptions are incorrect and I found the Congolese to be quite businesslike, decent people with aspirations and no interest in war. We stayed at the Hotel Ascension for $80 a night which was passable - clean and air conditioned”.

The dangerous truth is that the DRC’s ruling elite of political (and concomitant economic) spoils has been the cement, as one political analyst puts it, that has kept the power-sharing transitional formula together for the past three years. Many - particularly amongst the former rebel groupings - now fear the election will mean an end to their lucrative positions. Some were actively sabotaging preparations for the elections and others were focusing on extracting as much financial reward as possible before their tenure of office expires.

The structure of the election process was severely criticised variously as “hugely expensive”, as “massively complex”, and as “extremely dangerous”. The fact is that voter registration was poorly administered, creating considerable potential for electoral fraud. Months before the attack on Bemba’s villa, there had been a risible sense that the electoral process was dangerously close to breakdown, leaving the spectre of civil unrest wide open.

Equally worrying was Monuc's failure to integrate various rebel factions in a new National Army ahead of the elections, and the State's never-ending failure to pay its undisciplined military personnel. Everywhere, there are disgruntled seeds lying in wait to germinate upon news that the election had been lost – or not won.

The spoils of money, once from ivory and rubber, are manifest now in minerals. The latest report from the Group of Experts on the DRC to the Security Council reminded that earlier this year, it presented extensive evidence proving the linkage between the mismanagement of Congolese mineral concessions and diversions of natural resources for the financing of arms-embargo violations. Arms have been pouring into the Congo, month upon month.

Management of Congolese mineral assets lies bleeding. The Mining Cadastre (public record) of the DRC lists 2144 mining and quarrying concessions; according to the Group of Experts, “an undetermined number appear to be held by concessionaires affiliated with investors whose personal and professional integrity is doubtful”. At least 40 major concessions are being contested. The World Bank, lead agency among multilateral organizations in rebuilding the Congo’s mining sector, is trying to support solutions over contested claims. It has committed $150,000 for a three-month mandate of an evaluation commission.

This body, comprising 15 Congolese jurists, was appointed on 14 September 2005. The commission lacks support, tragically, from the DRC Ministry of Mines, which has referred only four of the 40 contested concessions to the commission. The Group of Experts argues that this lack of transparency “provides hiding places for sanctioned individuals, financiers of embargo violators and for other individuals who simply do not meet the standards of the Code Minier”.

The Lutundula commission, created in 2004, comprising 17 parliamentarians from a cross-section of Congolese political parties, published a 271-page report last year, containing a key recommendation that the commission’s mandate be extended to review contracts signed by the transitional government since 2003.

Lutundula said it was “indispensable and urgent” for the DRC National Assembly to review contracts signed by the transitional government which allegedly had done no better than “those who held State power during the period of the wars of 1996-1997 and 1998”. On the contrary, the draining of the country’s natural resources and other forms of wealth had “increased under the cover of the impunity guaranteed by the constitution to those in governmental positions”.

Some foreign companies with interests in the Congo already boast market values running into hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions. The big guns are back in town.