BrianJBecker.com

Election Day is upon us in DR Congo and the city is refreshingly quiet after weeks of raucous campaigning. The law declared an end to all campaigning at Midnight Friday night. By the time I go up on Saturday nearly all of the banners and posters were down. The radio warned people that they’d be arrested on sight for campaigning- even wearing political t-shirts or hats after the deadline. It’s like someone hit a magic button and everything went back to normal. I guess allowing the civic and military authorities an extra opportunity to punish people will have that effect. Most things do not work so well in Congo.

I just heard a radio report on the BBC with a Congolese commentator saying that these elections should have been delayed “at least another year” to allow the UN to work out all of the kinks. The commentator is either naive or he has a political agenda. People here were very upset when the elections were supposed to happen a year ago and were postponed. If they were postponed again, there would be trouble. The year following, the UN has worked very hard to collaborate with the Congo’s Independant Electoral Commission to get these elections off the ground. I’d argue that more time would cost a lot more money, but not change much. The UN is extending it’s management capacity to help pull this off. I’ve learned that managing anything here is far from easy or simple. I’m not sure anyone who works with them, being honest, would tell you that they are efficient. And then there’s the Electoral Commission.

Another argument was that more time should be given to allow the situation in the east to stabilize. The reality in parts of the far eastern reaches of Congo, like Darfur, is that in places society has broken down and spiraled into a violent free-for-all, chaos. The “rebels” are rarely fighting on a front, they don’t have a clear objective. They rob and hurt people and it’s becoming a way of life. The irony is that the fighters and theives over there made a pact with the UN/Congo govt. so they could try not to miss out on the elections. In general, the principle of fairness is extremely important to people here. They were willing to say that they would stop stealing and brutalizing people (in some cases their own neighbors) so they could get a chance to vote alongside the people they’ve been torturing! The media is doing a decent job covering all of this, but they hit a lot of the same notes and they miss some of the key complexities.

But the good news is that the city is quiet as people are walking to the polls. I’ve heard some church bells and some worship music wafting around, but for the most part Church has taken the back seat to elections. This is very strange to me.