They were barred from voting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) presidential election. They voted anyway.
On Sunday, thousands of men and women gathered in Beni to cast ballots that they hoped that someone, somewhere, might take seriously.
Last week, the Congolese Independent National Electoral Commission made the surprise decision to bar about 1 million voters in Beni and Butembo, cities in the eastern DRC affected by a deadly Ebola outbreak.
Photo: AFP
Protests followed the decision as people demanded to vote with the rest of the country. Ebola facilities were attacked. Health teams suspended work for days.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “prolonged insecurity” could bring a spike in Ebola cases.
Congo was dangerously politicizing the outbreak, the International Rescue Committee said.
The electoral commission had allowed candidates to campaign in the outbreak zone, protesters said.
Health officials had been prepared to screen all voters for fever; hand sanitizers were deployed for use in polling stations and angry residents asked what the sudden danger was.
The delay of the vote in the two cities, which have many opposition supporters, undermines the credibility of the election to select a successor to Congolese President Joseph Kabila, critics said.
Officially, voting in Beni and Butembo is to take place in March, months after the DRC inaugurates its new president by the middle of this month.
Many Beni residents decided that they could not wait. They gathered at a stadium in the center of the city, carrying their voting registration cards.
Young people wearing the vests of the electoral commission ringed the scene. A vuvuzela, the boisterous horn of soccer matches the world over, honked above the shouts of the crowd.
“Voting, it’s our right,” people chanted in Swahili while standing in line.
Each was given a paper ballot — a piece of note paper, cut into pieces — to vote for president and national and provincial deputies.
“Election Congo 2018,” it read.
Carefully, with a ballpoint pen, one woman filled out her ballot and waved it in the air in triumph. She dropped it into the plastic voting container.
“We do not have Ebola. Kabila is worse than Ebola,” said 24-year-old Jacob Salamu, who voted for the first time.
“I’ve been waiting here since 5am and I’ve just voted like my countrymen in Kinshasa and elsewhere,” he said.
When police tried to make arrests, the crowd stopped them and the officers backed away.
An organizer of Sunday’s protest event, Paulin Mwithe, said that the votes would be transmitted to the local election commission bureau and to the UN peacekeeping mission, which has been in the region for years amid threats from rebel groups.
The ballots would reach Kinshasa in time to be announced with all the others, Mwithe said.
By midday, more than 10,000 people were seen waiting in line in several locations around Beni.
Some said that they had walked many kilometers to vote.
While the rest of country struggled with hundreds of reports of malfunctioning voting machines, missing voters’ lists, vote-buying and other problems, the election in Beni ended on time and the vote-counting began.
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