The highest-ranking priest in Congo's powerful Catholic Church urged churchgoers in Kinshasa to boycott the country's first democratic elections in nearly 50 years if authorities do not correct alleged irregularities.
Manipulation
The letter from Cardinal Frederick Etsou, read out at masses in the capital on Sunday, came a day after the Catholic Bishops' Conference warned it might not recognize election results, saying fears of manipulation and fraud appear well-founded. Among concerns are the disappearance of 1.2 million names from the voters' roll -- due to a technical problem, according to the Independent Electoral Commission, which denies there are irregularities in the runup to next Sunday's vote.
PHOTO: EPA
"We invite our people to be ready to abstain from these elections, if the established irregularities are not corrected," Etsou said in his pastoral letter.
Half of Congo's 63 million people are Catholic and the church is about the only functioning institution in this country where the assassination of the first elected leader in 1960 was followed by decades of corrupt dictatorship which ended in civil war and then regional war, that killed some 4 million people.
The UN is helping organize the voting -- the biggest elections the world body has ever undertaken -- and its biggest peacekeeping force of 17,600 troops and a recently arrived EU force of 1,000 soldiers is deployed to help secure the voting at 50,000 ballot stations in a country the size of Western Europe with only a few hundred kilometers of paved roads.
Allegations
Thirty-three candidates are running for president and 9,000 for legislative seats but many are asking to have the campaign suspended until charges of campaign cheating, backed by several human-rights groups, are investigated.
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