Thousands of opposition supporters clashed with Congo riot police on Tuesday, burning President Joseph Kabila's campaign posters ahead of historic elections meant to bring lasting peace to the Central African giant.
Security forces swung batons and fired tear gas at protesters who threw chunks of masonry and Molotov cocktails. They also ripped Kabila's campaign advertisements from signposts and torched the banners in the streets of the capital, Kinshasa. There was no immediate word on injuries.
One onlooker said Congo's young people -- who made up most of the seething 4,000-person crowd in an outlying slum -- were outraged by their poverty after years of war and corrupt rule that has hobbled their vast, mineral-rich nation.
PHOTO: EPA
"Our poverty stems from our politics, which don't work. Our leaders are corrupt and sell our riches overseas while we have nothing," said Bob Massoud, a 23-year old artist. "We're mad because we're suffering. Everyone is angry."
Congo, roiled by back-to-back wars that ended in 2002, is tense ahead of Sunday's vote -- the first free, multiparty elections for president and parliament in decades.
Kabila is believed to be the front-runner in a field of 33 candidates seeking to lead the vast nation out of a postwar transitional period.
But the protesters, from two opposition parties, alleged that irregularities in the voters' roll and the printing of 5 million spare ballot papers means the vote is being fixed. Electoral authorities reject the charges.
The protesters say Kabila, age 35, isn't a natural-born Congolese since his mother is Rwandan. They noted that Kabila, the son of a former rebel leader who ousted longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, spent much of his formative years outside Congo and can't speak its main trading language, Lingala.
They burned banners bearing Kabila's smiling face and the slogan "In peace, we're reconstructing the country."
Many Congolese support Kabila for negotiating a settlement that ended five years of war sparked by his father, a former rebel leader who took power after his troops chased Mobutu from the country in 1997.
Kabila inherited the presidency in 2001 after his father was assassinated by a bodyguard and has led a national-unity government overseeing peace deals that ended the wars in 2002.
Aid groups say some 4 million Congolese have died during the war, mostly of hunger or disease stemming from violence, which continues to wrack the eastern borderlands near Rwanda and Uganda, only two of half a dozen nations that fought in Congo's wars.
On Tuesday, the UN's World Food Program (WFP) said that recent fighting among militia groups and army in eastern Ituri Province has sent another 38,000 people fleeing their homes.
The food agency said its food stocks were "being stretched to the breaking point" and needed US$106 million to feed an estimated 1.7 million people across the country over the next year.
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