ZAIRE-POLITICS: More Pressure Needed on Mobutu

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gumisai Mutume

COPENHAGEN, Mar 12 1995 (IPS) - Human Rights activists lobbied hard at the Social Summit in Copenhagen last week for world leaders to put more pressure on the Zairean government to speed up the democratic process.

Under the democratisation programme which began in Zaire in 1994, the people in one of Africa’s longest dictatorships go to the polls this year. But a Norwegian lobby group says the political atmosphere is not conducive for free and fair elections.

In an appeal made out to delegates at the conference, Freedom Flag for Kongo-Zaire (FFKZ) called on the world to “demand that Mobutu respect freedom of speech, freedom to organise and that he refrain from the use of military force to pervert the just process of democracy.”

FFKZ is a Norwegian-based independent organisation that supports the struggle for freedom and human rights in the central African nation of 40 million people.

Over the last 30 years Mobutu has ruled one of the continent’s richest countries in terms of natural resources with an iron hand bringing it to economic ruin.

He has however managed to maintain his rule with the support of some western nations.

In his address to the summit on Sunday however, he did not touch on the issues of democratisation and empowerment of his people. Instead he called for the international community to urgently focus its attention to the massive influx of Rwandan refugees to his country.

Zaire hosts an estimated 3 million refugees who fled the civil war in neighbouring Rwanda.

Back home, Mobutu maintains a firm grip on the media. During the early 1990’s the opposition managed to achieve a certain degree of legalisation and, for a short period, Mobutu accepted a prime minister from an assembly of opposition movements led by Etienne Tshisekedi. But in 1993 he used the military to force Tshisekedi to resign.

More than 100 opposition parties have now sprung up to contest the poll scheduled for July.

“But there has not been an attempt to educate the electorate,” says Julien Ciakudia, FFKZ chairman who was in Copenhagen. “There is no infrastructure to talk about in Zaire. Mobutu has been ruling without the need to develop social services.”

As a result the vast majority of the electorate in the rural areas remains out of reach, he says.