AFRICA/DR CONGO - Clear lead of “yes” votes in referendum to approve new Constitution. “This is the civil and peaceful response from a people who suffered so much in so many years of violence and abuse” says local missionary

Kinshasa (Fides Service)- “Yes” votes should make a clear win in the referendum on the Constitution in the Democratic Republic of Congo according to the first official results after a third of the votes had been counted. The President of the independent electoral commission, Rev Apollinaire Malu Malu a Catholic priest, said that according to the votes counted so far 78.47% electors were in favour of the draft Constitution which establishes a presidential system and a unitary state strongly decentralised.
If “yes” votes prevail the referendum will be followed by the adoption of an electoral law to allow political elections before June 30, 2006. At the moment 'Yes'' votes have the lead in 11 provinces including the capital Kinshasa and East Kasai, stronghold of Etienne Tshisekedi, principal antagonist of President Joseph Kabila.
The approval of the draft document would mark the end of a delicate stage of transition started in 2003, after a war which lasted about 5 years and involved 6 neighbouring countries and caused the deaths of over 3 million people.
The electoral Commission has not given a date for the announcement of the results of the referendum, the first free, democratic consultation after 40 years of dictatorship and conflicts. In some provinces of the vast country votes in favour scored an overwhelming victory: in north Kivu and south Kivu, where the consequences of war and ethnic violence were most atrocious, the percentage of yes votes reached respectively 97% and 96%; it reached 64.5 % even in East Kasai, the home province of opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, who had called for a boycott of the election. “The overwhelming victory of “yes” votes in the eastern provinces especially in both Kivu was a civil and peaceful response of people who suffered so much for so many years of violence and abuse” says a missionary in Bukavu, mean city in south Kivu. “The merit is also of the local Catholic Church and civil society associations which kept the flame of hope burning in difficult times and undertook an essential information campaign on the referendum”.
Outside the capital, one of the main bastions of the group which opposes the reform, yes votes did not go below 60%, and would seem to predominate in all eleven of the country’s administrative divisions.
This is the first independent democratic consultation called by the Democratic Republic of Congo in the forty years since it gained independence from Belgium, former colonial power.
If the constitution is approved, next year there should be general elections which will put the country on the path to democracy, unimaginable during the war and earlier under the dictatorship of deceased Mobutu Sese Seko. Before the vote Congo’s President Joseph Kabila warned of the serious consequences if this process were to be interrupted. (Agenzia Fides 21/12/2005 righe 42 parole 494)