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Ballots burnt after historic Congolese vote

By Barry Moody

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Counting from Congo's election proceeded swiftly on Monday but thousands of ballot papers were burnt in the east after a soldier killed two election officials.

International monitors and diplomats expressed satisfaction about the presidential run-off and provincial elections across the huge central African country on Sunday and said trouble was confined to isolated incidents.

Counting of votes was going more swiftly than in the first round of the election, Democratic Republic of Congo's first democratic poll for four decades.

Incumbent President Joseph Kabila and former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba are contesting control of a country which is a treasure trove of mineral riches but left destitute by decades of war and exploitation.

The vote is meant to draw a line under 1998-2003 war that killed more than 4 million people, mostly from hunger and disease.

Despite the task of organising a vote in a country the size of western Europe with scarcely any roads, electoral commission spokesman Dieudonne Mirimo said the count was going well.

"Counting has finished nearly everywhere. We are now in the process of collecting them and bringing them to compilation centres," he said. Vote counts from 50,000 polling stations will be collated in 62 centres.

Analysts and diplomats said the result was likely to be announced ahead of the November 19 official deadline. In the first round Kabila polled 45 per cent against Bemba's 20 percent.

ELECTION WORKERS SHOT

The generally successful vote, which cost the international community over $500 million, was marred by a handful of incidents, the latest in the early hours of Monday when an apparently drunken army sergeant shot dead two election workers.

Leocadio Salmeron, a U.N. spokesman in war-ravaged Ituri district in the east, said people tried to lynch the soldier but when he was arrested went on a rampage destroying about half the polling stations in the town of Fakati north of Bunia.

Some 25,000 people were registered to vote in the stations.

Mirimo said the election would be rerun on Tuesday in the town of Bumba, in northern Equateur province, where a polling station was destroyed by rioters on Sunday. Police shot two rioters dead.

Despite general optimism over the vote, there is concern about the danger of clashes between the two candidates' supporters or private armies as results trickle out.

More than 30 people died in three days of street battles in Kinshasa when first round results were announced in August.

Western diplomats anxiously watching the count are hoping for a substantial margin between the two men of at least 10 percent to avoid one side challenging the result with force.

But international monitors who asked not to be named said early indications were of a low turnout in Kabila's eastern strongholds which could undermine his strong first round lead.

Aides of the two men signed a declaration on Sunday promising not to contest the result by force and to guarantee the safety of the losing candidate.

But former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark, leader of observers from the U.S. Carter Centre, told Reuters: "We have to remember this is a country that is not very far from a civil war ... There are questions both about what leaders might do but more particularly about what might be done in their name that they can't control."

(Additional reporting by David Lewis in Kinshasa)

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Last updated: 30-Oct-06 15:51 GMT