Town in Congo Recasts Destroyed Votes
Northeast Town Where Ballots Destroyed Conducts Congo's Final Repeat Vote
By HEIDI VOGT
The Associated Press
KINSHASA, Congo - Thousands returned to the polls in a northeast Congo town Thursday and recast ballots destroyed in rioting that followed the weekend presidential runoff, officials said.
The vote in Fataki, a small town in restive Ituri province, completed voting countrywide in an election that was four years in the making and culminated a transition meant to usher Congo out of years of war and corrupt misrule.
The repeat vote allowed about 22,000 people to cast ballots after theirs were burned by rioters Monday, one day after the runoff between President Joseph Kabila and rival Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba, said local electoral official Aristotle Maki.
Countrywide, ballots from about 18 percent of Congo's 50,000 polling stations had been counted by Thursday evening, electoral commission head Apollinaire Malu-Malu said. He declined to give any figures on turnout or partial results.
Overall results are not expected for days or weeks with ballots having to arrive by boat or helicopter from some remote areas. The electoral commission has said it will issue preliminary results by Nov. 19.
Sunday's vote went off peacefully in Fataki. But early Monday a soldier who apparently was drunk shot and killed two election workers there, sparking riots in which hundreds of people ransacked polling stations and burned thousands of uncollected ballots.
After polls closed, Maki said the repeat vote went off peacefully though turnout was much lower than on Sunday. He did not have exact figures, but said maybe half of those able to vote again did so.
Congo is struggling to recover from a 1998-2002 war that divided the country into rival fiefdoms and drew in armies of half a dozen African nations, many of which were accused of plundering the country's mineral wealth, including diamond, gold and copper.
Kabila and Bemba were the top finishers in first-round vote held in July that saw dozens of candidates vying for the nation's top post. The winner will become Congo's first democratically elected president since independence from Belgium in 1960.
Kabila inherited power in 2001 after the assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila. The father was propelled to power by Rwandan forces and Congolese rebels who ousted late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
Bemba is a former Ugandan-backed warlord who commanded 20,000 troops in the east before joining a transitional administration established after the country's 1998-2002 war.
Fighting between troops loyal to Kabila and Bemba in the run-up to Sunday's vote prompted worries of violence, but balloting went off peacefully in most of the country.
The repeat vote in Fataki had been set for Wednesday, but was delayed so that materials could arrive from the capital, Kinshasa, and authorities would have time to inform voters that polls would reopen, said John Ukunya, the electoral commission's representative in Bunia, capital of Ituri province.
A separate repeat vote was held Tuesday in the western town of Bumba, where rioting over alleged ballot-box stuffing destroyed a number of voting centers on Sunday.
Fataki has been the scene of violence before. Last year, militiamen opened fire on a voter registration center there, killing an electoral worker. And the area has been plagued for years by militia raids and fighting.