Millions of Congolese vote in historic poll

Election workers count ballots in Kinshasa. Picture / Reuters

KINSHASA - Millions of Congolese have voted in their first free elections in 40 years, hoping to end years of war, corruption and chaos that have brought the mineral-rich African giant to its knees.

As polling wound down and counting of ballots began across Democratic Republic of Congo, UN officials and international observers reported a high turnout and said voting had been mostly enthusiastic, orderly and peaceful.

"I would hesitate to declare anything successful until it's done, but so far so good. In fact, so far, very good," Ross Mountain, the UN deputy special representative for the Congo, told reporters in Kinshasa.

Protected by the biggest peacekeeping operation in the world, the presidential and parliamentary polls in the vast, former Belgian colony were the most complex and expensive ever organised by the United Nations at a cost of $460 million.

From the sprawling capital Kinshasa to the jungles of the Congo River basin and the mist-shrouded peaks of the east, voters braved threats of violence from marauding rebels, bureaucratic hitches and rain to cast their ballots.

The polls were the culmination of a three-year peace process following a 1998-2003 war that sucked in six neighbouring states and killed 4 million people, mostly from hunger and disease.

Counting got underway immediately as voting centres closed, although official collated results from all 50,000 nationwide pollings stations scattered around a war-ravaged country the size of western Europe were expected only within three weeks.

In the southern West and East Kasai provinces - the stronghold of a major opposition party which boycotted the elections - youths destroyed several polling stations after voting was over. In the southeast town of Lubumbashi, students protested when they found they were not registered to vote.

But these appeared to be isolated incidents.

"I have witnessed long queues and busy polling stations," European member of parliament Richard Howitt, one of more than 1,200 international observers, told Reuters from Lubumbashi.

Turnout was heavy in the violence-plagued east, where President Joseph Kabila was expecting strong support to keep his job as head of state which he took over when his father Laurent was assassinated in 2001.

Initial counts from some individual eastern polling stations showed him well ahead there, witnesses said.

Standing against Kabila were 31 challengers including several former rebel leaders who fought the Kabilas in the five-year war that devastated the central African country already crippled by 32 years of misrule under dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

UN peacekeepers - 17,000 of them, backed by 1,100 European Union troops - and Congolese police guarded the schools, churches and tents used as polling stations. Many of the more than 25 million registered voters got up early to cast their ballots. Others waited patiently in line for hours.

"This is a great event. I'm 44 years old and this is the first time I've ever voted," said Zawadi Unega in Kinshasa.

More than 9,700 other candidates were bidding for 500 parliament seats in the polls.

Congo has one third of the world's cobalt reserves, as well as copper, gold and diamonds. However, it has known little but war and dictatorship since independence in 1960.

- REUTERS