More than 1,500 singing, chanting supporters of Congo's former Vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba marched through the capital Kinshasa on Tuesday to protest against his arrest in Belgium on war crimes charges.
Shouting "Free Bemba" and carrying posters of the portly former rebel chief, the protesters walked under police escort to Democratic Republic of Congo's parliament, where their leaders met with the heads of the national assembly and the Senate.
They then dispersed peacefully, for the moment easing fears of confrontation in the city where armed Bemba loyalists battled troops of President Joseph Kabila's guard last year. Several hundred people were killed in that street fighting.
Bemba, a senator and defeated contender in Congo's 2006 presidential election, was arrested by Belgian authorities in Brussels on Saturday on an International Criminal Court warrant for war crimes committed in the Central African Republic. Bemba is accused by the ICC of leading Congolese rebels who waged a campaign of rape and torture in the Central African Republic in 2002/2003. He denies the charges.
"He should be freed. He's not a bandit on the run," Francois Muamba, Secretary-General of Bemba's Congo Liberation Movement (MLC) party and former rebel group said at Tuesday's march. Witnesses estimated between 1,500 and 2,000 people took part.
Some carried blue MLC flags, others had the letters MLC painted on their foreheads, In the charges against Bemba, ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo alleges the MLC fighters Bemba sent into Central African Republic in 2002 to back then ruler Ange Felix Patasse raped hundreds of women, some of them girls and grandmothers.
'FOR CONGOLESE': But Bemba's supporters accuse the ICC of bringing a politically biased case against him. "It looks as though the ICC is just for Congolese. (US President George W.) Bush has killed so many people in Iraq and nothing happens," one of the protesters on Tuesday, Rigobert Momene, 33, who is unemployed, told Reuters.
Bemba, whose 2006 election defeat by Joseph Kabila turned him into Congo's most prominent opposition figure, fled into exile last year saying he feared for his life after the Kinshasa clashes between his fighters and Kabila's presidential guard.
Condemning his arrest, Bemba's MLC party has accused the ICC of timing his arrest to take place as Congo's opposition was preparing to make him its emblematic formal spokesman.
But some analysts played down Bemba's political influence back home, saying he had already been sidelined since April last year when he fled his mineral-rich country into exile. Nevertheless, as one of Congo's best known political figures, Bemba has strong support in the Lingala-speaking west of the vast, former Belgian colony, including the western capital Kinshasa.
The arrest occurred soon after Congo said it was recalling its ambassador to Belgium in a row over comments by Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht. But Belgian authorities said they were simply co-operating with the ICC and denied any link.
However, Bemba's arrest angered even some non-MLC members. "He's a senator from a sovereign country. We are 80 times the size of Belgium. They can't just play with us like that. Colonisation ended in 1960." said Henriette Bongumba, 40.
Comments
Comments are closed.