12 07 13 Congo Siasa – What will become of the national dialogue?

Since
last Saturday, hundreds of opposition politicians have been hunkered down in the
Limete neighborhood, trying to decide what to do about the national dialogue.
Since the controversial 2011 elections, the opposition has been demanding such a
dialogue, an initiative President Kabila seemed to endorse in his State of the
Union address last December. The UN Security Council has also apparently thrown
its weight behind the idea, asked the head of the peacekeeping mission to
"promote inclusive and transparent political dialogue among all Congolese
stakeholders with a view to furthering reconciliation and democratization" in
Resolution 2098. 


But
the various parties seem to have radically different visions of what this
dialogue should be. In his decree of
June 26, Kabila used the name Concertations nationales, and placed the
heads of the national assembly and senate at the head of the "presidium," which
will coordinate the meeting, control the funds, and––to the outrage of the
opposition––unilaterally adopt the meeting's by-laws. Discussions will take
place in the assembly, which will include hundreds of people from all political
parties, customary chiefs, civil society, courts and public administration,
experts, and "historical figures." It's hard to see how they will come to an
agreement on anything, especially as the whole thing is only supposed to last
for twenty days. And there is nothing to guarantee the implementation of these
conclusions: President Kabila is simply required to report the conclusions to
the Congolese people, after which he is apparently free to ignore
them.

The
opposition has, not surprisingly, called foul, and is pushing for a change to
this decree to make the discussions more balanced and their conclusions more
binding. We will have to wait for the end of the Limete conclave to know more,
but the opposition is also becoming a victim of its own internal divisions. The
two biggest opposition parties––the MLC and the UDPS––are not officially
attending the conclave, although some UDPS members are present. The UDPS
continues to suffer from the split created when a majority of its election
parliamentarians refused to obey Etienne Tshisekedi's order not to take up their
positions in the national assembly. Accusations are now piling up that Samy
Badibanga, the leader of one of the UDPS factions in the national assembly, is
growing too close to Kabila.

Things
are hardly better within the MLC. Jean-Pierre Bemba continues to manage the
party from his jail cell in The Hague––he made the decision not to attend the
conclave, suspicious that the concertations would be a means for Kabila to
co-opt the opposition through a government of national unity, and perhaps even
to change to constitution to allow Kabila to stay in power past 2016. This
remote-control-management has allowed relations to sour among the party's
remaining leaders––Jean-Lucien Bussa and Thomas Luhaka have fallen out over how
the party should be managed, most recently over who the MLC should send to the
national election commission. Bemba reportedly believes that a verdict in his
ICC case will be forthcoming this year, and that he could be let off with time
served, despite the long list of MLC-defectors who have testified against
him.

Meanwhile,
the new head of the UN peacekeeping mission, Martin Kobler, has not yet arrived.
When he does arrive in Kinshasa, he will have the unenviable task of trying to
make sure the concertations do not turn into a farce.