| International News

"Things went really well yesterday – in fact, surprisingly (so)," said Dorothy Madison-Seck, the regional director of Catholic Relief Services' Central Africa program, in a July 31 telephone interview from Kinshasa, Congo.

Although Madison-Seck said there were reports of a few polling stations opening late and other sporadic issues, there were few problems "other than those little glitches."

The sheer size of Congo, about the size of Western Europe, presented problems for election organizers. More than 25 million people registered to vote in nearly 50,000 polling stations in Congo, formerly Zaire, that has been racked by 40 years of dictatorial misrule and war.

Most election materials had to be brought by United Nations airplanes and helicopters to the polling stations, mostly churches and schools, because there are less than 1,000 miles of paved roads. This was the largest election support operation in the U.N.'s history.

Thirty-two candidates, including President Joseph Kabila, competed in the presidential polls, and around 9,700 candidates stood for the newly created, 500-seat Parliament.

Father Muholongu Malumalu, head of Congo's Independent Electoral Commission, said the "operation was unfolding well" in a statement on the commission's Web site.

Father Malumalu told reporters July 30 that a few problems did occur on election day – seven polling places burned down after polls closed in the town of Mweka, and 134 election kits – but no ballots – were destroyed in the opposition stronghold of Mbuji-Mayi, where many people boycotted the polls.

Also, a militia group in Ituri province, where war still rages, set up a roadblock and stopped several voters, said the Integrated Regional Information Network, a U.N.-sponsored news agency.

"We had 49,746 polling stations. The number of cases we are reporting are marginal when compared to the whole," Father Malumalu said.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, a powerful institution in Congo, weighed in on the elections ahead of the vote.

The Archdiocese of Kinshasa called for a boycott if transparency problems weren't fixed within 72 hours. But that position was quickly disavowed by the Congolese bishops' conference, which said July 27 the church's position remained that it was every Congolese's duty to participate in the elections.

The bishops urged Catholics to "participate massively in the vote" and to "clearly show their will for a new Congo."

Claude Berthiaume, a member of a five-person monitoring team from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a telephone interview from Lubumbashi that, like in much of the country, voters there gathered early and calmly.

He added that "two or three" presidential candidates were pulling ahead at the election office where he and 11 other observers watched vote counting, but he stressed that one polling station did not form a pattern.

Berthiaume added that the station where he watched the counting had one advantage over most areas of the country. "We were lucky because we had lights where I was," he said.

The Congolese church also sent out its own monitors through the country's interreligious observation network.

Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kisangani, president of the bishops' conference, said he would not comment until the results were announced and that the conference was waiting for reports from its monitoring teams.

The bishops' Web site said, "The elections happened in calm, without major incidents."

Results were expected in around three weeks, said Father Malumalu, who added that the commission would not be releasing preliminary results. If no candidate wins the necessary 50 percent, there will be a run-off between the top two candidates at the end of October. Parliamentary results will not be announced until after the presidential results are announced, Father Malumalu said.