coupures 18 juin 07 (eng)

Congo's self-exiled Bemba plans July return
By Joe Bavier
KINSHASA, June 16 (Reuters) - Congolese opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba hopes to return from self-imposed exile in Portugal next month after Senate leaders allowed him to extend a medical leave of absence, one of his advisers said on Saturday.
Bemba, elected a senator after losing landmark presidential elections last year, was granted a 60-day leave by the Senate in early April to seek medical treatment for an old injury.
His departure from Congo followed heavy fighting between his personal guard and government troops in Kinshasa.
The deadline for his return expired last weekend but the Senate leadership said in a statement late on Friday they had extended his leave until July 31 after receiving a letter from him asking to prolong his stay in Portugal.
"(Bemba) informed the Senate of his intention to return at the end of July, as long as his security situation is sorted out," Fidel Babala, one of Bemba's advisers, told Reuters.
The former rebel chief left Democratic Republic of Congo on April 11 after nearly three weeks holed up in the South African embassy, saying troops loyal to President Joseph Kabila were trying to kill him. The fighting killed hundreds of people.
Last week his Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) said the necessary measures were not yet in place to assure his security. His refusal to return had raised the possibility he might lose his Senate seat and the immunity that comes with it.
Bemba, a former warlord, lost to Kabila in a presidential election last October -- the first free polls held in the vast former Belgian colony in more than four decades.
Kabila and his government have placed blame for the violence earlier this year and a subsequent wave of looting on Bemba.
Public Prosecutor Tshimanga Mukeba wrote to the Senate in April requesting Bemba's immunity be lifted so that he could be prosecuted as the "intellectual author" of the violence.
Mukeba told Reuters on Saturday there had been no change in the government's plans to put Bemba on trial but that he was waiting for a response from parliament.
According to documents seen by Reuters, Bemba is accused of threatening state security, murder, armed robbery and destruction of property during the fighting, which erupted in March after his fighters refused to report for demobilisation.
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What Does Africa Need Most: Technology or Aid?

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By JASON PONTIN
Published: June 17, 2007
I AM just back from Tanzania in East Africa.
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In the mornings, disregarding the protests of the armed guards at my lodge near Arusha, I jogged along muddy footpaths. After the heavy rains, and under a low, misty sky, the fields looked as ruined as a battlefield. Very poor farmers and their children stared curiously at me as I passed.
In the afternoons, I attended the TEDGlobal 2007 conference, held by the Technology, Entertainment and Design organization in the modern Ngurdoto Mountain Lodge. The contrast between the two experiences troubled me.
TED conferences, mostly held in Monterey, Calif., are invitation-only affairs, are attended by the aristocracy of Silicon Valley and are known for their adventurousness in drawing together wildly disparate trends in technology, business and the arts.
On this occasion, Bono, the Irish rock star and champion of African causes, had persuaded the conference’s organizer, Chris Anderson, to invite the usual crowd, as well as African entrepreneurs, activists, health care professionals and artists to this tropical, leafy region midway between the Serengeti Plain and Mount Kilimanjaro.
Opening the conference on June 4, Mr. Anderson described his purposes as frankly promotional. Too often, he said, the only images of Africa that Westerners see are of drought, famine, disease and civil war. By contrast, TED Global 2007 would present an Africa that was newly entrepreneurial, increasingly wealthy and tech savvy, and largely politically stable.
“It’s a story,” Mr. Anderson said, “that is unfolding across the continent, and it’s a story that’s not well known outside of Africa.”
But beyond this Panglossian message, however much a corrective to the common images of African misery and however flattering to the pride of TED’s African attendees, was something that everyone at the conference knew (and which I saw every morning on my runs). Whether measured by per capita income or by the gross domestic product of its nations, Africa is the poorest place on earth. The question that the conference was really exploring was this: How can we make every African family richer?
At TED Global 2007, I witnessed one small skirmish in a larger ideological conflict between those who believe that Africa needs more and better international aid, and those who think entrepreneurialism and technology will lift the continent out of poverty and thus reduce its miseries.
Predictably, TED’s attendees and speakers were spellbound by technology and entrepreneurialism and, at the same time, distrustful of international aid.
“What man has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” asked Andrew Mwenda, an Ugandan journalist and social worker, now a research fellow at Stanford in California.
Mr. Mwenda argued that $500 billion in international aid over 50 years had achieved nothing in Africa and that the persistence of African poverty could be explained, in part, by aid. Charity, he said, had “distorted the incentive structure” and had persuaded the brightest Africans to work for corrupt governments. He called upon African entrepreneurs to build African businesses and the American investors in TED’s audience to finance them.
Echoing Mr. Mwenda, Russell Southwood, the publisher of Balancing Act, a newsletter about technology in Africa, implored African entrepreneurs and Western business leaders to “invest in shortages.” Africa, he said, could “leapfrog” the industrial technologies that Westerners use and build truly 21st-century technology systems and networks.
As an example, Mr. Southwood pointed to a near absence of telephone landlines in sub-Saharan Africa; cellular networks for mobile phones could quickly bring modern communications to hundreds of millions of Africans.
At least one of the African attendees of the conference was representative of the kind of technological entrepreneurialism that the show advocated.
Alieu Conteh, the chairman of Vodacom Congo, was born in Gambia, in West Africa, 55 years ago and moved to Congo in 1981. For years, he was a successful coffee buyer and exporter. Congo is about the size of Western Europe and has an estimated population of 65 million people. It is one of the least-developed nations in the world, with less than 300 miles of roads, most of them in poor condition.
Skip to next paragraph In 1997, Mr. Conteh recalled in an interview, he heard Laurent D. Kabila, then the country’s president, deliver a speech in which he called upon his countrymen to rebuild Congo’s infrastructure after the 30-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko. Mr. Conteh, who had no experience in telecommunications, said he was inspired. He decided to build the nation’s first GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) digital network.
At the time, according to Mr. Conteh, fewer than 10,000 people living in Congo — mainly business people, foreigners and government employees — had mobile handsets. They paid $7 to $10 a minute to make a call, using an older technology. Less than 15,000 homes had a telephone landline.
Mr. Conteh said he went, cap in hand, to the minister of communications to ask for the country’s first GSM license. In January 1998 he got it — but he first had to pay the government a license fee of $100,000. Over the years, and with little explanation, he said, the government, which is often terribly short of money, increased the license fee, first to $400,000, then $2 million.
Since, at first, no Western investors had any faith in the country’s mobile market, Mr. Conteh said he wrote the first checks to the government. And he paid $1.5 million to Nortel, the telecommunications equipment provider, to help create his network. To help raise the money, he had to sell his coffee trucks. In February 1999, Mr. Conteh introduced the Congo Wireless Network, with just 3,000 subscribers.
Throughout the early days of his company, Mr. Conteh faced challenges unknown to Western businesses. Once, after equipment providers declined to send engineers to Congo during a dangerous time in the country’s unending civil strife, he encouraged the citizens of Kinshasa, the capital, to collect scrap metal and weld them into a cellphone tower.
In 2001, he sold 51 percent of the company to Vodacom, South Africa’s largest mobile service provider, to get the capital to expand the mobile network to millions of Congelese.
By the middle of 2006, Vodacom Congo had more than 1.5 million subscribers, according to Vodacom’s annual report. Today, Mr. Conteh says, the company he founded has more than three million subscribers who have spent, on average, around $50 for a handset and who prepay about $2 for every five minutes of talk time. He says a recent offer for his shares valued Vodacom Congo at more than $1.5 billion. (He refused to name the interested party.)
Nonetheless, Mr. Conteh (whom I found charming, modest, hugely amused by his own travails — and very shrewd) turned down the offer. “My goal was never to become the richest man in Congo,” he told me. “I would like to create the country’s first stock market. Then I would like to float 20 percent of my share in a public offering, so that the people will see the company as theirs.”
MR. CONTEH is building a telecommunications network where none existed before. With 600 employees and 5,000 contractors, Vodacom Congo is one of his country’s biggest employers. If he realizes his ambition to create a stock market and offer shares in his company, he will have created new wealth. But the tale of Vodacom Congo also illustrates the difficulties of creating new businesses in Africa and the limits of entrepreneurialism as an alternative to international aid.
Mr. Conteh accepted risks that few businesses would, and for many years he found it impossible to attract more than a few eccentric investors. More significant, it has taken Mr. Conteh more than a decade to provide telecommunications to less than 10 percent of the country. While the existence of Vodacom Congo may one day help build other businesses, the country’s general poverty is not alleviated by the existence of the company.
In truth, Africa will need both investment in entrepreneurialism and aid, intelligently directed toward education, health and food.
Herman Chinery-Hesse, the founder of Softtribe, a software development company in Ghana, expressed this thought more personally than I could. “I think this choice between aid and entrepreneurship is false,” he told TED’s attendees. “If we wait for trade, it will take generations, and people need help now. On the other hand, only entrepreneurship can make us rich.”
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Radio station in Congo shut down for broadcasting 'bad French'
06/15/2007
New York, June 15, 2007— Intelligence agents in the Democratic Republic of Congo shut down a privately owned radio station for “intoxicating the population” and “broadcasting in bad French.” It was the sixth Congolese broadcaster this year to be raided by security forces over its coverage.
Radio Canal Satellite remained off the air today after a raid last Saturday by three agents of the Congolese National Intelligence Agency (ANR), according to the local press freedom group Journaliste en Danger (JED) and news reports.
“The world’s jails would be full if bad French were a crime,” said Joel Simon, CPJ’s executive director. “Clearly Congolese authorities are making it up as they go along and using any pretext to shut down independent broadcasters. We call on authorities to allow Radio Canal Satellite back on the air immediately.”
The agents confiscated equipment after the station’s staff fled the studios fearing arrest, local journalists told CPJ. They said Canal Satellite’s director, Yves Beya, had received several phone threats.
Gustave Amuri, the ANR deputy chief in Tshikapa, 405 miles (650 km) southeast of the capital Kinshasa, later accused the station of “operating without ANR documents,” “intoxicating the population,” and “broadcasting in bad French,” according to local media.
Local journalists said Amuri cited three things in the broadcast he objected to, including a report about a pay dispute between Congolese workers and Lebanese employers in Kinshasa.
The country’s press laws do not grant ANR any authority in media regulation.
Last month, CPJ named the DRC one of the world’s worst backsliders on press freedom.
CPJ is a New York–based, independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide. For more information, visit www.cpj.org.
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Congo-Kinshasa: UN Security Council to Visit June 19

United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa)
15 June 2007Posted to the web 15 June 2007
Monuc Press Release
The sitting President of the Security Council, Ambassador Johan Verbeke (Belgium) recently announced that the delegation composed of representatives of all 15 members of the United Nations Security Council will travel to Africa for a working visit from 14 to 20 June 2007, and will go in succession to Ethiopia, Sudan, Ghana, Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
During its stay in DRC, from Tuesday 19 June until Wednesday June 20 2007, the Security Council delegation will have the opportunity to meet high level Congolese political authorities, with whom they will discuss the important issues of security, consolidation of democracy and issues related to the respect of human rights and international humanitarian law.
This is the eighth consecutive year in which the Security Council comes to the DRC, and the first time since the advent of the Third Republic.
This visit takes place a few months after those of the Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations in the DRC and marks, once more, the commitment of the United Nations to stand by the Congolese people and its leaders, in the consolidation of peace, democratic institutions and the rule of law.
It also follows the recent renewal, on 15 May of this year, of the mandate of MONUC, the UN Peacekeeping Mission in the DRC, emphasizing the important contribution of the United Nations in the efforts of the Democratic Republic of Congo for the consolidation of peace and the development of the country.
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Congo-Kinshasa: Campaign Launched to Aid More Than 14,000 Street Children in Kinshasa

United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa)
14 June 2007Posted to the web 14 June 2007
Eoin Young
A joint MONUC - Congolese National Police (PNC) campaign for child protection in the DRC, in partnership with UNICEF and the DRC Ministry of the Interior, was launched this Thursday 14 June 2007 at MONUC headquarters in Kinshasa, aimed at aiding the lives of more than 14,000 children living on Kinshasa's streets.
The campaign will run until November 20, 2007, when the campaign partners will meet to assess the achievements and progress made in relation to this important issue, which is paramount to the future success of the DRC.
In his opening address, UN Deputy Special Representative to the Secretary General in the DRC Ross Mountain said that every day one hears of the problem of street children and the law in Kinshasa.
"UNICEF did a census which estimated that there are more than 14,000 children living on the streets of Kinshasa, with many open to violence and abuse on a daily basis. They count on the PNC to protect them, which is the reason why this initiative was launched."
"The objective of the campaign is to underline the important role of child protection and to have well trained and informed police who will respect the rights of minors, and promote the message of child protection," he added.
The campaign also aims, in conjunction with UNICEF, the PNC, as well as MONUC police and MONUC's Child Protection Division, to instill a code of good practice within the PNC in relation to child protection as well as reinforcing their capacities and sensitizing the public on the importance of child protection within society.
Spokesman for the DRC Ministry of the Interior Col. Kabengele explained that the DRC government is committed to working in partnership so that this problem can be addressed.
"50% of the DRC population are children, and it's critical that they be protected. We have set up technical groups to examine the problem, comprising of representatives from the Ministries of Justice, Youth and Social services, and specialised child protection units within the PNC are planned," he said.
Tony Bloomberg from UNICEF said the situation of children vis à vis the law in the DRC was a concern for them, with up to 10 children being held in police cells every day.
"The key actors with regard to child protection are the PNC, children's courts and social welfare services. The first step in this process will be a new code of protection for children, which will be legislated in July," he said.
"Up to 60% of children living on the streets of Kinshasa alone are thrown onto the streets with impunity by their parents, accused of sorcery and witchcraft. Poverty is no excuse for the violence done against these children, and a protective environment needs to be set up for children so that they can be protected," he underlined.
MONUC Police Commissioner Daniel Cure said that what was needed was a police force in the DRC that works closely with the population and responds to their needs.
"A necessary partnership with civil society is needed which give a collective awareness among all of the importance of child protection, in the family, schools, the PNC and DRC society in general.
The campaign will officially start on Saturday June 16, which is African Child Day.