Congo's Bad Year Is About To Get Worse

For a country that has witnessed millions of deaths, brutal colonial rule, and devastating dictatorship, the past year in the Democratic Republic of Congo still stands out as a bleak one.

Civilian massacres, decapitated police officers, bloody crackdowns, and resurgent armed groups, were fed in part by a national political crisis. The resulting instability has sparked fears of triggering the kind of regional war that scarred central Africa at the turn of the century, and has sent ordinary Congolese scrambling for safer pockets of the country.

“DRC’s largely forgotten crisis in central Africa superseded all other crises in terms of the number of people forced to flee their homes,” Ulrika Blom, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s country director in Congo, said in a statement. “Even Syria or Yemen’s brutal wars did not match the number of new people on the move in DRC last year.”

More than 922,000 Congolese were internally displaced due to conflict in 2016 – the highest recorded globally, according to a report published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center on Monday.

Analysts attribute part of these ills to an enduring election crisis.

President Joseph Kabila stayed in power after his constitutionally mandated two-term limit expired last December, citing heavy costs and incomplete voter lists for the delay in holding elections that were due last November.

“The political situation is chaotic,” said Augustin Kabuya, a spokesman for the main opposition UDPS party.

Indeed, recent months have seen violent street demonstrations, media shutdowns, and the arrests of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists.

The government and the opposition coalition, known as the Rassemblement, engaged in two rounds of talks last year to resolve the crisis. The first, mediated by the African Union, a key regional player, failed after criticism that it excluded much of the opposition.