May 27. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Congolese Police have finally prevented the great sit-in called for this Saturday by the opposition alliance to the Government in front of the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) in Lubumbashi in a new act of protest against the Government of the country’s president, Félix Tshisekedi .
The tension in the African country has been increasing in recent weeks, with the start, with a view to the elections scheduled for the end of the year, of a cycle of opposition demonstrations against the Government due to the deterioration of living conditions and violence army in the northeast of the country.
Supporters of the country’s four great opposition leaders — Moïse Katumbi, Augustin Matata Ponyo, Martin Fayulu and Delly Sesanga — have been prevented from accessing the vicinity of the CENI headquarters due to the barricades erected by the Police in the streets that overlooked the institutional headquarters.
Faced with the impossibility of starting the sit-in, opposition spokesman Mohamed Eyenga limited himself to reading a statement in which he accused the electoral authority of partisanship. “We refuse to hold elections in the current and corrupt electoral cycle that the CENI magistracy is auditing,” he indicated in the note, collected by the Congolese portal Actualité.
The mayor of Libumbashi, the second largest city in the country, Martin Kazembe, had declared this sit-in illegal on Friday, understanding that it posed a threat to social peace and that the current context did not justify this protest.
Last weekend, an opposition march in Kinshasa was broken up with great violence by the Congolese security forces to the point that the United Nations condemned the “disproportionate use of force” exerted by the Police.
The Minister for Human Rights of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Fabrice Albert Puela, demanded the opening of an immediate investigation into the violence displayed by the security forces, assuring that he will not tolerate the violation of the individual rights of the population “whatever the motivation”.
