Eleventh hour

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Today at 11am, people in Europe and the USA commemorated the official end of the First World War, taking two minutes of silence to remember the eight million who died in this tragic war. Today at 11am, two loud blasts echoed up the hill towards our peaceful haven, confirming the reports we’d been receiving since the morning of gunfire in downtown Kinshasa.

It is still unclear exactly what happened, and in what order. We already have a plethora of contradictory rumours, and I’m sure by Monday we will have just as many competing ‘official’ versions. What we do know is that people in Kinshasa mostly support Bemba , that for the past two weeks they have been fed misinformation about a confirmed Bemba win, that partial results now show Kabila in the lead (although not by much), that Bemba’s camp is alleging massive fraud although the man himself has remained quiet on the issue, that for the third day running ‘shegues’ and Bemba militants have been demonstrating, throwing stones and burning tires on the main downtown boulevard, that the intervention police were called in today to disperse them. Then it all becomes more confused. The police may or may not have shot in the air; Bemba’s private guards may or may not have retaliated with mortar-fire; the military may or may not have intervened; the Republican Guard may or may not have fired their tanks towards the river to keep Bemba’s men away from the Presidential house.

The truth is, apart from sporadic crackle from afar, and the obligatory radio monitoring and agitated text message exchanges, we have been happily sheltered from it all. I did have my first ever ration-pack meal today though.


“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.”

-- Bertrand Russell