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INSIDE AFRICA

President Kabila Reelected in the DRC; U.N. Summit on Climate Change Takes Place in Kenya

Aired November 18, 2006 - 12:30:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

FEMI OKE, HOST: Hello. I'm Femi Oke. This is INSIDE AFRICA, your weekly look at life and news on the continent.
From the election in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the U.N. Climate Summit in Kenya, there's plenty at stake in both of the events we're going to bring you up to date on this week. We begin in the DRC, where this week's presidential election has done little to ease tensions. Incumbent President Joseph Kabila may have won another term in office, but he hasn't won peace yet. The capital has been marked by sporadic violence, and opposition candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba disputes the results.

So can the man elected to lead Congo finally bring peace to his country? Jeff Koinange reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEFF KOINANGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): He grew up in exile before returning to join the ragtag rebel army led by his father, which went on to challenge and defeat one of Africa's most brutal dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko. And all this before his 30th birthday.

For the past five years, he's reluctantly led a war-weary nation, following his father's assassination while in office. Now, Joseph Kabila feels he's earned his stripes and says this time around he's up to be challenged of becoming president of Africa's third largest nation.

PRES. JOSEPH KABILA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: I'm more than confident. Not over confident, but yes, I'm confident.

KOINANGE: But tensions are still running high in the capital, with opponent Jean-Pierre Bemba refusing to acknowledge the loss.

JEAN-PIERRE BEMBA, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I regret to have to say to our people and the international community that I cannot accept these results, which are far from reflecting the truth of the ballot box.

KOINANGE: Coups, wars, diseases and more wars have defined a sorry state of a nation the size of all of Western Europe.

WILLIAM SWING, U.N. SPECIAL REP. TO THE DRC: This is one of the great humanitarian tragedies of our times since the Second World War, with nearly 4 million people who died through directly or indirectly causes of the war. Secondly, it is clearly the only part of Africa that lacks a center of political gravity, and we need to see that that happens.

KOINANGE: If that happens, Congo could potentially be Africa's wealthiest by far, with the bottomless supply of some of the world's most precious minerals.

ALEX GORBANSKY, SECURITY ANALYST: It's important to recognize, while the Congo is very important, it's one of the richest countries in the world from the mineral resources perspective. The Congo has the potential to be the Saudi Arabia of the minerals industry. That's just how wealthy it is in copper, cobalt and gold. But at the same time, the irony is that it's also one of the poorest countries in the world.

KOINANGE: And then, there's the natural resources like the Congo River, the world's second longest after the Amazon, which could, if properly exploited, supply enough electricity to light up all of Africa from the Cape to Cairo.

But experts say, Congo's riches have also been its curse. A curse that now needs to be exorcised by Kabila before the country can finally shake off its tumultuous past.

CABILA: This time around, we'll get it right. There are basically not very many margins for error, so this time around, we'll get it correct.

KOINANGE: The question on everyone's mind - can one of Africa's most troubled countries finally quiet its critics and succeed in pulling off a miracle, or is the Congo about to self-destruct and end up being written of as yet another African tragedy?

Jeff Koinange, CNN, Kinshasa.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: As you can see, put the energy of the Congolese people into rebuilding the country, it would be one of the best countries in the whole of Africa.

Now, U.N. and European Union troops in the DRC remain on alert in the wake of recent unrest. Some 17,000 strong, they're one of the world's largest peacekeeping forces. Jeff Koinange reported and patrolled the streets of Kinshasa with E.U. troops earlier on this week.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KOINANGE (voice-over): These are some of the men responsible for bringing peace to a war-ravaged land. Young, tough, well-trained, well- equipped, and ready for anything.

CAPT. PIERRE PRUD'HOMME, COMPANY COMMANDER, EUFOR: Our mission is to protect the population, to secure the (inaudible) process, and not to protect individual interests.

KOINANGE: Their services were required following the country's first run of elections in late July. Twenty-three people were killed and scores injured in violence that erupted when the elections did not produce a clear winner. Only after the intervention of these troops from the European Union was calm restored in the streets of the capital.

But the second round of elections resulted in more violence this past weekend, leaving four dead.

Lieutenant Colonel Tierry Fusalba, a seasoned veteran of the French Foreign Legion, leads a company of soldiers on patrol through the mean streets of Kinshasa. These paratroopers are more used to serving in peacetime Europe than war-torn Congo.

As they patrol the street, they're met with the mixed reaction from locals. Some clearly happy to have the presence of foreign troops in their country; others -- well, not so happy.

PRUD'HOMME: It depends on the location in the city. Usually they're very friendly, but sometimes I think they're afraid, so they express themselves with some - not aggressive, but some bad words and things like that, but that's very few, in fact. And it's perfectly understandable.

KOINANGE: In this French-speaking country, these troops work to win the hearts and minds and confidence of the locals.

LT. COL. TIERRY FUSALBA, EUFOR: We, the French parachutists, are very closest to the population, and we take contact with them, and we have a lot of discussion to explain why we're here and what our mission, and to show to them that we're not soldiers that are here to kill them.

KOINANGE (on camera): Now, there are only 1,400 European forces troops in Kinshasa, a city of more than 6 million people. But these men insist they're seasoned veterans, and that if push comes to shove, they're more than ready to hold their own.

PRUD'HOMME: Yes, we're ready for everything, quite everything, despite the fact that we know that we can imagine 50 scenarios, it will be the 51.

KOINANGE (voice-over): Lieutenant Colonel Fusalba insists at the end of the day, Congo's future should rest on the shoulders of the Congolese and not on the presence of foreign troops.

PRUD'HOMME: We will do our best for the future, but after, I think, the Congolese people have to take their - their destiny in their hands.

KOINANGE: A destiny that could go either way - total peace or all-out war. The European Union troops are scheduled to leave at the end of November, but they say they're prepared to stay a little longer.

Jeff Koinange, CNN, on patrol with EUFOR forces on the streets of Kinshasa.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: Jeff has been covering the Congo for more than a decade. Later on in the show, he takes us back to the Congo to tell us what it's like to cover the region as a journalist. That's later in our program in the "Reporter's Notebook".

Also, coming up - global warming raises the temperature at the U.N. Climate Summit in Kenya. We'll tell you what's really at stake. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KOFI ANNAN, U.N. SECRETARY-GENERAL: All of us want to see the day when everyone, not just the fortunate few, can live in dignity and look to the future with hope. All of us want to create a world of harmony among human beings and between them in the natural environment on which life depends. That mission, which has always faced long odds, is being - is now being placed in deeper jeopardy by climate change.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OKE: That was U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan speaking this week at the first ever U.N. climate conference held in sub-Saharan Africa. Addressing delegates at the 189-nation talks, Annan said there was a frightening lack of leadership on curbing global emissions, and as the least developed continent, Africa is poised to suffer the worst consequences.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

OKE (voice-over): Ethiopia's nomadic pastures: The floods hit while many of these villagers were sleeping.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): It was terrifying. The water washed away many people, especially children, women and the elderly.

OKE: More than 900 people reportedly died in the floods, partially a result of what some researches call a hot spot of climate change.

MARIO MARRERO: The definition for a hot spot to climate change and vulnerability is an area where you're going to have big - large impacts of climate change and where you have a lot of poor and vulnerable people.

PETER SMERDON, WORLD FOOD PROGRAMME: The droughts are becoming faster, more prolonged, and the floods which follow cause more damage because the land is seriously degraded.

OKE: Similar things are happening in Kenya, where experts and locals blame climate change for both destructive drought and rainfall in the country.

JUSTUS LAVI, VILLAGER: My feeling is that something serious needs to be done to correct this abnormality.

OKE: These are the types of issues that have brought some 6,000 delegates to the Kenyan capital for a U.N. conference on climate change.

MOODY AWORI, KENYAN VICE PRESIDENT: So, we're all gathered here this morning on behalf of humankind throughout the world, because we acknowledge the fact that climate change is rapidly emerging as one of the most serious threats that humanity may ever face.

OKE: Much of this conference is focusing on helping poorer countries grapple with climate change by financing the building of walls to hold back rising seas, for example, or switching to drought-resistant crops.

ANNAN: The question is not whether climate change is happening or not. But whether in the face of this emergency, we ourselves can change fast enough.

OKE: Scientists and study groups say that unless we do, increasing climate change could bring more floods, droughts, desertification and rising sea levels. And not just in Africa. U.S. climate scientists say rapid warming has raised the world temperatures to levels not seen in at least 12,000 years. Britain's leading climate scientists say extreme drought will spread to one third of the planet, in effect making agriculture impossible unless climate change is reined in. NASA last month announced a dramatic melting of Greenland's ice mass, leading to rising sea levels. The U.N.'s chief climate scientist says a forthcoming report will show much stronger evidence that humans are behind these changes, and that this will likely have a major impact on the political debate over global warming.

RAJENDRA PACHAURI, U.N. PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE: There's a huge expectation that this report will provide some solid and credible findings on the basis of (inaudible) the public can take some positions.

OKE: In the hot seats of the debate, including at this year's conference, are the U.S. and Australia, the only major industrialized countries to reject the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions by 2012. The U.S. says it is instead focusing on developing cleaner fuels and argues that emission curbs will harm its economy.

But a new report commissioned by the British government says world's economies do not have to suffer while dealing with climate change. The economics of climate change has created quite a stir by describing climate change as the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen. The report offered by Sir Nicholas Stern says unimpeded global warming could cause between 5 percent and 20 percent of global growth domestic product each year.

Kofi Annan called the Stern report good news:

ANNAN: I think there are many leaders who are not taking climate change seriously. I was encouraged by the report that the United Kingdom government issued, which really also sounded the alarm.

OKE: But for some, like Ethiopia's nomadic (inaudible), the alarms could be sounding too late. Researches say further climate fluctuations may make life here totally impossible. And after hundreds of generations in this former wetlands, these Ethiopians may soon have to consider a new way of life.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: Earlier, we spoke to Jonathan Pershing with the World Resources Institute, who had just returned from the Nairobi conference.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JONATHAN PERSHING, WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE: It strikes me that the negotiations and the discussions in Nairobi did not have the sense of urgency that I believe the problem warrants.

Ultimately, as we move forward, we don't have a lot of time before we're locked in to the kinds of emissions that we probably can't return from, that we couldn't retreat from.

Invariably, it's the poorest people in the world who have the worst impact. Africa, with less than 3 percent of the world's GDP, is responsible for less than 5 percent of total emissions, which means that the cause of the climate problem is not from them.

But then we began to look at impacts. The impacts are on declining water and air that's already hurting. The impacts are on heat, which increases the problem with growing food. The impacts are on diseases, which already in Africa we see problems handling -- more malaria, more dengue fever, more schistosomiasis, more river blindness. Those are diseases that are carried by mosquitoes primarily, and as it gets warmer, they move further and further up slopes and into the northern parts of the country.

So, what we're seeing is a significant increase in impact, and unfortunately the people in Africa are likely to see some of the worst of those.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: And that was Jonathan Pershing of the World Resources Institute, speaking to us earlier on the problem with global warming. It's a very difficult thing to plan for in terms of seeing that immense damage that could be done in the future. Our show will continue to follow this story over the next couple of years.

Now, there's more to come on INSIDE AFRICA. Just ahead, we head back to the Congo. Jeff Koinange gets out his reporter's notebook to tell us what it's really been like to cover the region as a journalist for a whole decade. See you on the other side.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

OKE: Hello again. Good to see you. I'm Femi Oke. You're watching INSIDE AFRICA.

Now, traveling the world as a journalist is one of the most fascinating jobs in the world. This week, we asked Jeff Koinange to dip into his reporter's notebook and his memory bank to tell us about his years of covering the Congo.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KOINANGE (on camera): I've been coming to the Congo ever since it was known as Zaire. Africa's third largest country, the size of all of Western Europe. It's been both a difficult and exciting country to cover.

(voice-over): For more than three decades, Zaire was ruled by one man, Mobutu Sese Seko, arguably Africa's biggest of the big men. Mobutu's rule came to a crashing end one morning in May 1997. That's when these soldiers stormed the capital Kinshasa after marching for more than eight months across this vast land.

They were led by this man, Laurent-Desire Kabila, a former brothel owner turned rebel leader. Kabila was installed as president and went on to rule the country with an iron fist for four years. One of his first tasks was to change the country's name to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But he's also credited with plunging the nation into a war that would involve no fewer than six surrounding nations, a war that would come to be known as Africa's First World War. Tens of thousands killed, and countless more maimed.

And then one January morning in 2001, Kabila met his fate, gunned down by his own bodyguards.

(on camera): I was in Kinshasa the day they buried Kabila, and soon after, when they installed his 29-year old son Joseph as the country's interim president. Young Joseph had grown up in exile, joining his father's rebel army, and rising to the rank of major general. Now he's been selected to lead a country and a people he hardly knew.

(voice-over): Since then, I've ridden with him in his jeep, taken walks with him across this vast land, and crossed some pretty shaky bridges with him.

He once told me he's resigned to whatever fate has installed for him.

KABILA: You should never be afraid of death. My father was assassinated on the 16th of January 2001. So death does not really scare me, not at all.

KOINANGE: But Kabila's wasn't the only story we've covered in our many trips to the Congo. We've flown this huge expanse of land from Goma in the east to Lubumbashi in the south to the mouth of the Congo River in the west, the second largest in the world after the Amazon. We've been on patrol with peacekeepers through some of the thickest jungles, where rebels often seek sanctuary. Peacekeepers from countries as far away as Bangladesh and Pakistan trying to maintain law in a lawless land. And we've had some fun, like the time we met the bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees. They're only found in the Congo, and they're threatened with extinction due to civil war and pouching.

But the one story that will probably haunt me forever is the one we did in the hospital for rape victims in Bukabu in the eastern Congo. On the day we were there, there were more than 600 women of all ages being attended to. Old, young and even toddlers, all of them said to have been raped repeatedly by men in uniform.

It's here we also met some heroes, people like Dr. Dennis Moquege Mukengere (ph), a lone physician whose mission, he said, was to try to restore some dignity to the women of Congo.

When it came time to leave the hospital, the women sang a song for us, the words of which I'll never forget. "We will never be broken," they sang, "we will never be broken."

(on camera): Those haunting words seem to define the Zaire that became the Democratic Republic of Congo -- a land so badly treated by despots and dictators, a land once described by the novelist Joseph Conrad as "the heart of darkness."

But now for the first time since I've been covering this vast land, experts believe recent democratically held elections may be a first step in ushering in the light.

(voice-over): The responsibility of leading now rests on the shoulders of this man, a foreign-born Congolese who dedicated his life to overthrowing a despot. Now he's reaching out to Congo's 60 million people as he tries to mend their broken country one giant challenge at a time.

Jeff Koinange, CNN, Kinshasa.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OKE: Thanks very much, Jeff. I'm sure this won't be the last time he heads out to the DRC. Do you mind a little bit of video from the bonobo chimps? The one fact I remember from that report is the bonobos unlike many animals procreate not just during the season, but whenever they feel like it. They're more like humans than the rest of the animal kingdom. I like those chimps.

The INSIDE AFRICA team wants to hear from you. Please, send us your pictures, videos or email and tell us about your Africa. Whether you've visited the continent or whether you call it your home, we want to share your impressions of Africa with the entire world. You can send them to INSIDEAFRICA@CNN.COM. That's INSIDEAFRICA@CNN.COM. Thank you for watching.

And next week's show, a special show highlighting the plight of some of Africa's refugees. We'll be particularly looking at those fleeing the conflict in Somalia, and some incredible video you won't want to miss. So join us next week, same time, same place. Let INSIDE AFRICA be your window to the continent.

Until the next time, I'm Femi Oke. Take care.

END

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