African press review 21 March 2012

A UN report on DRC military violations gets a frosty reception in Kinshasa. Kenya has a timetable for next year's election, while controversy over violence after the last one continues. How is Côte d'Ivoire's Laurent Gbagbo enjoying life in The Hague? 

There's been an angry reaction in the Democratic Republic of Congo to yesterday's report by the United Nations in which DRC security forces are accused of serious human rights breaches during last year's elections.

According to this morning's edition of the daily Avenir, published in Kinshasa, the Congolese chief prosecutor has been instructed to open his own investigation of the allegations. According to the UN report, DRC military personnel were responsible for murder, abduction and arbitary arrest in Kinshasa during last November's presidential and legislative elections.

L'Avenir describes the allegations as "selective and tendentious".

The daily goes on to accuse the United Nations of lacking any clear policy in the DRC, beyond a determination to destabilise the authority of President Joseph Kabila. According to L'Avenir, the timing of this report could not have been more destructive, given that negotiations are currently under way with a view to forming a new government.

The government-aligned daily says the UN is simply following in the steps of Human Rights Watch, the international organisation which last December alleged that murders and abductions had been carried out by DRC security forces during the elections without, according to L'Avenir, being able to provide a single element of proof.

The authorities maintain that five people died on election day, 26 November last, and not 17 as alleged in the latest United Nations' report.

According to the UN, at least 33 people were murdered by security forces in the election period and that 16 are still missing. Two hundred and sixty-five people were arrested arbitrarily and held without charge during the same period.

The Standard in Kenya reports that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has finalised the timetable for next year's elections. Following the presidential first round on 4 March, there will be a run-off in April 2013 between the top two candidates should there be no clear winner. The Kenyan constitution requires a candidate to obtain more than 50 per cent of votes cast in order to win outright.

Voter registration will start in August and is expected to net about 18 million eligible voters.

The courts or parliament could still change the election date. President Mwai Kibaki favours the March date chosen, but Prime Minister Raila Odinga opposes it, saying the election should take place in December this year.

The Daily Nation reports that the Kenyan government cannot stop International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo from claiming that the 2008 post-election violence was planned at State House, the official residence of the president.

A report by a legal panel advising the government on the cases at the ICC says the Kenyan authorities would have to prove that national security would be compromised if the prosecution evidence was admitted.

In his case against four suspects, Moreno-Ocampo claims that meetings to plan revenge attacks in Nakuru and Naivasha were held at State House in Nairobi.

The ICC ruled in January that Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Francis Muthaura and Joshua Arap Sang have cases to answer in connection with the violence in which at least 1,133 people were killed in early 2008.

The Kenyan Daily Nation looks at how former Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, is finding life behind bars at the International Criminal Court holding facility.

Since he arrived at Scheveingen Prison on 29 November 2011, Laurent Gbagbo has physically weakened. He tells visitors of the eight difficult months he spent with neither sunshine nor natural light in the remote village prison at Korhogo in nothern Côte d'Ivoire.

His current living conditions at the VIP section of the International Criminal Court have nothing in common with his former life at Khorogo. Here he has good food, an individual cell, an office, a television set and access to a library.

At the ICC, he also benefits from medical care for his arthritis and he can, once a day, leave his prison cell and make his way to the gym at the heart of the prison complex.

“He is getting better physically,” says recent visitor Sylvain Miaka Ouretto, interim president of the Ivorian Popular Front. “Intellectually, he is as brilliant as ever.”