Thank you very much for your question, Ms. Vandenbeld.
The election situation in the DRC is indeed extremely complicated. That is nothing new. We saw it in 2006 and 2011 and we are seeing it again now. The elections were supposed to be held in 2016, and they have been postponed twice.
The issue is not only whether they will take place, but, as you said, whether they will be credible, transparent and fair. Above all, whether the Congolese people will have enough trust in the results to allow peace in the country. If they do not have that trust, holding the elections serves no purpose because they will cause conflict thereafter.
As for the voting machines, which the Congolese call “the cheating machines”—which gives you a good idea of how the people view them—they were a choice the government made. Personally, as an observer, I do not feel that the voting machines will be up to the task, and neither do the other international diplomats in the country. There will be 100,000 polling stations. The DRC is a huge country the size of western Europe. The size of the country, and the number of polling stations, is really hard to imagine. To be able to hold the elections with voting machines, hundreds of millions of dollars would need to have been invested, and the government does not seem to have the money. Above all, the order for the machines needed to be in last February, and that was not done. So I am a little sceptical about how the commitment of the Congolese government will turn out in reality. I actually get the impression that the use of the voting machines will be mixed with traditional paper ballots.
In terms of observation, we have a very interesting $10-million project with the Conférence épiscopale nationale du Congo, the CENCO. The goal of this project is to help to train people for the elections, but also for observation. Ten thousand Congolese observers are being funded by the project and are in the process of being trained by the CENCO. A lot of women are part of the program as well. So I am very encouraged by that.
As regards the audit, as you know, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, or OIF, is in the process of conducting one, led by General Sangaré, who has a lot of experience in French-speaking Africa. A very positive aspect of the election audit is that the opposition parties, civil society and international organizations were able to participate directly. Voter registration was done incompletely and the fingerprints of eight million voters are not available, but the OIF is urging the government to rectify the situation before the elections.
There will also be a public audit of the voters’ list, which will allow citizens to see the list and try to correct the errors in it.