DRC set for turmoil as Jean-Pierre Bemba expected home within weeks

Jean-Pierre Bemba, the Congolese opposition leader whose war crimes convictions at the international criminal court (ICC) were quashed, is expected to return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo within weeks, risking an intense new phase of political manoeuvring and instability in the vast and impoverished central African state.

Bemba, a former rebel leader and vice president, left the country in 2007 and spent the last 10 years in prison in The Hague before his surprise acquittal on appeal.

The 55-year-old is free in Belgium pending a hearing on a separate conviction for attempting to influence witnesses, but will travel to his homeland to attend a party congress to select a candidate for a presidential election due in December, a party spokesman said on Friday.

Joseph Kabila, whose second term expired in 2016, has repeatedly postponed the poll. He is barred from a third term by the constitution and his close associates have repeatedly denied that he hopes to find a way to stand again.

Bemba has a powerful support base in the DRC and experts describe his return as “a huge wildcard”.

“On his own, as an opposition leader, he could do extremely well,” said Stephanie Wolters, an analyst based in South Africa. “He is seen as a victim of Joseph Kabila’s politics and of international politics. If the opposition unite it would be very hard to see a Kabila victory that was anything but stolen.”

The opposition in the DRC is fragmented, with neither of the two current main leaders – Félix Tshisekedi and Moïse Katumbi – committing to a formal coalition backing a single candidate.

Bemba unsuccessfully opposed Kabila in elections in 2006. After his militia clashed violently with government forces in 2007, he was forced out of the DRC and arrested in Belgium.

Judges at the ICC initially found Bemba guilty on five counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by his private army during a five-month rampage in the neighbouring Central African Republic in 2002.

Bemba had sent his militia, the MLC – a rebel force that he later transformed into a political organisation – into the Congo’s northern neighbour to quash a coup against the then president, Ange-Félix Patassé.

The 18-year sentence was the longest ever to be handed down by the court.

“Many people in the DRC have always seen his indictment for crimes in the CAR as politicised. He is the only politician of national stature to be sent to The Hague and is a lot more credible as an opposition leader than Katumbi or Tshisekedi,” said Wolters.

The attitude of regional powers will be key in coming months, with western powers seemingly without significant influence on Kabila, who succeeded his assassinated father, Laurent, in 2001.

The US said on Thursday it had imposed visa bans on several unidentified senior officials in the DRC for corruption tied to the country’s electoral process to send a “strong signal” about the need for a peaceful transfer of power.

The move comes after the US Treasury sanctioned the Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler on15 June, saying he had amassed a fortune through corrupt mining and oil deals in the DRC using his close friendship with Kabila.

Sasha Lezhnev, deputy policy director at the nonprofit rights group Enough Project, called Thursday’s visa ban an important step “to dissuade Kabila from putting his name on the ballot and help ensure a credible election”.

“Several senior Congolese officials involved in corruption travel frequently to the US, so the visa ban is an important step,” said Lezhnev. “They or the businesses they partner with also use US banks to process corrupt commercial deals, so the US and EU should enact stronger sanctions on their corporate networks to target their assets.”

Corruption costs the DRC at least $15bn each year, or about three times its annual budget, according to Kabila’s anti-graft adviser.

“It’s an open secret that corruption exists and it is seriously eating away at institutions,” Emmanuel Luzolo Bambi told the UN’s news website Okapi.

The DRC, which Kabila has run since 2001, has the reputation of being one of the world’s poorest, most volatile and graft-riddled countries.

In Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index, the DRC ranked 161 out of 180 countries. The World Bank estimates GDP per capita annual income at $450, or 225th out of 237 economies surveyed.