Despite the violence reigning in eastern DRC, the civil society is resisting and reacting as citizens to the arbitrariness and brutality to which they are subjected. The churches are at the heart of this mobilisation and taking active part in preparations for elections that are considered antidotes to the war and declining State.

The small mining town of Kamituga, on the edges of South Kivu and Maniema Provinces, is flooded with noise from daybreak on, even though not a single car drives through it. There's the murmur that rises from the market, where people throng to buy low-cost items from China; the radios and cassette players blasting at maximum loudness; the backfiring of the gleaming motorcycles, whose engines the young men who transport gold to Bukavu gun to show off; and even more. On top of it all, stubborn and insistent as the rattling of noisemakers, is the rhythmic pounding, from dawn until dusk, of the pilons, the hammers that the women wield in place of the machines that have long since rusted. The women of Kamituga have deserted farming and fled their fields on the forest's edge to spend all day, seven days a week, crushing the stones that the diggers bring them. They crush the stones into small heaps of grey dust that will then be sieved and washed until the shiny particles of gold dust, the object of everyone's desire and the source of the region's wealth and misfortune, are found twinkling in the pans. The wages that these women earn are set by the diggers on whom they depend and do not exceed a dollar a day. Still, they do not complain, explaining that in town at least they are fairly safe and not likely to be abducted or raped by the Interhahamwe, the Rwandan Hutus who continue to hide in Maniema's forests.

However, once through the parish church gate, the buzz of Kamituga dies away, to be replaced by a studious atmosphere. Next to the office of Abbot Jean-Claude, who is the parish vicar, women gather around Dévote several times a week. These are not catechism lessons or charity work, although these women, who are often on their own with dependent children, lack everything and also have to break rocks to survive. The reason for their gatherings is both simple and ambitious: They want to learn how to read and write as quickly as possible so that they "are able to do their duty as voters to the best of their ability", as Dévote tells us.

Dévote, who works as a nurse in a nearby hospital (a hospital that gets no international assistance and operates thanks only to the patients' voluntary contributions) readily translates her fellow citizens' remarks: They have no identity cards, have never registered with the population office, and know that registering as voters will enable them to obtain some official ID. But above all, these women have understood that the elections will enable them to choose their leaders for the first time in their lives, and on all levels of government: local, national, and presidential. They stress this fact: "Here, in the east, we have been occupied, exploited, and plundered. The people responsible for our troubles are still here. Tomorrow they will stand for election. But we also know that there are other candidates, people who have come from the rank and file, former trade unionists, patriots, people who embodied the resistance. We want to be able to choose, to be able to be observers in the polling stations and prevent cheating."

They were already very attentive during voter registration, making certain that "non-Congolese", that is, foreign infiltrators from Rwanda and Burundi, could not pass themselves off for Congolese nationals, and combed through the lists of registered voters posted outside the offices.

Abbot Jean-Claude supervises both the women's literacy training and the preparations for the elections and loaned the parish schools' classrooms to the Independent Electoral Commission. His optimism stems from a strong will: "The people's ability to mobilise is not gauged in Kinshasa, and even less so abroad. The Congolese want to vote, and they began organising long ago to make sure that this election takes place, including in the most far-flung regions…People also forget that this 'self organisation' of the people is longstanding. It goes back to the times of Mobutu, who abandoned us…".

To illustrate this mobilisation of his flock, the abbot mentioned the existence of Justice et Paix (Justice and Peace) groups, which are found in all the parishes, the constancy of the grass-roots Christian communities, called "diaconies" (deaconries), that are present throughout the country, and boasts of the excellent collaboration among all the religious faiths: "When our Protestant neighbours lacked teaching materials, we gave them the leaflets that Justice et Paix had handed out to us and had been printed thanks to funds from Belgium. These little brochures explain very concretely how to vote and how to detect possible tampering. They used them for their own training meetings." In Belgium, indeed, an awareness-raising campaign conducted by the Flemish Roman Catholic organisation Broederlijk Delen, Justice et Paix, and other Christian NGOs on the subject "Congo wants to vote" succeeded in raising funds that were used to support the grass-roots organisations in the DRC.

In the field, the agreement reached by the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, Muslims, and "revivalist churches", that is, the cults that are propagating throughout the country, is a reality: All the religious denominations have agreed to abstain from proselytising and to join forces to train their faithful with a view to the elections. Such an agreement is of capital importance in this country, where almost every citizen asserts a religious affiliation…

Abbot Malu Malu's challenge
This determination of the grass-roots organisations will probably hold fast, despite the hierarchies' contradictory messages. Indeed, the chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, (IEC), Abbot Malu Malu, who enjoys strong community support, has found himself out of the Episcopal Conference's good graces.

A small man with sparkling eyes in a very mobile face, the abbot, who has become a key figure in Congolese politics, comes from Butembo, in Nande country, in eastern Congo. After earning a Ph.D. in political science at Grenoble University (France), he was appointed rector of Graben University, in Butembo. This university is supported entirely by private funding and considered the best in the region. After his appointment to head the IEC, the abbot maintained his ties with the grass-roots Christian communities and, outside the State and international organisations, he has an impressive network of contacts in the parishes. This popular base enables him to take the blows from his hierarchy's crosier philosophically. Indeed, the Episcopal Conference of the Congo, headed by Monsignor Monsengwo, who used to head the Sovereign National Conference (1991-92) and harbours a certain nostalgia for active politics, distanced itself from the IEC's chairman, thereby ensuring that the latter could not commit the Church as an institution.

This reluctance upset the Western powers that are paying a pretty penny to finance the voter registration work and future elections (the bill for the European Union alone amounts to US$149 million) and discreet pressure was put on the Congolese hierarchy, via the Vatican, to prevent it from withdrawing its support for the electoral process.

The registration of twenty million voters that took place across the entire country despite logistic problems and calls to boycott the process that were issued by certain parties such as Etienne Tshisekedi's UDPS (Union démocratique pour le progrès social or Democratic Union for Social Progress), shows in addition how the people are still standing, despite the oft-described failure of the Congolese State. Simple citizens have not lost their desire to form a nation. They have organised to survive and withstand foreign aggression and the overwhelming majority are determined to get to the ballot box. Their only frustration, for many of them, is not to have been able to reach the voter registration offices in time…

The limits of the people's participation
The Congolese people's ability to organise themselves often escapes the control of, and sometimes displeases, UN agencies and humanitarian teams, which prefer to have the feeling of working with a clean slate where everything must be rebuilt or redone.

In the field, for example, there have been times when Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) teams, wishing to distribute medication and provide medical care to an extremely poor population free of charge, have clashed with Congo's health workers. Both sides' arguments are valid: MSF argues that the cost recovery policy of fee-for-service healthcare makes dispensaries inaccessible to a large proportion of the population, whereas the local doctors and nurses point out that the country's weak healthcare facilities, which date back to the colonial era and the first years of Mobutu's regime, have survived despite the total absence of official funding because the local communities are used to taking charge of themselves. So, the dispensaries and health centres, including those that belong to religious institutions, ask their patients to make a contribution, even a token contribution, and many people fear that in restoring free health care, foreign aid will destroy these longstanding reflexes of self-sufficiency…Indeed, the citizens of the Congo learnt to do without the State a long time ago: The Mobutu regime, which had been grappling with an economic crisis since the late 1970s, was preoccupied with remaining in power and enriching its elite, and was all the more indifferent to the people's needs as it faced no threat from free and democratic elections, had long ago delegated responsibility for social services to foreign development agencies.

Since the early 1990s the regime, having reached an end-of-reign situation and being in disgrace, was penalised by the West. In withdrawing all their direct co-operation programmes, the West effectively left the people to their own devices. After the collapse of Mobutu's regime, the Congolese went through five years of a bloody war, then, after the Sun City Accords, two years of a transition in which the social sector was the least of their leaders' concerns, given that these leaders had been promoted by the force of their arms.

Despite all that, even though they sometimes have the feeling of being abandoned by God and man, the Congolese have coped with adversity. Everywhere in the country, in the bush and in towns alike, when people are asked, "How are things?" they give this simultaneously clear and evasive answer: "We're here. Things are somewhat OK, just somewhat", which means "Times are hard but we're hanging in, we've held our own, we hope that things will improve." In other words, they are trying to pull through.

The key to this resourcefulness is family solidarity, the support of relatives who live in town or, even better, those who have managed to go abroad and send money back to the family members who have stayed in the country. It is impossible to set a figure to the sums that are transferred through such channels, but they far surpass the international aid budgets for the DRC.

Church networks have also played a role, and the missions circuit has remained intact, despite ageing foreign priests, with all that that entails: Information transmitted by voice (and which, when rebroadcast via the Misna agency, often issued the first denunciations of the massacres in the east), fund-raising opportunities abroad, invisible circuits for transferring capital, the distribution of aid outside the ruling power's networks, and so on.

The Congolese have also managed by developing trade associations and committees of all kinds to the extreme. Even in the remotest villages, you have no chance of interviewing the market women, cyclists cum taxis (the tolekas of Kisangani), or youths strolling about with transistor radios glued to their ears without any other form of introduction. All of them belong to a committee or association and demand that foreigners look up their "rep" or "chairman" first. The latter will talk on their behalf, sum up the general feeling, and, without waiting, present the visitor with a "list of needs".

The revivalist churches
While the Roman Catholics, Kimbanguists, and Protestants have developed vast solidarity networks that long ago replaced non-existent international aid or a State that has failed to deliver, the églises de réveil (revivalist churches), as they are called, have also made massive inroads in the country: Katanga is now home to the Kitawala movement (a variant of Jehovah's Witnesses) from Zambia and prayer groups have sprung up across the country. In the large towns, the crisis has been seen to produce the following effect: The ngandas (bistros or restaurants) have disappeared, to be replaced by small neighbourhood churches, which the pastors have launched with the help of extensive advertising. In so doing, the pastors have found both an opportunity to get people to pray but also, if not above all, an opportunity to get rich by asking the faithful for financial contributions.

These revivalist churches are also linked to a new phenomenon: casting blame on "child sorcerers". The pattern is as follows: Families become convinced that their problems stem from a "spell" that one of their children cast on them, and it even happens that the child even comes to believe that s/he has been endowed with supernatural or evil powers. The pastor is called in to break the spell, against payment by the family, and the "guilty" child may even be driven out of the family, in which case s/he joins the cohorts of street urchins. The child may also be handed over to the "clergyman", who will have no qualms about using physical violence, even mistreating the child. This explosion of "cults" and magical-religious practices reflects the deep unravelling of the social fabric that has stemmed from years of war, the rural exodus, and the forced displacement of populations. One can only hope that if the country gets back on the path to development, the Congolese will be able to save the best of their religious practices and their "economy of solidarity" and get rid of all the excesses…