Gabon capital calm but Unrest continues in Gabon after disputed presidential elections
LIBREVILLE, Gabon
France put its troops in the former colony of Gabon on alert and demonstrators set fire to a police station in the country's second-largest city Friday after Ali Bongo, the son of the country's late dictator, was declared the winner of presidential elections.
Police from the capital arrived in force in Port Gentil, the hub of the nation's oil industry and an opposition stronghold, and took up positions in front of broken storefronts. Virtually every shop on the town's main boulevard had been looted Thursday and into the night, said Dianney Madztou, the editor-in-chief of local TV station Top Bendje. Sporadic gunfire rang out in the morning.
Police reinforcements were flown in from Libreville in the morning but despite the beefed up security, protesters set the main police station on fire, Madztou said.
But calm appeared to be returning to Libreville, the humid, seaside capital. Residents who had shut themselves inside their homes Friday morning, turning Libreville into a ghost town, began emerging as shops and markets reopened. Traffic again clogged the pitted streets, rumbling past a few shops whose shelves had been emptied by looters.
"Life is returning to normal and people are starting to go out again," said Sydney Koumba, a law student in northern Libreville. "We're even seeing traffic jams again."
Speaking Friday in Paris, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said France's 1,000 soldiers based in Gabon were on alert and that contingency plans have been drawn up to evacuate the 10,000 French nationals living in Gabon if needed.
Frank Ndjimbi, the spokesman for opposition candidate Pierre Mamboundou, said his boss and other opposition leaders were in hiding because they believed the government was trying to kill them. Ndjimbi said opposition-appointed members of the electoral commission had reported Wednesday night, hours before Bongo was declared the winner, that the ruling party planned to try to submit false electoral results.
Ali Bongo, 50, told France's Le Monde newspaper that "politicians should be careful with their words and act calmly." He said that opposition leaders that want to contest the results could do so "through the proper channels." Ndjimbi said there is no point in doing so because the constitutional court and 40-member electoral commission are stacked with appointees of the late dictator Omar Bongo.
Louis-Gaston Mayila, head of a political party that supported Mamboundou, called the vote "an electoral farce" and claimed Mamboundou had won. But Mayila also called for calm.
"We can't burn our own country because an election was stolen," Mayila said on France-Inter radio
Sunday's special ballot was called after Omar Bongo, who ruled this African nation for 41 years, died in June. The disputed poll has stoked fears the country of 1.5 million people will destabilize.
Omar Bongo's family amassed a fortune from the country's oil wealth, owning 45 homes in France and more than a dozen luxury cars, including a Bugatti worth $1.5 million which was paid for with a check from the Gabonese treasury. Meanwhile, a third of Gabon's citizens lived in wretched poverty, some digging through garbage dumps for food.
Opposition supporters, aghast that the Bongo family's grip on the country would continue into a fifth decade, turned their wrath Thursday on France, widely suspected of having propped up the dictator and meddling in the elections. France's minister for cooperation, Alain Joyandet, denied the French government meddled in the election.
On Thursday, Interior Minister Jean-Francois Ndongou announced that Bongo, the country's defense minister who campaigned from a private jet and plastered the capital with billboards, won with 41.7 percent of the vote. The top two opposition leaders - Andre Mba Obame and Mamboundou - got 25.8 and 25.2 percent of the vote respectively, Ndongou said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for calm Thursday and urged the candidates and their supporters to resolve grievances "through legal and institutional channels," U.N. deputy spokeswoman Marie Okabe said at U.N. headquarters in New York.
U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said international observers "had noted some irregularities" but said Washington had made no call on whether the vote was fair.
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Associated Press writers Rukmini Callimachi and Todd Pitman in Dakar, Senegal, Cecile Brisson in Paris, Matthew Lee in Washington and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
