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‘I take my hat off to the Brazilian woman’
By:   []
Date: None

I did not choose to live in Brazil and I had never thought about living outside my country. I ran away from political persecution. I was part of a collective of lawyers who protested changes to the constitutional laws around the organisation of elections in my country in 2014. It was a forced situation and today I find myself here, in Brazil.

My country is a country with many sad memories. The trafficking of enslaved people, colonisation and empires, then the independence wars, and after independence we had dictatorship and more war. The murder of Congolese in genocides still happens today.

Genocide has been going on in Congo for more than 20 years. We have a political problem, a dictatorship that is trying to keep itself in power. We had a president who was assassinated. He had managed to overthrow the dictators in 1997, 32 years after they first came to power in the 1960s, but a few years later they murdered him and took the power again. They put into place a five-year transition period until they managed to organise democratic elections again. The one in power during the transition period won the election and stayed as president. He organised elections twice, and the constitution limits a president to two, five-year terms. He had run the country for five years during the transition, five years after the 2006 elections, and five years after the 2011 elections. That should have been his last election. But in 2016, when his term was ending, he started to manoeuvre. He had a parliamentary majority and he wanted to change the constitutional laws that limit the president's mandates.

Congo has more than 80 million inhabitants and it is not possible to understand why a small number of people, or a ruling class, can change the constitutional laws that were voted on by a referendum. A law that was voted on by more than 80 million people was about to be changed by a small number of people following their personal interests. That is not democratic at all. So in the face of so many fights and so many struggles, we stood up, as lawyers, as people who understood this part of the law. We went out on the streets as lawyers, with lawyers' clothes on, to represent the people so that no one would interfere with the constitutional laws. We demanded respect for our constitution. So, it is from there that my pursuit for freedom became more difficult.

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/i-take-my-hat-off-to-the-brazilian-woman/