Pascal Lissouba

Pascal Lissouba (born November 15, 1931 in Tsinguidi ; † August 24, 2020 in Perpignan , France ) was President of the Republic of the Congo from 1992 to 1997 .

Early years

Lissouba comes from the southwest of what was then the French colony and belongs to the Banzabi ethnic group . From 1948 to 1952 he attended the Lycée Félix Faure in Nice and then the College of Agriculture in Tunis and from 1958 to 1961 the Sorbonne in Paris .

Political career

After his return to the Congo, which has been independent since 1960, he worked for the Ministry of Agriculture and became Minister of Agriculture in 1963. On December 24, 1963, he became Prime Minister under the new President Alphonse Massemba-Débat , who in August succeeded the first President Fulbert Youlou , who had been overthrown by a coup . During this time the Republic of the Congo began to embark on a socialist course. His term of office as head of government ended on April 15, 1966. He remained a member of the government even after Massemba-Débat was overthrown in 1968 and replaced by Marien Ngouabi .

In the years 1969-1971 he was prohibited from any political activity, but in 1973 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Unity Party Parti Congolais du Travail (PCT). In the same year he was temporarily imprisoned for alleged involvement in a failed coup. After Ngouabi's murder on March 18, 1977, he was also suspected of being involved and sentenced to life imprisonment. Massemba-Débat, who was also accused, was executed.

The life sentence ended after around two years. After his release he went into exile in France . He became a professor at his old university in Paris and worked for UNESCO in Paris and Nairobi .

president

After the long phase as a one-party state, most recently under President Denis Sassou-Nguesso , who has ruled since 1979, further parties were legalized in 1990. Lissouba returned in 1991 and became chairman of the center-left party Union panafricaine pour la démocratie sociale (UPADS) .

In 1992 he applied to succeed Sassou-Nguesso as their candidate. In the first ballot on August 8, 1992, he came first with 35.89% of the vote. On August 16, 1992 he won 61.32% over the remaining candidate Bernard Kolélas and took office on August 31, 1992. In the parliamentary elections on May 2 and 6, 1992, his UPADS alone achieved 47 of the 125 seats, the coalition supporting him 65. The defeated opposition accused the government of election fraud. Since taking office, there had been frequent bloody clashes between supporters of the various parties. Through the mediation of Gabon and the Organization for African Unity , a civil war could be prevented, until the beginning of 1995 sporadic fighting continued.

Shortly before the end of his term in office, in May 1997, Lissouba briefly hosted his recently overthrown counterpart from the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo , Mobutu Sese Seko , who stopped in Pointe-Noire on his way into exile . In the spring of 1997, ex-President Sassou-Nguesso returned from exile in France with the intention of running again in presidential elections. When the army surrounded Sassou-Nguesso's house on June 5, 1997 on the instructions of Lissouba, fighting broke out with his militiamen. The fighting, in which Sassou-Nguesso was militarily supported by Angola , ended with the fall of Lissouba's on October 15, 1997. Ten days later, Sassou-Nguesso was declared the new president and has governed ever since. The civil war is said to have claimed up to 10,000 lives between May and October. Supporters of Lissouba continued to resist for a while, and in 1999 they were given amnesty by Sassou-Nguesso .

Another exile

Lissouba fled the country and this time went to London . For his fall, he also blamed France and the Elf Aquitaine concern, which he accused of supporting Sassou-Nguesso. First, he wanted to take part in the 2002 presidential election. A case of treason and embezzlement opened in Brazzaville in his absence in December 2001 led him to remain in exile. The court sentenced him to thirty years in prison. The allegation of corruption related to a deal with the American oil company Occidental Petroleum in 1993. In 2001, Lissouba was found guilty of corruption in absentia by a court in Brazzaville and sentenced to 30 years of forced labor. The $ 150 million from the deal with the US oil company reappeared in 2013 as part of the disclosure of the Gladio scandal in Luxembourg. In autumn 2004 he left London and moved to Paris in the 17th arrondissement . He suffered from Alzheimer's and died on August 24, 2020 at the age of 88 in Perpignan.

Web links

• Elections in Congo-Brazzaville [Republic of the Congo]. In: African Elections Database. October 15, 2012(English). 
• Ex Congo-Brazzaville president to sue ELF. In: BBC World Service . November 27, 1997(English). 
• Congolese ex-leader guilty of treason. In: BBC News . December 29, 2001(English). 
• Pascal Lissouba s'installe définitivement à Paris. In: Afriqu'Echos. October 21, 2004, archived from the original on September 25, 2008 (French). 
• Ian Biddle, Spyros Demetriou, Robert Muggah: Small Arms Availability, Trade and Impacts in the Republic of Congo. (pdf; 727 kB) ed. from Small Arms Survey at the Graduate Institute of International Studies. In: ethz.ch. April 2002, archived from the original on March 4, 2016 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Fabrice Iranzi: Former Congolese President Pascal Lissouba passed away at 88 in France. In: regionweek.com. August 24, 2020, accessed on August 24, 2020 .