Most newspaper stories in Kinshasa today are related to presidential runner-up Jean-Pierre Bemba's legal challenge to the provisional official results of the 20 October runoff election.

As announced, DRC Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba, the losing candidate in the country's presidential runoff, has filed a complaint with the Supreme Court challenging the presidential runoff results published last Wednesday by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).

According to L'Avenir, complaints lodged by Bemba are essentially about "those having voted outside their home their constituencies, ballot stuffing, inflated turnout figures in the Kabila eastern strongholds, unequal treatment of the [Bemba] campaign, falsified results and witnesses [for Bemba] having been denied access to polling stations..."

In a story headlined "The legal battle has started," Le Potentiel sees "three scenarios [for handling] Jean-Pierre Bemba's objection" to the election results.

One possibility is that "the Supreme Court could, after declaring [Bemba's] objection receivable and after examining the case, confirm the provisional results published by the IEC," the paper says. In another possibility, "based on the evidence it has, [the Court] could order a vote recount in places where irregularities seemed blatant," it says. The third is that the Court could "cancel extra votes in constituencies where there were more people voting outside their home constituencies than those normally registered to vote there," it says.

Citing European Union observers, L'Observateur says the fact there were "people voting outside their home constituencies does not falsify the results".

"Jean-Pierre Bemba's Court action is bound to fail," especially "given the huge vote gap [2.6 million]" between the two candidates, says L'Avenir, citing a foreign diplomat who was quoted by the French news agency AFP.

Quoting the diplomat further, L'Avenir notes that Bemba "couldn't have accepted his defeat without putting up a fight, given the pressure from his supporters... [He just] couldn't have given up straight away".

With its credibility at stake here, the Supreme Court "should rule on this challenge to the results ...completely independently and away from any pressure," according to Le Potentiel.

"A fair Court decision, one that is based on sound argumentation and respects the relevant laws of the country, can only boost the Court's image ...," the paper writes. Therefore "in deciding the case, [the Court] must resist any political influence and only apply the law," Le Potentiel adds.

Meanwhile, "people will remain fearful as long as [Bemba] refuses to accept the outcomes of the 20 October vote, even if he does so in a peacefully and legally manner," according to Le Phare.

In this regard, Le Phare cites the capital, Kinshasa, where, "despite the security apparatus MONUC and EUFOR have put in place, most Congolese still believe that theirs is a situation of no-war-no-peace." The raison is that people "know that the slightest incident would suffice to pull down the entire electoral edifice and plunge the country into an uncontrollable cycle of violence at the hands of soldiers", Le Phare concludes.