Congo's new legislature installed

KINSHASA, Congo --Congo's newly elected national assembly was installed Friday and party leaders began jockeying for power in the divided group, while a key politician threw his support behind President Joseph Kabila.

The war-ravaged Central African country held its first multiparty elections in more than four decades in July. None of the presidential candidates won a majority, forcing a runoff set for next month between Kabila and runner-up Jean-Pierre Bemba.

Third-place presidential candidate Antoine Gizenga told his supporters to vote for Kabila in a statement issued Thursday and a spokesman said Friday that his party agreed to join with Kabila's in the legislature.

Gizenga received 13 percent of the vote in the first presidential ballot.

Though Kabila's party won the largest share of seats in the parliament, it failed to capture a majority. As a result, the 500-person legislature was sworn in without a prime minister and members must form coalitions that will choose the government.

Kabila's party holds 111 of the legislative seats, compared with 64 for Bemba's party and 34 for Gizenga's Unified Lumumbist Party, or PALU.

PALU spokesman Godefroy Mayobo said the coalition has also brought in other parties and now has about 200 members -- approaching the 260 seats needed to govern.

The elections follow decades of coups, wars and corrupt governance that have wracked resource-rich Congo since its independence from Belgium in 1960. The days following the July 30 vote saw a return to violence, with clashes breaking out between supporters of Kabila and Bemba, a former rebel leader and vice president in the transitional administration.

The new government replaces a national unity administration arranged under peace deals that ended a 1996-2002 war. Some 17,500 U.N. peacekeepers are helping provide security, but much of the east remains violent.