BIENVENU KENNY carefully folded the six poster-sized pages into a neat packet and pushed it firmly through the ballot box slot.

“I have never voted before in my life but I have always wanted to,” he beamed as he walked out of the polling station in the centre of the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, yesterday.

Mr Kenny, 26, was one of the first to arrive outside the Lycée Bosangani, an old Belgian school, at 6am, an hour before its doors opened, a little later than scheduled.

“We were some of the first, but it was worth it — I was the first guy to get a vote,” he said.

In scenes repeated across this huge, impoverished country, millions of people waited patiently to vote in the first free elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo in more than forty years, an event organised by the United Nations and monitored by thousands of international observers.

In the far eastern province of South Kivu, the scene of some of the latest war’s worst fighting, eager voters braved the morning chill to join queues outside rural polling stations. About four million people died in the 1998-2003 civil war, making it the world’s costliest conflict since the Second World War.

At Tubimbi primary school the sun rising over the surrounding hills illuminated hundreds of villagers standing in neat lines, the women wrapped in brightly coloured printed fabric, babies strapped to their backs. Pascalina Faida, 18, had queued since 4am. She said: “I want my country to be better and to be peaceful so I will vote.”

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Soldiers guarded the polling station at Tubimbi to protect voters from the Interahamwe, a militia that was part of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, camped in the jungle a few kilometres away. Its leaders are accused of carrying out the Rwanda genocide in 1994, but they kept a low profile.

Early indications were that the largest and most expensive election organised by the UN was going smoothly. Polling stations reported occasional missing electoral lists and some people claimed that they were turned away on false pretences.

But in most places it seemed that the biggest problem was the speed with which ballot boxes were being filled by ballot papers containing the names, parties and photographs of 9,700 candidates for 500 parliamentary seats and 32 candidates for president.

About 50,000 polling stations have been set up in schools, churches and tents to enable more than 25 million voters to elect a new government and try to deliver the country from years of tyrannical misrule and conflict.

President Kabila, the front-runner, was given a rapturous welcome when he arrived to vote in the Athénée de la Gombe district. He told singing and dancing supporters that the elections signalled “a new start” for the country and denied opposition politicians’ claims of electoral malpractice.

People already in the queue when the polls close at 6pm local time have been guaranteed the right to vote, even if it takes all night. Counting will then began, but even provisional results are not expected for several days.

The run-up to the poll, promised in a peace deal that ended Congo’s brutal civil war, was largely free of violence except for some incidents in Kinshasa, an opposition stronghold, but in recent weeks concern has mounted over how the losers will react to the result.

The UN has deployed more than 17,500 peacekeepers. European Union countries have sent an extra 1,000 troops to prevent any slide back into chaos. After a conflict that killed four million, more than 1,200 still die every day from disease, hunger and unresolved localised conflicts.

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