Fears that violence would upset the first multi-party election in 40 years in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo were allayed as Sunday's poll went off peacefully with millions of Congolese casting their ballots hoping to end years of war, corruption and chaos.

United Nations officials and foreign observers said turnout in the mineral-rich African country the size of Western Europe was high. "All indications that we have, not just from Kinshasa, but across the country is that the population has responded fairly substantively," UN envoy Ross Mountain said, adding he was "relieved" and "delighted" with how voting had gone.

"The number of incidents has been absolutely minimal. Security hasn't been a problem and it has been an extraordinary day for Congo."

The election  is closing the chapter on a 1998-2003 war that involved six neighboring states and killed 4 million people. After polls closed, officials began the mammoth task of counting ballots at some 50,000 voting stations across the country. Official results are not due for about three weeks.

"All of us are happy about this vote because we are suffering in this country: without food, without homes," Miriam Kawanga, 35, in the town of Goma in Congo's lawless east, told the Reuters news agency. "We need to elect somebody who is going to help us."

A $460 million election

Protected by the biggest peacekeeping operation in the world, the presidential and parliamentary polls in the former Belgian colony were the most complex and expensive ever organized by the United Nations, at a cost of $460 million.

The political director of the UN mission in Congo, Albrecht Conze, told German radio that while the election was a great day for the country, the UN would have to remain watchful in the coming weeks of uncertainty over who has won.

"We're now entering a difficult phase because the people who voted yesterday will of course be very impatient to hear the outcome. And they'll have to be told again: it will take two weeks, perhaps even three, until the results are known everywhere and until they can be officially announced.

"It's a time in which some will definitely seize the moment to declare themselves the winner prematurely. A time in which one will have to keep a watchful eye politically but also in terms of security."

President Joseph Kabila is regarded as favorite to win a five-year term. His main rivals, former rebel chiefs Jean-Pierre Bemba and Azarias Ruberwa, criticized "irregularities" on Sunday, raising the prospect they may question the result.

Isolated incidents

Across the country, from the capital Kinshasa to the jungles of the Congo River basin and the misty mountains of the east, voters braved threats of violence from marauding rebels, bureaucratic hitches and rain.

In the southern West and East Kasai provinces -- the stronghold of a major opposition party which boycotted the elections -- youths destroyed several polling stations after voting was over. In the southeast town of Lubumbashi, students protested when they found they were not registered to vote.

But these appeared to be isolated incidents. "I have witnessed long queues and busy polling stations," Richard Howitt, a member of the European Parliament who was one of more than 1,200 international election observers staying in Congo, told Reuters from Lubumbashi.

Turnout was heavy in the violence-plagued east, a stronghold of 35-year-old Kabila. Initial counts from some individual polling stations there showed a strong lead for the president, who took office when his father Laurent was killed in 2001.

Kabila faces 31 challengers, among them several former rebel leaders who fought in the five-year war that devastated the country.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of Sunday's vote, a run-off between the two leading candidates will be held on October 29, the national electoral commission said.

UN peacekeepers -- 17,000 of them, backed by 1,100 European Union troops -- and Congolese police guarded the schools, churches and tents used as polling stations.

Congo has on- third of the world's cobalt reserves, as well as copper, gold and diamonds. However, it has known little but war and dictatorship since it gained its independence in 1960.

Conze said he was more hopeful now than he had been a few weeks ago that the German troops stationed in Congo would be able to leave after four months as planned.

"The president of the electoral commission announced on Saturday evening that the second ballot will take place on October 29, in exactly three months. I had feared it could drag out into November, then things would indeed have got tight."

European forces are scheduled to leave at the end of November.