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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Cote d'Ivoire delays poll results |
| 2010-12-02 |
| [Al Jazeera] Cote d'Ivoire's election commission has delayed announcing the results of Sunday's presidential runoff elections. Supporters of the main challenger Alassane Ouattara on Tuesday accused Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent president, of trying to block the first results because, they said, he knew he had lost. A news conference held on Tuesday to start announcing the result was cut short when pro-Gbagbo members of the election commission tore up results as a front man tried to read them out. Al Jizz's Yvonne Ndege, reporting from Abidjan, said the chaotic scenes at the election commission have caused a stir in Cote d'Ivoire. "The spokesperson for the commission tried to announce some of the results but he was stopped by other members of staff, who also work for the commission," she said. "What they basically said was that he had no right to read the results that he had in his hand. There was a small scuffle breaking out where the results were essentially snatched from his hand." Sunday's tight race had triggered violence and rekindled simmering tensions in the world's top cocoa grower, divided by a 2002-2003 civil war. The poll aims to reunite Cote d'Ivoire after its northern half was seized by rebels, but the electoral battle lines during the campaigns looked ominously similar to the ethnic and territorial ones of the 2002 conflict Fraud accusations The pro-Gbagbo members of the election commission accused the body's front man of "an electoral hold-up" before tearing up a sheet of results. One shouted that the results had not yet been consolidated so could not be read out. Gbagbo's party said it would formally challenge the results in the rebel held north, where his rival Alassane Ouattara did well in the first round, because of intimidation by rebel New Forces soldiers of Gbagbo's supporters. "The presidential camp is trying to prevent the proclamation of the results," Marcel Amon Tanoh, Ouattara's campaign director, said earlier in the day. "If Mr Laurent Gbagbo knew he'd won, he wouldn't have ... prevented the CEI [commission] from speaking on the radio and TV ... Gbagbo knows he's lost." Representatives of Gbagbo's campaign were not available to respond to the accusation. Hillary Clinton, ... sometimes described as the Smartest Woman in the World and at other times as Mrs. Bill... the US secretary of state, called on "Ivorian leaders to act in a responsible and peaceful manner." "We strongly urge candidates to allow the counting and announcement of the results to take place without interference and to respect the results that are announced," she said. |
| Posted by:Fred |