February 7, 2005
Liberia will hold presidential and parliamentary elections on 11 October and the results of the poll will be published no later that 26 October, Frances Johnson-Morris, the chairwoman of the National Elections Commission of Liberia said on Monday. Voter registration will commence on April 25 and end on May 21, but only people living inside Liberia will be eligible to cast a ballot on polling day, she added. "Elections will be held on October 11 and this date is in conformity with both the Comprehensive Peace Accord and the Liberian constitution which stipulated that voting should be held on the second Tuesday in October and the results will be announced not later than 26 October," Johnson-Morris said.
A second-round run-off between the two leading presidential candidates will have to be held if neither fails to win at least 50 percent of votes cast, but the Commission has not yet fixed a date for such a poll. Johnson-Morris admitted that this was an "oversight." The Liberian constitution stipulates that such a run-off should be held two weeks after the round of the presidential election.
About 350,000 Liberians fled abroad as refugees during the 1989-2003 civil war, but Johnson Morris said only those who came home before the close of voter registation would be allowed to cast a ballot. "There will be no polling outside of Liberia and we are sorry that refugees who are not repatriated before or during voter registration, will not be allowed to vote in camps", she added. "We have held a series of meetings with the UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to speed up the repatriation and resettlement of refugees and IDPs", Johnson-Morris said.
She also said that most of the 500,000 Liberians who were internally displaced during the conflict should also be resettled in their home communities before voter registration gets under way. "If IDPs are not fully resettled by the start of voter registration, we will have to find a way where they can be registered in their respective camps that would allow them to participate in the elections, but those details will be worked out as soon as the process begins in April," she added.
One potential problem is that the UN-backed process of repatriation and resettlement, which began on 1 October, is moving much more slowly than expected. The UN refugee agency UNHCR had originally planned to bring home 100,000 Liberian refugees from Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire by the end of 2004. But UNHCR announced last week that it had only managed to repatriate 6,500 by the end of January. However, the UNHCR believes that about 100,000 more refugees have trekked home spontaneously without official assistance since the civil war ended 18 months ago.
Aid workers told IRIN on Monday that just over 17,000 IDPs had been resettled so far. With barely eight months to go before the elections, the field is crowded with dozens of aspiring presidential candidates and political parties.
Over 45 people have declared their intention to run for the presidency. Leading contenders include former soccer star George Weah; Winston Tubman, a former UN envoy to Somalia; and Varney Sherman, a legal consultant and advisor of Gyude Bryant, the chairman of Liberia's current transitional government. The electoral commission announced on Monday that it had so far registered 18 political parties and was processing the applications of a further 18. However, it is keen t
o see many of these merge into stronger larger groupings and has issued guidelines on how the parties should go about this. Johnson-Morris said the United States, the European Union and the United Nations had agreed to help pay for the elections, which will cost an estimated US17.5 million to organise. But she said: "We still have a shortfall in terms of field operations and logistics, for things like vehicles and communications equipment that would be used in the interior by our field offices."
Besides electing a new president, who is due to take power in January 2006, voters will also choose 30 senators - two for each of Liberia's 15 counties - and a new House of Representatives. Seats in the House of Representatives will be allocated in proportion to the population of each county once voter registration has been completed. In the last two parliaments, elected in 1985 and 1997, there were 64 elected representatives in the lower house of parliament. The number to be chosen this year has not yet been finalised.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which brokered the 2003 peace agreement between Liberia's three warring factions, has meanwhile reiterated that, under the terms of the peace deal, those who hold high office in the current transitional government will not be eligible to stand for high office in October. Several ministers in the broad-based transitional government have already announced their intention to run for the presidency. They include Laveli Supuwood, the Labour Minister, a former human rights lawyer who sits in cabinet as a representative of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), one of two rebel movements which fought against former president Charles Taylor.
However, ECOWAS recalled in a statement at the weekend that the ban applied to the chairman of the transitional government and his deputy, cabinet ministers, the speaker of the transitional parliament and his deputy and all judges of the High Court. "All current government functionaries occupying these positions are rendered ineligible to contest for elective office by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) itself," it said.
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