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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

RWANDA: Presidential poll set for 25 August

KIGALI, 4 July 2003 (IRIN) - Presidential elections in Rwanda will be held on 25 August and parliamentary elections on 29 September, the government announced on Thursday.

The election will mark the end of a nine-year transitional government established after the 1994 genocide that claimed the lives of some 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

The government also announced that it recognised only two political parties in the country that had registered with the Ministry of Local Government. The parties are the Rwandan Patriotic Front of President Paul Kagame, and the Parti liberal. The transitional government of national unity comprises eight political parties.

Meanwhile, opposition presidential candidate Faustin Twagiramungu, 58, said on Thursday that he planned to form a new party before the elections.

"The decision is in the offing," he told IRIN. "Though the time given to us is very short, it is possible [to form a party]."

The Mouvement democratique republicain, of which Twagiramungu was once its president, is about to be banned following a parliamentary decision that the cabinet adopted in May.

A new law the parliament passed recently gave political parties 15 days to register again, ahead of the polls. The law also allows candidates to contest the presidency as independents.

Twagiramungu, who recently returned home after eight years in exile, told IRIN that his party would insist endeavour to uproot ideologies based on ethnicity.

"We cannot always create political parties based on ethnic lines," he said. "The idea of Hutu majority and Tutsi minority has to disappear and this is the fundamental basis of my intended political party."

Theme(s): (IRIN) Governance

[ENDS]

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