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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

RWANDA: Twagiramungu wants presidential poll postponed

BRUSSELS, 7 July 2003 (IRIN) - As the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) confirmed on Saturday President Paul Kagame as the party's candidate for the presidency, former Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, who has declared his candidature for the position, called for the election to be postponed "to give enough time for the candidates to campaign".

The Rwandan government announced on Thursday that presidential elections would be held on 25 August and parliamentary elections on 29 September.

During a meeting with 200 of his supporters in Brussels on Sunday, Twagiramungu said: "According to the new electoral law I am requested, as an independent candidate, to submit 600 signatures in total for my candidacy, but it will be very difficult to get them in such a short time."

He added that it was unfair that Kagame had "already been able to campaign for many months".

The Rwandan News Agency (RNA) reported on Saturday that up to 5,000 RPF members had confirmed Kagame's candidature at the party's extraordinary congress at Nyamirambo stadium in the capital, Kigali.

"Other parties allowed to operate in Rwanda, as well as the RCD-Goma [the Rwandan-backed Congolese rebel group Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie], were also represented at the congress as invitees," RNA quoted Modeste Rutabayiru, the foreign affairs secretary at the RPF secretariat, as saying.

The Mouvement democratique republicain, of which Twagiramungu was once president, is about to be banned for "divisionism" following a parliamentary decision that the cabinet adopted in May. Nevertheless, the law allows candidates to contest the presidency as independents.

Twagiramungu said that he was in line with two other independent candidates, Jean-Nepomuscene Nayinzira and Theoneste Niyitegeka, on the issue of postponement. "The initial date for the elections was 26 November 2003, which seems a much better date," he said.

He added that "the EU should not fund the elections in the current circumstances".

Twagiramungu, who recently returned to Rwanda after eight years in exile in Belgium, was in Brussels for a few days before going back to Kigali on Tuesday.

The presidential poll will mark the first multiparty election in the country nine years after the 1994 genocide, which claimed the lives of at least 800,000 people.

Themes: (IRIN) Governance

[ENDS]

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