Mali's presidential vote will go ahead as planned: Government
Iran Press TV
Tue Jul 2, 2013 3:15PM GMT
The Malian government says the country’s presidential election will go ahead as planned despite doubts over the fairness and transparency of the vote in the war-torn nation.
"The presidential election will be held on July 28. The Malian government has never set two dates,” Malian Minister of Territorial Administration Moussa Sinko Coulibaly said on Tuesday.
Speaking after a meeting with diplomats and Mali's financial backers in the capital Bamako, Coulibaly stressed that the ministry “has never had any doubts” regarding the election plan and that his department was the only authority responsible for seeing the vote through.
"If we were to postpone the elections a month or two, it would not improve things, it would have the opposite effect," he argued.
Coulibaly said the distribution of voter cards had begun, and that there was a "craze" among Malians for the election.
The election commission, however, said the production of polling cards was way behind schedule and that it would be "extremely difficult" to distribute some eight million cards among the voters given the large number of people displaced by war.
The ballot, announced by Mali’s caretaker government over a month ago, would be the first vote in the country since March 2012, when a military coup ousted democratically elected President Amadou Toumani Toure just months before the end of his term in office.
On January 11, 2013, France launched a war in Mali and deployed around 4,000 troops to its former colony under the pretext of halting the advance of fighters who had taken control of northern Mali.
The French war in Mali, believed to have been encouraged by the African country's natural resources including gold and uranium reserves, caused a serious humanitarian crisis in the northern areas of the country and displaced thousands of people.
MRS/PR
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