adminBANGUI. — With just over a month left before presidential elections are held in Central African Republic, experts and humanitarians are concerned that time is running out for authorities to create a representative voters roll in the country marred by ongoing conflict.
David Smith, an advisor to the Institute of Security Studies (ISS) in Johannesburg, told Al Jazeera that failure to include people in rural areas or refugees currently in Chad and Cameroon in October’s vote, “would take a problematic election and make it very flawed”.
“So far, it is only people in the capital, Bangui, that have been put on electoral roll … most people are in rural areas and they have one month to put it all together,” Smith told Al Jazeera yesterday, adding that if “these elections are to be remotely legitimate, refugees would (also) have to vote”.
Smith’s comments come days after the United Nations Security Council said it was “absolute priority” for the election on October 18 to be an inclusive one.
The country’s transitional government, in power since January 2014, issued a draft electoral bill on June 30, saying that refugees who wished to vote had to first return to the country. — Al Jazeera.
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