Mali goes to the polls

BAMAKO. – Malians voted yesterday in parliamentary elections intended to seal the troubled west African nation’s return to democracy but overshadowed by the threat of Islamist reprisals. The polls mark Mali’s first steps to recovery after it was plunged into chaos by a military coup in March last year, and finalise a process begun with the election of its first post-conflict leader in August.

“I wanted to express my joy at coming to vote,” President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said after casting his ballot in the capital Bamako.

“If you had told me a few months ago that we would be staging parliamentary elections I would have thought I was dreaming. But this is reality. Mali is standing on its own two feet and moving forward,” he added.

Some 6.5 million Malians are eligible to cast ballots for a new national assembly, with more than 1 000 candidates running for 147 seats – but turnout initially looked weak across the country.

“I see . . . that there are not many people here – the candidates weren’t able to mobilise – but I hope that in the afternoon there will be more people,” said Oumou Sawadogo, a voter at a polling station set up in a school in the capital Bamako.

In another voting centre, Boubacar Tembely said he had come to do his “civic duty” despite feeling bitter about how little progress has been made in Mali.

“The politicians are all the same. I left my ballot blank as a protest to them,” he told AFP.

Voting takes place amid an upsurge in violence by Al-Qaeda-linked rebels who stalk the vast northern desert, an ever-present danger to French and African troops who are tasked with providing security for the election alongside the Malian army.

Al-Qaeda-linked insurgents ousted by French and African troops in January from the northern towns they had occupied last year resumed their deadly insurgency on September 28, after a lull of several months. Since then, a dozen civilians as well as Malian and Chadian soldiers in the United Nations’ MINUSMA peacekeeping mission have been killed in the country’s vast desert north while French security personnel were targeted for the first time last week.

Much of the worry ahead of the polls has been focused on the largely lawless region of Kidal, occupied for five months by ethnic Tuareg separatists until a ceasefire accord signed in June allowed in the Malian army.

A second round will take place on December 15 if no party is able to form a government following yesterday’s vote. – AFP.