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WorldPosted at: Dec 27 2020 11:33AM


Central Africans to vote on Sunday in general election amid surge in violence

MOSCOW, Dec 27 (Sputnik) Voters in the Central African Republic will go to the polls on Sunday to cast ballots in presidential and parliamentary elections amid political turmoil and a rise in violence.
The week before the voting day saw incumbent President Faustin Archange Touadera accuse his main rival and predecessor, Francois Bozize, of plotting a coup and the militias march on the capital Bangui.
Bozize, a 74-year-old former general who seized power in 2003 and was ousted a decade later, returned from exile a year ago to plot his comeback.
Touadera, 63, accused his challenger of trying to topple him with the help of militias who briefly captured the country’s fourth-largest city, before they were pushed back by UN peacekeepers.
Bozize has denied the accusation but the top CAR court barred him from running on "morality grounds" as he is under UN sanctions and subject to an international arrest warrant.
Touadera is now a clear favorite in the race against 16 other contenders, although his reelection is already at risk of being contested if there is not enough confidence in the polls, Sputnik has been told.
The national government controls only a third of the country’s territory, with the rest of CAR being in militias’ grip. Armed groups have refused to allow the voting to go ahead in parts of the country.
Martin Ziguele, a presidential candidate for the leftist Movement for the Liberation of the Central African People, said that voters were afraid to go to the polls in the country, which has not seen lasting stability after it became independent in 1960.
Thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled CAR since the 2013 coup. More than a quarter of CAR’s population are refugees in neighboring countries or have been internally displaced and will not vote.
"As the situation deteriorated in the last three days, most of the candidates suspended their trips inside the state. It’s as if there were no presidential campaigns," Ziguele told Sputnik in an interview earlier this week.
The ex-prime minister added that the government needed to "calm the situation" to make sure that those still eligible to vote would. He also doubted that Touadera would win the election outright in the first round.
"The competition will be tight, because all the candidates are experienced. It’s not like in 2015 after we came out of the transitional period. There are clear political views, and Central Africans are politically mature, so one cannot dream of a victory in the first round. There will be a second round," he explained.
Mahamat Kamoun, another presidential hopeful, told Sputnik that Central Africans would accept nothing less than a transparent election and would rise up en mass against perceived dishonesty.
"If the Central African people’s voice is not reflected in this ballot, there will be a general mobilization. People will not go to work, there will be strikes, and that’s what we don’t want," Kamoun, who served as prime minister from 2014-2016, told Sputnik.
Both candidates also made it clear that security and economy woes topped the election’s agenda.
Kamoun, in particular, stated that the February 2019 peace deal between the government and the coalition of 14 armed groups had not yielded desired progress.
"Two years later, we must have the courage to admit that the application of this agreement did not bring the results we were counting on. The deal did not allow the central African government to regain control over certain parts of the territory," he said.
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Tags: #Central Africans to vote on Sunday in general election amid surge in violence
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