Opposition wants election date
2004-08-17 12:25
Luanda - Angola's political opposition is keeping the pressure on President Jose Eduardo dos Santos to set a date for the Southern African country's first elections since the end of its 27-year civil war.
Opposition leaders told a news conference late on Monday that they planned to present bills to parliament in the coming weeks to lay the groundwork for the elections, which would be the first since 1992.
"The parliamentary groups of the opposition parties will present by September 30 2004 the bills on the framework for preparing the next general elections," said Analia de Vitoria Pereira of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Political crisis
Dos Santos last month asked parliament to adopt the necessary measures for holding the elections after an advisory body, the Council of the Republic, gave him until September 2006 to set a date for the polls.
The opposition however maintains that elections should be held next year.
"The consultations that we requested with the head of state have begun but were not continued. The elections timetable has not be outlined and the independent national electoral commission has not be established," said De Vitoria Pereira.
The former Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) rebel movement, now Angola's main opposition, renewed demands for elections to be held in September 2005 and deplored the government's failure to set a date.
"We don't have an election date," said Adalberto da Costa Junior, Unita's secretary for information.
"All we have is a mere statement of intent from the head of state," he said.
Angola, one of Africa's top oil producers, has been in the throes of a political crisis over the election date after opposition members in May walked out of a constitutional commission set up to agree on the framework for holding the polls.
The parties reiterated on Monday that they would not return to the commission until an election timetable is agreed on.
Elections were last held in Angola in September 1992, when a second round of voting was scrapped after Unita claimed widespread fraud, reigniting fighting that had raged almost uninterrupted since before independence from Portugal in 1975, and ended in 2002 after Unita rebel chief Jonas Savimbi was killed in battle.
Dos Santos has been at the helm for 25 years in Angola.