Protests greet Togo result

2005-04-26 15:09

Emmanuel Goujon

Lome - Faure Gnassingbe, candidate of the party that has ruled Togo for four decades, won a violence-marred presidential election while his main rival took more than a third of the votes, officials said on Tuesday.

Gnassingbe took 60.22% of the votes cast, the independent national electoral commission (CENI) announced, putting the joint candidate of a self-styled "radical" opposition coalition in second place with 38.19%.

When the official announcement came, hundreds of armed youth supporters of the ruling Togolese People's Rally (RPT), gathered at a north Lome exhibition centre whose entrance was guarded by troops.

Politicians meanwhile argued over whether a post-electoral power-sharing deal had been cut, as announced by regional heavyweight President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, who met Gnassingbe and his rival in exile, Gilchrist Olympio, on Monday.

Olympio said in Paris by telephone that there had been "massive fraud".

Talk of power-sharing deal

One of the youths at the Togo 2000 park said they had arrived in Lome from Kara, the traditional powerbase of Gnassingbe's long-ruling family in the north of the West African country, to "escort Faure Gnassingbe to Kara if there's a victory."

"Given the provisional figures, Faure Gnassingbe is elected president of the Republic," CENI chairperson Kissem Thangai Walla said, calling the outcome provisional because it is up to the constitutional court to declare it valid.

Violence broke out in the last weeks of the run-up to the poll, on voting day and afterwards, mainly between rival youth activists and also with some shooting by the security forces, according to witnesses, hospital staff and diplomats.

Togo has been tense since the death on February 5 of Gnassingbe Eyadema, a military man who was tough on all political opposition but considered one of the last of Africa's wise elder statesmen by some peers after more than 37 years in power.

Olympio, whose father was the first president of the former German then French colony before Eyadema killed him, was unable to stand in the election since he has long lived in exile in France, but Akitani Bob, 74, was the inside man against 39-year-old Gnassingbe, a finance expert.

Violence mainly restricted to working-class opposition strongholds in Lome claimed at least three lives on election day and left a score injured, several sources said, partly blaming trigger-happy troops, but the government played it down, saying one person was dead and an unknown number wounded.

The clashes were fuelled by reports of stolen and burned ballot boxes, fraud and thuggery, for which both sides blamed each other.

Before the win was announced, opposition leaders on Tuesday denied that any power-sharing deal had been mediated and cut by regional heavyweight Nigeria.

The impoverished nation has been under European sanctions since 1993 for Eyadema's poor record on democracy and human rights. - AFP

- SAPA