Int'l observers to monitor elections in Moslem region
Int'l observers to monitor elections in Moslem region
MANILA (AFP): Observers from the United States, Europe and
Asia will monitor next week's elections in a Moslem autonomous
region in the south, crucial to the success of a newly signed
peace accord with Islamic rebels, officials said yesterday.
The nine observers, from private organizations in Bangladesh,
Belgium, Cambodia, Finland, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the United
States, had already arrived for the September 9 poll, the
government's Commission on Elections (Comelec) said.
It will be the first election in the Philippines where votes
will be counted by computer rather than the laborious, manual
system which often resulted in wide-scale fraud.
Comelec executive director Resureccion Borra said there were
904,941 eligible voters in the Autonomous Region of Moslem
Mindanao (ARMM).
They will be electing a vice governor and members of a 21-seat
regional legislative assembly based in the southern island of
Mindanao.
Nur Misuari, whose Moslem insurgent Moro National Liberation
Front (MNLF) signed a peace treaty with Manila on Monday, ending
a 24-year guerrilla war, is unopposed for governor.
He will head a regional council that will oversee economic
projects in 14 southern provinces as part of the peace deal.
A meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)
to be held in Jakarta in December may discuss assistance for
development in the region, the OIC secretary general Hamid Al-
Gabid said in Jakarta yesterday.
"The problems in the southern Philippines will be once again
discussed and perhaps aid could be organized for the development
and construction of the southern Philippine area," he said.
The southern region's majority Christians have angrily opposed
the peace pact, saying it gave too much power to the MNLF whose
guerrilla war for Moslem self-rule in the early 1970s left
120,000 people dead.
About 105 candidates are contesting the legislative assembly
seats, Borra said, adding that campaigning had so far been free
of the violence that has been a hallmark of Philippine elections.
He attributed this to the peace agreement and a pledge by an
MNLF breakaway group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF),
not to mount attacks.
Jose Concepcion, head of the National Movement for Free
Elections, a private election watchdog, said the MILF has agreed
to allow ballot boxes to pass through its controlled territories
provided that there are no soldiers among the escorts.
Concepcion, a prominent industrialist, said the
computerization of the counting was an experiment which, if
successful, would be used for the 1998 presidential and national
elections.
"What is at stake is whether we can have clean and credible
elections," he said. "If the elections are dirty, then the
leadership will be put at issue."