Parliamentary elections to be held Sunday despite fighting

The first round of national legislative elections are scheduled to take place on Sunday in the Republic of Congo (ROC), despite calls from the opposition for a postponement in order to update and verify lists of registered voters, and despite continued insecurity in the Pool region, which borders the capital, Brazzaville. The government has said that if instability prevented elections from taking place in certain regions, they would be held later. A second round of legislative elections is due to take place on 23 June, concurrent with local and municipal elections. At stake in this election are 137 seats in the National Assembly and 66 in the Senate. Since 1998, ROC has had National Transitional Council consisting of 75 non-elected members. The council was created to replace the bicameral parliament that existed prior to the 1997 civil war. The council will be replaced by the bicameral parliament chosen in this election. According to the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), the number of registered voters in ROC is about 1.6 million of an estimated population of three million. Taking part in the legislative elections will be former Prime Minister Andre Milongo, who withdrew his candidacy two days before the 10 March presidential election, claiming irregularities. Milongo will be vying for the seat for Boko district, in Pool region. Asked by Radio France Internationale on Monday what effect hostilities in his region might have on elections; he said, "there is no war in my district". Fighting erupted in ROC at the end of March, when so-called Ninja militias attacked several government military positions in Pool region, official sources said. Ninja representatives have countered that the clashes were provoked when they discovered government plans to arrest their leader, the Rev Frederic Bitsangou (alias Ntoumi). "Three other districts in the region have not been affected by the fighting, and political campaigns can be carried out without worry," Milongo said. Asked why he was standing in these elections after he had withdrawn at the last minute in protest from the presidential campaign, he said: "We cannot sustain a policy of empty-chair politics. We want to have a platform from which we can communicate to the nation and the international community what is wrong in this country so as to lead the government to change its manner of leadership." Meanwhile, former President Pascal Lissouba and former Prime Minister Bernard Kolelas have called on their parties, respectively the Union panafricaine pour le developpement social (UPADS) and Mouvement national congolais pour la democratie et le developpement integral (MCDDI) to boycott the elections. Lissouba and Kolelas were barred from entering the March presidential race by the country's new constitution, revised in January 2002, which requires candidates to have resided continuously in the country for at least two years before the election. Both are living abroad in exile, having been tried and convicted in absentia for crimes allegedly committed during civil war that plagued the nation throughout the 1990s. Campaigning for the first round of legislative elections was officially launched on 10 May, with Congolese Interior Minister Pierre Oba appealing for the sustained prevalence of the "calm and good conduct" that characterised the recent presidential elections, when Denis Sassou-Nguesso won a landslide victory in the ROC's first presidential elections since 1992. The ROC, an oil-rich country bordering the much larger Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a former French colony that gained independence in 1960.