Presidential election results to be announced after Christmas

The official results of Guinea's presidential election, in which President Lansana Conte stood virtually unopposed for a fresh seven-year term, would only be announced after Christmas, Interior Ministry sources said on Tuesday. Voting took place on Sunday and the government of this poor West African country had been expected to start announcing results on Monday. However, one senior official told IRIN that logistical problems in getting ballot boxes from remote areas to the main towns and then to the capital Conakry would delay the final count. Opposition leaders, who boycotted the election claiming that it would be rigged, accused the government of deliberately delaying the announcement of results because of an embarrassingly low turnout. Conte, who has ruled Guinea with an iron hand since coming to power in a 1984 coup, faced one token challenger in the poll, Mamadou Bhoye Barry, the lone parliamentary representative of a small pro-government party, the Union for National Progress (UPN). It was therefore a foregone conclusion that Conte would win. The Republican Front for Democratic Change (FRAD), an alliance of Guinea's main opposition parties, claimed that less than 15 percent of the electorate bothered to vote. "The government is now very much embarassed by the low turnout and and are still trying to find ways of putting out the result that would save their blushes," Ibrahima Diakite, one of the leaders of FRAD, told IRIN. "What we are interested in hearing is the percentage of voter turnout that the government will publish," said Diakite, a senior official in the Rally of the Guinean People (RPG) party of veteran opposition leader Alpha Conde. The satirical weekly Lynx, the biggest selling privately owned newspaper in Guinea, said the low turnout witnessed by journalists throughout the country was clear evidence that "democracy has suffered a breakdown in Guinea."