Voter registration extended for returning refugees

Liberia's National Elections Commission is extending voter registration by two weeks in the country’s 11 October general and presidential elections to allow eligible refugees who return home to participate, the commission chairwoman told IRIN on Tuesday. Frances Johnson-Morris said returnees unable to take part in countrywide voter registration scheduled between 25 April and 21 May would be entitled to register later, from 23 May up to 4 June. "This special extended period of voter registration is intended for only our fellow Liberians who return from refugee camps after the general period so as to allow them to exercise their franchise", Johnson-Morris said. She said the adjustment to the electoral calendar followed numerous appeals from refugees across the West African sub-region. Some 350,000 Liberians fled to other West African countries during the 1989-2003 civil war and an estimated 300,000 were internally displaced. UN refugee agency (UNHCR) spokeswoman in Liberia, Francesca Fontanini, told IRIN on Tuesday that around 100,000 refugees had spontaneously returned last year, and that 13,204 refugees had been repatriated from countries of asylum since the start of a refugee repatriation scheme on 1 October last year. Johnson-Morris said delays in the resettlement of people who were displaced internally by war were hampering the electoral process. "There is the problem of the resettlement of IDPs which is not going as fast as we had wished’, she said. “There is a substantial number of IDPs still living in camps, we want them to return where they would vote. The commission is only going to allow them to register in the camps, but they have to return to the counties of origin to vote." The UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) said in a report released on Monday that as of 29 March a total 95,165 IDPs had been resettled. Abou Moussa, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Liberia, said in March that a new mechanism had been put in place to speed up the resettlement of the IDPs still in 20 camps around the country ahead of the October elections. Moussa, who has been touring camps around Liberia encouraging people to return home, said assistance to IDPs in camps would have to be discontinued at some point in the future. He did not set a deadline. The electoral commission said 1,511 voters registration centres would be set up across the country. Johnson-Morris warned however that bad roads would hamper the movements of election workers as well as the shipment of election materials in remote villages and towns during the rainy season which runs from April to October.