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Voters go to the polls in troubled Mali

By AFP
20 November 2016   |   4:12 pm
Mali was voting Sunday in its first elections since 2013, with turnout low as security jitters remain high despite an international military intervention.
Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita casts his ballot at a polling station in Bamako during municipal elections on November 20, 2016. Mali is holding its first elections since 2013, the year international forces came in to tackle a rebel surge which threatened to split the country in two. HABIBOU KOUYATE / AFP

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita casts his ballot at a polling station in Bamako during municipal elections on November 20, 2016. Mali is holding its first elections since 2013, the year international forces came in to tackle a rebel surge which threatened to split the country in two.<br />HABIBOU KOUYATE / AFP

Mali was voting Sunday in its first elections since 2013, with turnout low as security jitters remain high despite an international military intervention.

Voters are electing 12,000 councillors across Mali as the government wrestles with implementing a peace deal and warding off the stubborn jihadist threat in the north.

French troops were deployed in 2013 to repel Al-Qaeda-aligned jihadists who had overrun several northern towns, joining forces with Tuareg-led rebels. Some 11,000 UN military and police followed, but the jihadists were never defeated, merely displaced.

The election — being held two years later than scheduled — coincides with the first anniversary of a jihadist attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in the capital Bamako that left 20 people dead, many of them foreigners.

“These elections have been delayed four times. That’s enough,” said President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita after casting his ballot in the first vote to be held since his own election.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon called Saturday for a peaceful vote in areas “where political and security conditions allow” in a nation still under a state of emergency.

He encouraged the government to work with other parties “to defuse tensions that may arise before and after the poll”.

Residents and officials reported low turnout in the capital and string of disruptions to voting in northern and central Mali.

In Timbuktu, unknown attackers seized and burned electoral papers in multiple raids ahead of the elections and on voting day.

Voting was going ahead in Timbuktu city, whose fabled shrines were destroyed during the jihadist takeover in 2012, but was called off in many nearby villages.

Oumar Moussa, resident of Timbuktu’s working-class Sareykeyna neighbourhood, said there had been “huge turnout” in his area. “There are concerns, but it’s gone well so far,” he told AFP.

Residents were also not voting in Kidal, bastion of the former rebels of the Coordination of Azawad Movements (CMA), the Tuareg group that runs the northern town.

The CMA had denounced the government’s “pig-headedness” in organising the vote before northern interim authorities are set up as per the peace deal, and ahead of the return of “tens of millions of refugees and displaced people” who would be affected by the outcome.

The vote was also cancelled in numerous villages in the neighbouring Gao region.

Opposition candidate Saibou Barry was kidnapped Saturday morning in the central town of Koro, with his party saying his car was found burned and that he had been driven to “an unknown destination”.

It was hoped that last year’s peace deal between rebels, the government and loyalist militias would bring stability to the north, but since then rival armed groups have repeatedly violated the ceasefire.

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