Comoros president wins controversial vote extending his powers

MORONI: Voters in Comoros overwhelmingly backed controversial constitutional reforms that would allow President Azali Assoumani to run for another term, an electoral official said Monday, following a referendum boycotted by the opposition.
The Indian Ocean archipelago has a long history of instability and risks renewed unrest after Assoumani banned demonstrations and the opposition called Monday's vote "illegal".
"I'll give you the national results... 'Yes,' 172,240 votes, which is 92.74 percent. 'No,' 13,338 votes, which is 7.26 percent," the president of the Comoros National Electoral Commission (CENI), Ahmed Mohamed Djaza, told a briefing in the capital Moroni.
Turnout was 63.9 percent, he added.
The poll was held to a backdrop of rising tensions, suggestions of ballot stuffing, and voting was interrupted by at least one violent incident.
"In the majority of polling stations visited there were fewer than 20 voters waiting to cast their ballots," Jules Hoareau, part of the Eastern Africa Standby Force observer mission, told AFP.
"But when we returned we observed a sudden flood of voting papers in the ballot box. That doesn't make any sense."
Unidentified assailants attacked the Hankounou polling station in Moroni with a knife, destroying two ballot boxes and hospitalising a policeman.
“What a result! A faked vote, fabricated figures — that’s how President Azali consults the public,” said secretary general of the opposition Juwa party, Ahmed el-Barwane.
Under the constitution adopted in 2001, power rotates every five years between Comoros’ three main islands as a means of balancing politics in the coup-prone country.
If the government wins the referendum, this arrangement would be scrapped and replaced by a president who would be elected for a five-year tenure, renewable for one term.
Assoumani would also gain the power to scrap the country’s three vice-presidencies, another balancing measure of the present constitution.
If the referendum is approved, Islam would also be proclaimed the state religion for the first time. Ninety-nine percent of the Comorans are Sunni Muslim.
One businessman who requested anonymity told AFP he had not voted because he “sensed a scam.”
In the capital Moroni there were only a handful of posters of Assoumani’s face emblazoned with slogans exhorting voters to support his reforms.
The opposition did not participate in the process and turnout appeared weak at several polling stations in the capital, AFP reporters witnessed.
“In the majority of polling stations visited there were fewer than 20 voters waiting to cast their ballots. But when we returned we observed a sudden flood of voting papers in the ballot box,” Jules Hoareau, part of the Eastern Africa Standby Force observer mission, told AFP. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
The poll was marred by several incidents including the destruction of ballot boxes at a polling station in Moroni in which a policeman was stabbed and hospitalized.
But state media insisted “there was no apocalypse... the vote proceeded without any major incident.”