4 November 2009
Maputo — Mozambique's main opposition party, Renamo, on Wednesday produced the first hard evidence of its allegations of ballot box stuffing during the general elections held a week ago.
This took the form of nine ballot papers, five for the presidential and four for the parliamentary election, all marked for the ruling Frelimo Party or its presidential candidate, Armando Guebuza.
Renamo says that one of its polling station monitors, Bilaly Vuqueque, acted to prevent these ballot papers from being slipped into a ballot box in Mozambique Island district, on the coast of the northern province of Nampula. The monitor seized the papers from the hands of a woman named as Sualehe Malda who was in the queue waiting to vote at polling station 541 on Mozambique Island.
The police arrested not Malda, but the man who denounced the attempted fraud.
"Once again, we want to state that the returning officers at the polling stations ordered the detention of Renamo monitors, with the main objective of stuffing the ballot boxes with ballot papers filled out in favour of Frelimo and its candidate", said the Renamo national election agent, Saimone Macuiana, at a Maputo press conference.
He added that Renamo was surprised to find that, when Vuqueque denounced the attempted crime to the police, instead of detaining the offender, they arrested the whistle blower instead. This led Macuiana to conclude that the police "acted under instructions from the Frelimo Party and its candidate".
The ballot papers shown by Macuiana looked genuine. They were not the papers used in polling station staff training exercises, which are clearly marked "formacao" (training) to avoid any confusion. Three of the presidential papers were numbered in sequence, and the rest of the ballots were numbered in isolation, and it could not be seen whether they came from the same block of papers.
Macuiana also distributed copies of the handwritten report by Vuqueque, telling how he had been beaten, handcuffed and briefly incarcerated in the local prison. He had, however, managed to cling onto the nine ballot papers.
Macuiana declared "These facts and others show that the 2009 elections suffer from serious irregularities which call their credibility into question. We want to tell Mozambican society and the world that these elections are falsified. That's why Renamo and its candidate are not going to accept the results of these elections".
Asked about the authenticity of the ballot papers, Macuiana said that that Renamo does not have the capacity to produce such documents on South African printing presses.
The ballot papers were all printed and packaged in South Africa under the eyes of members of the National Elections Commission (CNE). Once in Mozambique, they were not to be opened until the polling stations opened at 07.00 on 28 October. If the Renamo claim is true, somebody in the electoral staff must have violated a pack of ballot papers, which would indicate a serious breach of security.
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