Polls have opened in Mali for the second round of legislative elections that come despite an armed conflict and a looming coronavirus pandemic.
Voters in the nation of 19 million will cast their ballots in the runoff for 147 seats in the National Assembly on Sunday.
The elections have been repeatedly delayed, eroding trust in institutions as the country struggles with an armed revolt that has killed thousands of people and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes.
The first round of voting on March 29 was disrupted by attacks and intimidation, including the kidnapping of opposition leader Soumaila Cisse. It was unclear which group was behind the kidnapping.
“I am scared. I had to hide to visit my own constituents,” Hamadoune Dicko, a parliamentary candidate for the Democratic Alliance for Peace party, told Al Jazeera.
“If they can abduct our opposition leader for 21 days, they could abduct a president, they can take anyone they want,” Dicko added.
In central Mali, where Dicko is campaigning, al-Qaeda affiliates are reportedly asking people not to vote, Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque said.
The turnout in the first round nationwide averaged 35.6 percent, but was just 12.9 percent in the capital Bamako.
Security concerns
These are the country’s first parliamentary polls since 2013 when President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s Rally for Mali party won a big majority.
The elections were meant to take place in late 2018 after Keita was returned to office, but the polls were postponed several times, mainly because of security concerns.
A “national dialogue” staged last year to discuss Mali’s spiral of violence called for the ballot to be completed by May.
The hope is that the new MPs will endorse changes to the constitution that will promote decentralisation.
That is the key to pushing ahead with the government’s plans for peace – it signed a deal with armed separatists in northern Mali in 2015, but the pact has largely stalled.
Violence in that region began in 2012 and was then fanned by armed outfits.
Defying thousands of French and United Nations troops, the armed groups took their campaign into the centre of the country and now threaten neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.
Mali is one of the world’s most impoverished nations.
Its conflict zones and poor healthcare infrastructure place it in the category of countries that health experts say are at high risk of coronavirus.
An election-monitoring NGO warned about social distancing in Sunday’s vote. Keita said “every health and security” precaution will be “rigorously applied”.
The country has officially recorded 13 deaths out of more than 200 cases.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES