LIBERIA: People start registering for first post-war elections but not in droves

MONROVIA, 25 Apr 2005 (IRIN) - Liberia began to register voters on Monday for elections in October that are due to set the seal on national reconciliation after a 14-year civil war.

The four-week registration process got off to a slow start in the capital Monrovia and was delayed in several remote parts of the West African country, where refugees and people who were internally displaced by the conflict are starting to trickle home.

Nonetheless, the head of Liberia's National Elections Commission, Frances Johnson-Morris, seemed confident that by the end of registration exercise some 1.5 million people would be eligible to vote in presidential and parliamentary polls set for 11 October.

"We've observed a slow turnout in some places today. But this is just the first day and as time goes by, the process will pick up and you will find more and more people coming to register," Johnson-Morris told reporters. "This (target) figure may increase as the process gains momentum."

Liberia is still struggling to emerge from a bloody conflict that completely wrecked the country by the time it ended with a peace agreement in August 2003.

This deal installed a broad-based interim government which is dominated by the country's three former armed factions. But Liberia's infrastructure remains shattered, former combatants idle their days away on the street and tens of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) have still not returned home.

Johnson-Morris said false rumours about the documentation required to register to vote had been doing the rounds of the capital Monrovia and this might have put some people off.

"There were some negative reports circulating that only those with passports and birth certificates were to register, which was not true, and this information went wide," she explained.

An IRIN correspondent who toured registration centres in Monrovia found that some were virtually empty with as few as three people queuing up for their right to choose Liberia's next generation of leaders. At other locations, the number of people waiting to register was in the tens but not the hundreds.

Gyude Bryant, the interim head of state who will hand over power to the elected government next January, said he had hoped for a bigger turnout.

"The only disappointment is I don't see huge lines, I hope our people will come out and register," Bryant was quoted as saying by the BBC.

But not everyone is clear about how voter registration works.

"I do not even know where to register and I just heard last weekend that the voter registration starts on Monday", Annie Carter, a market trader, told IRIN.

One electoral worker registering voters acknowledged that the authorities needed to get their message across more clearly.

"The commission really needs to work extra hard to carry out a massive information campaign to encourage more people to register," said the man who did not wish to be identified. "From this first day, we noticed that people are not fully informed about the exercise."

The commission also faces a lack of vehicles to take its officials over atrocious roads to remote towns and villages in the interior. Such transport problems have made it difficult to move the required people and equipment to all the 1,511 registration centres which are due to be set up in this heavily-forested country.

"In Grand Kru County (in the southeast), the situation there is very difficult," said Johnson-Morris. "Our field workers will have to walk long distances just to transport materials from one village to the other... there will be a delay in that (south-eastern) county."

Nobody knows the present population of Liberia or how it is distributed, although for planning purposes aid agencies generally use an estimate of around three million.

The last proper census was carried out in 1984 and counted 2.5 million people. The 1989-2003 civil war, which killed tens of thousands of people, have prevented the authorities from carrying out a new population survey.

Over 350,0000 Liberians fled to seek refuge abroad while another 300,000 were displaced within the country.

Tens of thousands have returned home, but officials have admitted that resettlement is going much slower than they would have wished. And they worry about the impact this will have on giving Liberians their say in the country's future.

Voter registration is officially due to end on 21 May, but it has been extended to 4 June for refugees returning from other West African countries who have still to journey home.

The commission has said it will allow IDPs to register in the camps where many of them are still living, but it is adamant that they will have to back home to their villages to vote.

[ENDS]