Failed Guinea-Bissau presidential hopeful Kumba Yala agreed on Monday to accept the results of June 19 polls ”in the interests of peace,” after three of his supporters were killed during a police crackdown on a rally to protest the vote.
”I won the elections, but the results were changed. Despite everything, in the interests of peace and the nation, I accept the results,” he told a press conference in Dakar in the presence of Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade.
Yala said on Saturday he would accept the results if they ”conform to reality,” following talks with Wade in the Senegalese capital.
The former president came third out of 13 candidates in the first round of the presidential elections, behind two predecessors in office: Malam Bacai Sanha of the former single ruling party, and strongman Joao Bernardo ”Nino” Vieira.
The two will face off in a second round to be held between July 17 and 24 barring any appeals by the candidates.
But Yala’s Social Renewal Party (PRS) said the results were falsified, and called hundreds of activists to a rally last Friday that turned deadly when police fired tear gas and then live bullets into the crowd, killing three.
The violence was universally denounced by pan-African bodies and deplored by the national electoral commission, which noted that the PRS had not filed any official appeal to contest the results.
Guinea-Bissau, scratching out a meagre existence in subsistence agriculture with a tiny export market of cashew nuts and fish, has been marked by a cycle of coups and civil war since independence in 1974 from Portugal.
Observers hope these polls will mark a transition to stability and democracy that will unblock badly needed international aid for the west African state, where the average annual income is around $140. – Sapa-AFP