Angola opposition on Monday denounced what it called government ”strategy” to delay legislative elections scheduled for next year.
In a statement, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) said that acts of ”intimidation” and ”increased attempts to curtail individual and collective freedoms in Angola” were evidence of the alleged strategy.
President Jose Eduardo dos Santos on Friday said the country’s first legislative elections since independence more than 30 years ago would go ahead as scheduled in 2008 in what observers noted was his first public statement on the poll to an Angola audience.
Unita alleged that political intolerance was on the increase in Angola, mainly in the countryside, where citizens were allegedly beaten, tortured and houses burned.
”People are killed, journalists and politicians are summarily tried, all these are deliberate acts to postpone democracy,” Unita secretary general Camalata Numa said.
”We will only be convinced that there will be elections when President Dos Santos sets a date for elections,” he said.
There was no immediate government reaction to the Unita allegation.
The long-awaited legislative elections are to be followed by presidential polls in 2009 to usher in a new era of multiparty democracy after Angola’s 27-year civil war ended in 2002.
The elections, which have been postponed several times, would be the first since the nation’s independence from Portugal in November 1975 triggered a civil war between Unita and the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.
Fresh fighting, which broke out in 1992 following a truce, interrupted an earlier electoral process. The war finally ended in 2002.
Dos Santos has been in power since 1979. — AFP
