Tadjikistan to open polling stations for its subjects abroad

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21/2 Tass 84

DUSHANBE, February 21 (Itar-Tass) - Tadjikistan's Central Election
Commission will open polling stations at its foreign diplomatic missions
to make it possible for Tadjik subjects residing abroad to take part in
the February 28 parliamentary elections, Central Election Commission
chairman Mirzoali Boltuev told Itar-Tass on Sunday.
According to Boltuev, polling stations will be opened at Tadjik
missions in Russia's eight biggest cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg,
Novosibirsk, Perm, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Volgograd and Kemerovo, i.e. the
cities with the biggest Tadjik communities.
"According to our migration service, over 500,000 Tadjik citizens are
temporarily residing outside Tadjikistan. The bulk of them are staying in
Russia as labour migrants," he said.
"The voter lists include a total of 3.4 million voters, who can cast
their ballots at 3,065 polling stations, many of which have become a kind
of information and propaganda centres, especially in rural areas," said
Boltuev. He assured that voting ballots printed at a state printing house
have seven security features.
The current election campaign involves eight political parties while
only six parties took part in the last elections. A total of 221
contenders will race for 63 seats in the national parliament. Five
contenders withdrew their names a week before the voting, furnishing no
explanations. Meanwhile, despite the formal political pluralism in the
country, the majority of seats in the parliament will be traditionally
taken by the ruling Popular Democratic Party of Tadjikistan, having a vast
administrative resource and a charismatic leader, the country's President
Emomali Rakhmon, local observers say. The party holds 54 seats in the
current parliament.
Experts do not rule out that apart from the Islamic Revival Party (now
having two seats) and the Communist Party (four seats), parliamentary
seats might be won by the opposition Social Democratic Party. So far, the
Party, positioning itself as the party of lawyers, failed to get over the
vote threshold.
More than 500 observers from the OSCE, CIS, Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, European Union and a number of foreign countries, including
Russia, the United States and China, will monitor the election procedure.
However, experts from the OCSE Office for Democratic Institutions and
Human Rights have never recognized either presidential or parliamentary
elections in the post-Soviet Tadjikistan as meeting "democratic standards."
-0-ras/gor