Police, but Few Voters, in Ivory Coast Turnout

With tensions running high after opposition calls for a boycott, few turned out to vote today in the first presidential election since the death of the country's long-governing founding father, Felix Houphouet-Boigny.

In the days before the election, the interim President, Henri Konan Bedie, who took over after Mr. Houphouet-Boigny died in December 1993, sternly pledged to provide security throughout the country. He urged voters to defy his opponents by turning out in large numbers.

From daybreak, the streets of this city and many other Ivoirian towns were filled with security personnel armed with tear-gas grenades and dressed in riot gear. Adding to the tension was an announcement Saturday of Mr. Bedie's removal of the commander of the armed forces, Gen. Robert Guei. The general was reported to have resisted the President's orders that the military be deployed alongside the police in putting down demonstrations and maintaining order. This morning two protesters were reported to have been shot dead by security forces near the northern town of Korhogo. At least eight other people were killed in politically related violence leading up to the election.

But opposition supporters heeded the call of their leaders for an "active boycott" of the vote, while others, apparently considering the uncompetitive vote a mere formality, simply stayed at home. In Abidjan and in the interior, disgruntled citizens burned ballot boxes, ripped up voter lists or cut down trees to block roads to their towns in order to delay or prevent voting.

Mr. Bedie's main opposition rivals have charged that the Government rigged the voter lists and refused to allow independent supervision of the election process. On Saturday Mr. Bedie sought a settlement to ward off the election-day crisis. Opposition leaders said, however, that the President's offer amounted to what they called an unacceptable deal in which they would call off their boycott in exchange for revisions of voter lists in time for parliamentary and local elections starting next month. "From the moment they say they are willing to correct the lists, they are admitting there is a problem," said Abou Dramane Sangare, a senior leader of the Ivorian Popular Front, one of two main opposition parties that are boycotting the vote.

With Mr. Bedie's main rivals abstaining from the election, the only competition the 62-year-old leader faced was from Francis Wodie, a 59-year-old lawyer who heads the tiny, center-left Ivorian Workers Party and was not expected to win.

Earlier this year, an electoral code written by Mr. Bedie's supporters eliminated the man who was widely given the best chance of unseating the President, Alassane D. Ouattara, who served as Prime Minister under Mr. Houphouet-Boigny and is now deputy director of the International Monetary Fund in Washington. The other main opposition leader, Laurent Gbagbo, pulled out of the race in protest over other elements of the electoral code.

Source: New York Times