Team to monitor Rwanda election

Published on Saturday 23 January 2010 18:18

THE Commonwealth will send a monitoring team to Rwanda's August presidential election in which incumbent Paul Kagame is likely to seek a second seven-year term.

On his first visit to Kigali since Rwanda joined the 54-member organisation last year, Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma said the Commonwealth would assist in strengthening the central African country's electoral commission.

It would also help improve Rwanda's judiciary and provide training to the central African country's journalists.

"I have offered, that in the presidential election in August, we would be very happy to send a team," said Sharma. Foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo accepted his offer.

New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch described the 2008 legislative elections in Rwanda as peaceful but said they were marred by "serious irregularities".

Rwanda, scene of genocide in the 1990s in which around 900,000 Tutsis were massacred by the majority Hutu, is a multiparty democracy but analysts say power lies in the hands of Kagame, the head of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front party.