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Georgia opposition says election body stole votes
2008-01-08
Angry Georgian opposition leaders marched into the election commission's headquarters on Tuesday and accused its chief of stealing half a million votes to fix leader Mikhail Saakashvili's re-election. Western ambassadors later told the opposition at a meeting to respect the result of Saturday's election -- which Saakashvili won with a tiny majority over the threshold required to avoid a second-round run-off -- but they responded by pledging mass protests and hunger strikes. "You have stolen 500,000 votes," Levan Gachechiladze, the candidate who represented the main nine-party opposition coalition, bellowed at Levan Tarkhnishvili, the election commission chief. The 43-year-old wine producer shook his fists at Tarkhnishvili and stared straight at him. "We've facts proving the vote was rigged, but you've signed off on all of this. You are a main accomplice in this plot," he shouted. Georgia lies at the heart of the South Caucasus, a volatile region which hosts a pipeline pumping oil to Europe from the Caspian Sea and the centre of a power battle between the United States and Russia. The election commission declared Saakashvili winner of Saturday's vote -- with around 52 percent of the vote to about 25 percent for Gachechiladze -- hours after Western monitors said the poll had been slightly flawed but still competitive. Saakashvili's slim majority means he avoided a second round run off with Gachechiladze who says the vote was fiddled. The European Union, NATO and the United States congratulated Georgia on holding its first competitive election since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. And Western ambassadors in Tbilisi said after meeting the opposition that everybody should respect the final result. HUNGER STRIKE THREAT After the meeting, a clearly frustrated Gachechiladze pledged to hold a mass demonstration on Sunday against the result. He said some of his supporters would go on hunger strike from Wednesday outside the national broadcaster's headquarters. "They should either kill me or organize a second round of elections," he told reporters at a news briefing. Georgia's Labor party, which has a very active support base and won just over 6 percent in the election, said they would support his protests. "The reality is that Saakashvili is defeated," said Nestan Kirtadze, one of the leaders of Labor Party. "We are going to join Gachechiladze in protest actions, all the opposition should join him." On Sunday, around 7,000 people had rallied to protest against the election. Around 100,000 people massed in November at the peak of a five-day long anti-government protest which ended when Saakashvili, who rose to power in a peaceful 2003 revolution, ordered police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets at demonstrators. In an interview with Reuters on Monday Saakashvili had praised the election as fair and said it should be respected. "We can have free and fair elections, good elections, clean elections and basically in a very competitive environment," he said. Saakashvili's supporters dismiss the rigging allegations as a desperate attempt to discredit the election by an opposition which knows it has lost. The re-elected president will also hold his first cabinet meeting since the elections on Wednesday. The opposition accuse Saakashvili of economic mismanagement, corruption and acting as an autocrat, charges he denies. (Additional reporting by Margarita Antidze) (Writing by James Kilner; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
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