Algeria to hold presidential election on April 8

Algerian presidential elections, expected to be held in the most peaceful conditions since Islamic rebels took up arms in the early 1990s, will take place on April 8, the president said yesterday.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, under pressure to ensure free and fair voting, called on election authorities across Africa's second-largest country to ensure the polls' neutrality.

Official radio reported yesterday a Bouteflika representative picked up candidate registration forms from the Interior Ministry, the clearest sign yet that the incumbent wants another five-year term.

Earlier this week, Bouteflika invited international observers to the April poll, a surprise move that followed US criticism of the North African country's election preparations.

Opposition leaders have threatened to boycott the vote if conditions do not improve, which would be reminiscent of 1999 elections when all candidates except Bouteflika pulled out of the race at the last minute alleging electoral fraud.

In a statement Bouteflika, widely seen as a moderate reformer, said he was setting up a national commission to supervise the election and ensure transparency.

The commission will be made up of representatives of political parties and presidential candidates.

He has asked the United Nations, the European Parliament, the Arab League and the African Union to send monitoring groups after long resisting such a call from opposition parties.

But the country's largest party, the National Liberation Front (FLN), said Bouteflika had failed to involve the opposition in setting up the electoral commission.

"This is another sign of the president's intentions... to control public institutions, media and public funds for electoral purposes," the FLN said in a statement.

FLN leader, former Prime Minister Ali Benflis and other opposition groups accuse Bouteflika of suppressing parties and the independent press and using state funds to get re-elected.

The FLN, the sole party for most of the period since Algeria gained independence from France in 1962, has been temporarily frozen by the courts following a lawsuit by rebels within the party that favour Bouteflika over Benflis.

This has weakened Benflis's position although he remains Bouteflika's principal challenger, political analysts say.

Bouteflika is favoured to win, with Benflis second and the emerging force within the legal Islamic movement, Abdallah Djaballah of the El Islah party, the third most popular, according to opinion polls published late last year.

Bouteflika is believed to want another term to complete economic reforms and crush the remaining rebel groups.

"Bouteflika is the favourite to win again because I think the elections have been fixed since the beginning with little opportunity for the opposition," said Mahmoud Belhimeur, professor at the University of Algiers and deputy editor of Algeria's top daily El Khabar.

Bouteflika has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. The polls will be seen as a gauge of the oil-rich country's stability after a decade of bloodshed involving Islamic militants in which rights groups say more than 150,000 died.

The violence was ignited by an army-backed cancellation of parliamentary elections a now-banned radical Islamic party was poised to win in 1992.

Rebel violence has fallen sharply over the past two years, although five policemen were killed by rebels on Thursday in a part of western Algeria controlled by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has ties to Al-Qaeda. The powerful military, long influential in the country's elections, has pledged its neutrality in the polls.