Correction: Mali-Election story

— In a story April 5, The Associated Press reported erroneously that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb denied in a statement France's claim of having killed senior commander Abou Zeid. AQIM did not name Abou Zeid as the commander they were discussing. Washington-based SITE Intelligence said it seemed the group was referring to the commander as Abou Zeid in the English-language translation of the AQIM statement.

A corrected version of the story is below:

French minister in Mali, presses for July poll

French foreign minister urges Mali to stick to July poll date


Associated Press

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) - French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius urged Mali on Friday to stick to a July date for its upcoming presidential election, stressing that the poll is a crucial step in restoring constitutional order following last year's coup.

The date is considered unrealistic by many country watchers because the northern half of Mali remains insecure, with remnants of an al-Qaida cell still active despite a three-month-old, French-led military intervention aimed at uprooting the extremists. But during a stop in Mali's capital, Fabius stressed that the elections are necessary and that the country should not delay them.

"The desire to hold the election by the given date is unanimous, and that date is in the month of July," Fabius told reporters at a press conference on Friday.

Foreign Affairs Minister Tieman Coulibaly said France had promised to provide Mali with the human resources it needs to carry out the election, including two, full-time election experts. The price-tag for the election is estimated to be around 149 billion West African francs ($295 million), according to a confidential planning document which The Associated Press was allowed to see.

Late Thursday, Moussa Sinko Coulibaly, Mali's minister in charge of organizing the election, said the country already had the budget needed to organize the poll. Besides the problem of holding the poll in the insecure north, critics point out that hundreds of thousands of Malians are currently displaced, living in refugee camps in four neighboring nations, making it unclear how to carry out voter registration.

Coulibaly said on Friday that they plan to work with the U.N. refugee agency in order to create a system to allow people to vote inside the refugee camps, if they are unwilling or unable to return to Mali.

An official involved in the planning of the election who could not be named because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the matter said that it is logistically impossible to hold the election by July.

"There are lots of things missing that we need in order to hold a presidential election. To start with, the company that needs to be contracted to create the voter ID cards has not even been chosen yet. Secondly, the minister of territorial administration who is in charge of overseeing the election has presented a budget that is different from the one presented by the minister of finance to organize the poll - just to say, it's a real mess right now," the official said. "The Malians are trying to show (to the French) that they want the elections to be held, but there is not a single, palpable thing that they are doing to make this happen."


