Dar es Salaam, Tanzania - At least four opposition parties in Zanzibar are pondering their next move after boycotting Sunday's partial rerun of the island's 2000 multiparty elections as counting of the highly controversial poll continues on the archipelago.
Voting was conducted on 16 of the island's 50 constituencies, where an initial poll on 29 October was annulled due to widespread irregularities and was to have wound up by 5 PM East African time.
There was no violence as was anticipated, a source speaking from Zanzibar said, adding that the voting was "peaceful and without fanfare like the failed election" described by local and international observers as a sham.
Opposition parties, including Zanzibar's largest opposition party, the Civic United Front, or CUF, supported by UDP, TLP and TADEA, boycotted the exercise demanding for a complete rerun of the Zanzibar elections.
A faction of the NCCR-Mageuzi, which had earlier pledged solidarity, reneged, joined by at least one other party, the UMD.
A senior CUF official told PANA that it was now up to the international community to salvage Zanzibar from a similar crisis witnessed after the island's 1995 controversial elections.
In a statement Saturday, the US said it was ready to assist in any way it could to help restore the legitimacy of the electoral process in Zanzibar by calling on the government, political parties, and the civil society to avoid violence and work together to maintain calm on the island.
"As a close friend of Tanzania, we are deeply concerned about the failure of the electoral process in Zanzibar," a spokesman for the US Department of State, Richard Boucher, said in the statement.
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