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Sana'a: In the absence of an agreement among Yemeni politicians on how to conduct free and fair elections in April 2009, Western experts believe that boycotting or delaying the elections are not good options.
Without reaching an agreement on the tools and mechanisms to administer the elections, both options are bound to be a bad decision for Yemen according to experts.
Political parties have not agreed about forming a new committee to run the upcoming elections despite repeated trials to do that ever since the previous committee expired eight months ago. There are two views.
The first one supported by the ruling General People's Congress (GPC), suggests forming a committee from judges. The other view supports forming a committee from political parties, and this has been mainly supported by the Joint Meeting Parties (JMPs), the opposition alliance.
The two sides, GPC and JMPs, have different views over the type of elections system that can guarantee a fair and free election.
The opposition JMPs wants to have the current election system, known as the First Winner System, changed to another system called Proportional System, while the GPC want to adhere to the current one.
The limited time is not in the interest of changing the process, which requires an amendment to the law.
Democracy experts and supporters based in Yemen such as the NDI (National Democratic Institute) and IFES have different views over which system is the best for Yemen's emerging democracy, although all of them insist that such a decision is up to the Yemenis.
The head of the Yemen-based NDI, Peter Dimitroff supports the idea of forming a committee to run the coming elections composed of representatives from parties rather than from judges.
"Political parties' representatives in the committee are always going to bring some of their own political parties' views to the table. I think judges have already a role to play in terms of a complaints process," Dimitroff told Gulf News in an interview.
Backwards
"Going to the system of judges would be a step backwards in my opinion," he said. Also, Dimitroff said he prefers the first winner system, since it keeps the link between the winner and his voters. "One of the most important things in politics is to keep or to enhance the link between members of parliament and geographical regions. That is done on single member constituency [biggest number of votes]," said Dimitroff.
He disagreed with the idea of a quota for women. He said it would be better if the parties look for strong women to run in normal elections.
"Quota ... it gives special status which decreases the power of women in parliament," he said.
However, Peter Williams, Yemen's director of IFES, said he supports the quota system for women, saying "it would be easier to implement." In the current climate probably a representation of different political views would be the best option, Williams said.
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