Tensions mount during Togo elections

LOME, Togo - Both sides claimed the lead Monday in a Togo presidential race overladen with fears of violence, and angry opposition followers promised an uprising if the west African nation's 36-year ruler stole the vote.

"We will revolt," shouted one opposition supporter, Adama Komi, who was among sweating, milling crowds of people surrounding opposition headquarters. A truckload of military police drove slowly by and glared.

Markets in the capital, Lome, stood nearly deserted, and many spoke of having sent their families to neighboring Ghana for fear of unrest.

Gen. Gnassingbe Eyadema is the world's longest-serving ruler after Fidel Castro of Cuba. Eyadema is Africa's longest ruler.

He faced five challengers in an election on Sunday that had been pressed upon him by Western donor states.

Eyadema, a former Togolese French Foreign Legion officer, seized power after a 1963 coup that was the first in postcolonial Africa. He withstood the wave of multiparty democracy that swept across some other African countries in the 1990s, repeatedly calling out security forces to crush democratic revolts.

Almost all international aid has been cut off to Togo since the last presidential election, in 1998, when Eyadema abruptly stopped the vote count and declared himself winner.

Amnesty International said security forces killed hundreds after the 1998 vote announcement, leaving bodies to wash up on the beaches of Togo and neighboring countries for days.

Togo's election commission announced partial results late Monday, saying Eyadema was ahead at 59 percent, with 40 percent of the ballots counted. Top opposition challenger Bob Akitani was reported second at 35.15 percent.

Akitani, a one-time independence leader in the former German colony, has been endorsed by Eyadema's top rival, Gilchrist Olympio.

Olympio is the son of the democratically elected President Sylvanus Olympio, who was killed at the gates of the U.S. Embassy in the coup that brought Eyadema to power. Gilchrist Olympio lives in exile in Paris. Togo's courts barred him from the presidential race as a nonresident.

Akitani's supporters claimed Monday he had received more than 80 percent of the vote in the southern capital, Lome, and surrounding communities.

Top government officials privately agreed.

Eyadema's support base is among his own northern-based ethnic group, from which he draws 70 percent of the army and 79 of 81 members of the national legislature.

In Lome, the United Forces for Change opposition bloc pledged "an appropriate reaction" if Eyadema stole the election.

"We will not accept the stealing of the vote like in 1998," the opposition bloc's vice president, Emmanuel Kaftou, said, raising his voice over the opposition crowds shouting outside the headquarters.

"If that happens, democracy is dead in Africa," party activist Laurent Yao Kossi added.

Eyadema has touted himself as the nation's only guarantee of stability, citing civil wars that have bloodied fellow west African nations Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.