SANAA, (IRIN) - - International election observers have expressed concerns over violent incidents in the run up to presidential and local elections on 20 September in Yemen. With a history of election-related killings, the country’s authorities are taking steps to prevent any further confrontation.

“There is no place for violence in a democratic election and we condemn all violent acts without reservation,” reads a European Union statement, quoting Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, the chief observer of the EU Electoral Observers in Yemen. The statement added that the EU called upon “all candidates, political parties and officials to respect the wishes of Yemeni voters for a peaceful election”.

The EU statement was made in reference to the killing of election officials on 24 August in Yemen’s Al-Jawf Governorate, north-east of Sana’a.

These murders have also prompted political parties, candidates, NGOs and Yemen’s Supreme Council for Elections and Referendum (SCER) to come together on 31 August to declare their commitment to an election without violence at a press conference at the Elections Media Centre.

The killings took place on the second day of the electoral campaign and led to the deaths of three persons, including an electoral candidate and two SCER employees, in a heavy gun battle. At least six more people were injured.

According to the EU, the shooting incident in Al-Jawf overshadowed an otherwise calm start to the election campaign.

However, Al-Jawf was not alone in witnessing pre-election violence. In the southern Lahj governorate, north of Aden, the nephew of independent presidential candidate Ahmed Abdullah Al-Majidi was murdered on 29 August, reports Almotamar.net.

This violence follows a familiar pattern in Yemeni elections. Thirteen people were killed and 50 wounded in the 1997 parliamentary elections, according to the Civic Democratic Initiatives Support Foundation (CDF), a Yemeni NGO doing research into conflict.

In the 2001 local council elections, 67 people were killed, says CDF - although the official government figure is 48 - and more than 100 wounded on election day.

In 2003, according to observers from the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an American NGO working on democratisation in Yemen, three people were killed and 14 wounded on the day of parliamentary elections, and significant violence occurred in the lead-up to elections day.

Analysts say that much of the violence has been related to distrust, a history of conflict among candidates, suspicion that voter registers were flawed and the seemingly arbitrary drawing of electoral districts.

However, Yemen has of late been taking steps to prevent electoral violence. There was less violence, for example, in the 2003 elections than in the 2001 elections, partly due to government and civil society efforts.

This time round, the SCER has carried out countrywide public awareness campaigns which include putting up 25,000 posters about a ban on guns in polling stations and informing electoral officials of the ‘no guns’ message through training, says John Landry, chief of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) electoral support project.

In addition, local peace-building NGO Dar al Salam is carrying out a campaign called ‘Polling Day 2006: A Day Without Arms’. In June, the NGO persuaded chiefs of 21 tribes to sign an agreement to conduct elections peacefully.

Yemen’s President, Ali Abdallah Saleh, and the National Defence Council made a similar declaration for a peaceful poll nationwide.