Incumbents claim Tajik landslide poll win

The party of authoritarian President Emomali Rakhmon has won nearly three quarters of the vote in parliamentary elections in Tajikistan, election officials said Monday, DPA reported.

The Democratic People's Party won 71.69 per cent of Sunday's vote, the Central Electoral Commission said.

As in the previous election, only two further parties managed to clear the 5 per cent barrier.

However observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe(OSCE) criticized the conduct of the election in the impoverished Central Asia state as undemocratic, as in previous polls.

OSCE said that there had been a "high prevalence of family and proxy voting and cases of ballot box stuffing."

"Such grave irregularities weaken the true democratic process", Pia Christmas-Moller of the OSCE's observer mission said in the country's capital Dushanbe.

Observers said that in rural areas whole family clans frequently had voted according to the patriarch's will.

Moreover, OSCE election observers blamed state television for biased coverage. State television is the main information source for the country's population of seven million.

Candidates of eight parties had competed for the 63 seats in the lower chamber of Parliament. All parties are considered government- friendly.

According to official accounts, 85.2 per cent of about 3.5 million eligible voters cast their ballot.

  Mountainous, landlocked Tajikistan is one of Central Asia's poorest countries, and suffered a brutal civil war after the breakup of the Soviet Union, between 1992 and 1997.