Tajikistan\'s Emomali Rakhmonov took out a 17-year lease on his country\'s presidency after Tajiks voted massively for constitutional changes that allow him to stand for two more seven-year terms of office after his current mandate expires in 2006. Announcing figures reminiscent of Soviet era elections, a spokesman for the central electoral commission said that according to provisional results, 93.13 percent of voters had approved the amendments in a poll in which 96.40 percent of eligible voters took part. Just 6.13 percent of voters rejected the referendum package with 0.7 percent of the ballots spoilt, commission spokesman Mirzoali Boltuyev said. Western observers stayed away from Sunday\'s referendum in a refusal to endorse the process, with the United States expressing concern and the pan-European security body the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe declining to send its representatives to monitor the poll. First elected in November 1994, Rakhmonov was re-elected in 1999 with a seven-year mandate under a constitution that barred him from standing again. The proposal to allow him to stand twice more after his current term expires in November 2006 was included in a package of some 50 constitutional amendments that Tajikistan\'s 3.1 million voters were asked to adopt or reject on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The other amendments were mostly of a technical nature or concerned social issues. The result was seen as a foregone conclusion in the run-up to the hastily-arranged poll that was announced last March and allowed for little national debate. But the small opposition here denounced the results as a fix. \"Our party observed how one person would vote in the name for six others, along with his own family members,\" Shokir Khakimov, deputy head of the Social Democratic party, told AFP. \"This was a political farce,\" agreed Asliddin Sokhibazarov, deputy head of the Democratic Party. \"These election results are falsified, this is another government lie,\" he told AFP. (AFP)