Election officials and observers have discovered widespread fraud, including ballot stuffing and proxy voting, in the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan.
AFGHANISTAN went to the polls on September 18 to elect a new Parliament and 34 provincial councils. The country will soon have a National Assembly, which will be made up of a directly elected lower house, the House of the People, and an indirectly elected upper house, the House of Elders. It will be similar in many respects to the Indian political system. In the September elections, Afghan voters cast two ballots, one for the lower house and one for the provincial council. The upper house will eventually be made up of leaders of the provincial councils, the district councils and direct appointees of the President. District Council elections are due next year. Until then the upper house will have a strength of 51, half its projected size. Sixty-eight seats (27 per cent) in the lower house and one-sixth of the seats in the upper house are reserved for women.
The voter turnout for the parliamentary elections was reportedly lower than that for the presidential poll held late last year. The official estimate of turnout in the presidential election was 70 per cent. That figure, according to many independent observers, was a highly exaggerated one. In the parliamentary elections, the official turnout was 53 per cent. Twelve million Afghans are officially registered to vote. Six thousand candidates stood for the elections, among them 600 women. International observers reported that many polling booths in the provinces looked deserted. Only the capital witnessed people queuing up to vote.
According to the Afghan Election Commission, only 36 per cent of the electorate voted in Kabul, one of the few urban centres that enjoy comparative peace and security. President Hamid Karzai praised the voters for coming out "in spite of the terrorism, in spite of the threats". The banned Taliban had urged the people to boycott the polls. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the elections showed "the clear determination of the Afghan people to pursue the peaceful and democratic development of their nation". An estimated $149 million of international aid money was spent on the elections.
The directly elected Parliament will have the authority to pass laws. For the past three years, Hamid Karzai has been ruling by decree. Karzai said he wanted the new Parliament to act as a "check" on the executive. "I want an assembly in which the real representatives of Afghanistan should have a role, and I want that assembly to have a whip over the government of Afghanistan," Karzai told a meeting of provincial leaders during the run-up to the elections.
Prior to the elections there were demonstrations in Kabul to protest against the murder of a prominent candidate running for Parliament. At least four election officials and six candidates running for elections were killed in the run-up to the elections. The demonstrators, numbering around 5,000, had demanded the resignation of the powerful warlord, Atta Mohammad, from the post of Governor. Among the candidates with tainted human rights records who contested in the parliamentary elections were Abdul Sayyaf, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Mullah Taj Mohammad, Yunus Qanooni and Mullah Ezatullah. Most of them stand accused of crimes committed against humanity during the long-drawn-out bloody struggle for the control of Kabul in the early 1990s. Interior Minster Ali Ahmad Jalali had earlier resigned from the Cabinet to signal his "anger and frustration" at the state of affairs. Jalali was known to be a confidant of Karzai.
Four years after the American invasion of Afghanistan and the installation of the regime led by Hamid Karzai, the Taliban has resurfaced with a vengeance. More than 1,200 Afghans have been killed in renewed attacks by the Taliban. On September 28, a suicide bomber killed nine Afghan soldiers and injured many more outside a military camp in Kabul. American forces in Afghanistan have suffered their worst casualties this year. More than 70 United States Army personnel have been killed since January.
After winning the presidential election last year, Karzai had promised to institute wide-ranging reforms and purge the warlords from their positions of power. A few of the warlords have been sidelined, but the majority of them hold on to their influential posts. Poppy cultivation is booming, with the warlords cornering much of the profits from the opium trade. Initial results from the elections indicate that the warlords have managed to ensure the victory of their candidates. If the trend continues, the majority in Parliament will consist of supporters of factions patronised by warlords. The final results will be known only by the end of November. San Zarifi, deputy director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), said the Afghan people were "disappointed that the government and its international partners haven't done more to prevent warlords and rights abusers from dominating Afghanistan's political scene".
Election officials and observers have discovered widespread instances of fraud, including those of ballot stuffing and proxy voting, in the parliamentary elections. The number two in Al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahari, has, not surprisingly, joined in the chorus of criticism. In a taped interview shown on the Al Jazeera television network, he said the elections were "conducted under the terror of warlords". He went on to say that though the American forces drove the Taliban's government out of Kabul, the movement has been "active in the mountains and countryside, where the real power of Afghanistan lies".
Despite widespread demands, Karzai successfully resisted the idea of allowing political parties to contest the parliamentary polls. The President evidently felt that it would be easier for him to control Parliament by wheeling and dealing with individuals instead of strong groupings fighting under a political banner. Karzai is of the opinion that Afghan political parties were responsible to a great extent for the chaos and bloodshed of the past three decades. This concept of "partyless democracy" was endorsed by the West, which is propping up the government in Kabul.
The Bush administration was seemingly in a hurry to get over with the election process in Afghanistan. With his popularity in free fall, President George Bush wanted to show to his domestic audience that he was successful in implanting democracy in Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Apparently, Bush feels that he also has divine sanction for his imperial project in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Sha'ath, Bush told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that God had instructed him to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan from tyranny.
The Bush administration would like to declare Afghanistan a "democracy" and start winding down the American military presence in the country. U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has expressed his desire to reduce by a quarter the 18,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld wants American troops to be replaced by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops. However, major NATO countries such as France, Germany and Spain have not reacted positively to this plan. They have also refused to participate in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan.
In Germany, the newly formed Left Party, which got more than 8 per cent of the vote in the recent parliamentary polls, wants German troops to be recalled immediately from Afghanistan.
The Bush administration and the Karzai government, meanwhile, have openly suggested that the most wanted man on the planet, Osama bin Laden, is not in Afghanistan. U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Porter Goss said recently that they knew where Osama bin Laden was. They were pointing fingers at the Pakistani government. American and Afghan officials accuse Islamabad of indirectly playing a role in the resurgence of the Taliban. They point out that the Taliban leadership is getting support from groups in Pakistan and accuse the Pakistani leadership of not doing its best to help consolidate the democratic process in Afghanistan.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE