Afghans get to vote, sort
of By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - After much debate and two
postponements, presidential polls will be held in
Afghanistan on October 9. However, the parliamentary
election - which has also been deferred twice - will be
held next April. While the deferment of parliamentary
elections has been widely welcomed, the decision to
press ahead with the presidential poll when the
situation in the country is far from conducive for any
elections has evoked a mixed response.
Presidential and parliamentary elections were to
be held last month, but because of the deteriorating
security situation, rising violence and slow voter
registration they were postponed to September. While
voter registration is making slow progress - about 6
million of Afghanistan's estimated 10 million eligible
voters have registered - the security situation seems to
have worsened. Yet presidential elections will be held
in three months' time.
The number of violent
attacks by the Taliban and Afghan resistance has
increased steadily over the past several months.
Security personnel, election officials, aid workers -
especially those who are involved in registering voters
- and Afghans who have been registered as voters have
been the main targets of the Taliban. In the southern
province of Uruzgan, the Taliban massacred about 16
people who had voter-registration cards. They have vowed
to disrupt the elections and it is unlikely that many
voters will defy the Taliban and cast their vote in the
presidential election.
Though most of the recent
spurt in election-linked violence has been blamed on the
Taliban, there is evidence that warlords and their
militias are responsible for much of the instability and
violence outside Kabul. Militias loyal to General Rashid
Dostum and General Atta Mohammed dominate the politics
of the north. In a recent interview, President Hamad
Karzai admitted that the private militias posed a
greater threat to Afghanistan's security and dismissed
the threat from the Taliban as "exaggerated".
The authority of the Karzai government is
limited to Kabul. A plan to disarm the 100,000-strong
militias controlled by warlords before the election is
floundering badly, with only an estimated 10,000 having
agreed to leave the militias and only 7,000 weapons
handed in. Voter intimidation will be high under such
conditions.
The United Nations is buying time by
putting off parliamentary elections. It is hoping that
by then the disarmament process will have made more
progress and the power of the militias to determine who
will sit in parliament will have been reduced. It will
give them time to register voters, making the mandate
more meaningful.
The significant gains that are
to be had from deferring the vote makes the decision to
put off parliamentary elections until April a sensible
one. Why then the rush to hold presidential elections in
October when the situation is not conducive for any
election?
The rush to hold the presidential
elections in Afghanistan in October has to do with the
fact that the United States goes to the polls in
November. President George W Bush, who has nothing to
hold up as achievements on the foreign-policy front, is
hoping to present the Afghanistan election, the
country's "return to democracy", as a major
accomplishment of his administration.
US
officials insist that their hurry to hold presidential
elections in Afghanistan has to do with Karzai's
legitimacy. Further postponement of the poll will weaken
his credibility, they argue. It is true that Karzai's
mandate as interim president has already expired, and an
election will increase his legitimacy.
Zakim
Shah, head of Afghanistan's Joint Electoral Management
Body, said it would have a "negative effect on public
opinion" if the vote did not happen in October. However,
how much legitimacy can the mandate provide in an
election where so many voters, especially in the south
and southeast, are yet to be registered? Voter
registration might be progressing, but in 19 of
Afghanistan's 34 provinces less than 50% of the
population have their names on electoral lists. What is
more, the delay in announcing the polling date could
exclude several aspiring presidential candidates. At
least a dozen other candidates are keen to challenge
Karzai in the upcoming election, but several of them
could find themselves out in the cold.
Afghanistan's electoral law requires political
parties and presidential candidates to register 75 days
before polling day. The date for the presidential poll
was announced on July 9. This gave political parties 17
days to register their candidates. They need to show
that the candidate has 10,000 supporters to register.
Most aspiring candidates will not have enough time to
meet this requirement, provoking criticism that the date
for the election favors Karzai.
Besides, how
free and fair will an election that is held in the
shadow of the gun be? Some officials believe that the
security situation in Afghanistan, while inadequate to
hold the more complex parliamentary election - every
candidate would need to be provided tight security, for
instance - is okay to hold a presidential poll. "From a
security viewpoint, the environment is decent for
presidential elections," said the UN's special
representative to Afghanistan, Jean Arnault.
Analysts are also pointing out that the ethnic
divide in the country will deepen if only the
presidential election is held now. The people can be
expected to vote along ethnic lines. With the
non-Pashtun ethnic groups deeply divided, Karzai, a
Pashtun, is expected to win. But with Karzai having
failed to reach out to the ethnic minorities, his
victory could deepen the alienation and hostility of the
Tajiks, the Hazaras, the Uzbeks and others.
Experts have pointed out that if parliamentary
elections are held simultaneously, the ethnic minorities
might not see themselves as losers in the presidential
election as they would feel they at least have
representation in parliament. Barnett R Rubin, senior
fellow at New York University's Center for International
Cooperation, told Inter Press Service: "Presidential
elections will be seen as a kind of all-or-nothing thing
in a system where the level of trust in existing
institutions is practically non-existent." Delinking the
two elections then might not be such a good idea.
Some have pointed out that a flawed election is
better than no election at all. However, there is a
third option - a deferred election. There is a
possibility of course that the security situation might
not have improved substantially by April. But the
disarmament of the militias might make some progress,
however minimal that might be. The Americans, the UN and
Karzai are hailing the upcoming election as an important
milestone in Afghanistan's road to constitutional and
representative government.
However, democracy is
not just about holding elections. It is as much about
ensuring that people can vote without fear, about
building democratic institutions and so on. But Bush is
determined to make the Afghans vote in October and that
is all that seems to matter.
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