[Dryerase] AGR afghan elections

[Shawn G]

This is a world news story ... still maybe timely?

Asheville Global Report (www.agrnews.org)

Afghans elect government leader under fear and interference

By Shawn Gaynor

June 18 (AGR)— Afghan representatives gathered last week in a Loya Jirga 
(grand council) and selected the Northern Alliance interim president Hamid 
Karzai as the head of the newly forming Afghan government. Many have said 
that the elections, supported by the US and Australia among others, were 
rife with coercion, foreign diplomacy, and electoral manipulation, with the 
result being a victory Washington’s allies. Of the candidates, 8 were killed 
before the election, and the former King Mohammed Zahir Shah withdrew on the 
second day of proceedings after consultations with US officials, leaving 
almost no one willing or able to run strongly against Karzai.

The State Department, commenting on the election of Karzai said, “We 
congratulate Mr. Karzai . . .We have had excellent working relations with 
Chairman Karzai and the Interim Authority.” A state department spokesperson 
went on to say, “we think this is a very important step in reconstruction of 
the country and re-establishment of Afghan self-government.”

A statement by the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan 
(RAWA), a group who struggles for the rights of Afghanistan’s violently 
oppressed women, said of the election: “Our wounded and bewildered people, 
who have borne the constant blows of the past ten years, seem to be looking 
at it with disappointed eyes. Disappointed because the Loya Jirga has been 
convened under the patronage of guns and threats and the corruption of 
fundamentalists.”

Before the delegates arrived in Kabul for the council, the Tajik ethnic 
group, who dominate the Northern Alliance, had reportedly already been 
favored in several key ways.

According to the election guidelines set in Germany, Taliban supporters and 
those who committed war crimes were explicitly barred from being a 
representative. According to RAWA, who have long been anti-Taliban, Pashtuns 
not related to the former Taliban government where excluded unjustly. 
Furthermore, many Northern Alliance war criminals and fundamentalists were 
permitted to serve as representatives.

The election districts that the delegates where drawn from for the Loya 
Jirga were taken from a census conducted during a time when the Tajik, the 
ethnic group of the Northern Alliance, was previously in power and heavily 
favors them.

The fraud went deep, with Tajik territories claiming representative seats 
for universities that do not exist, in order to boost their delegations 
numbers. “And it is still unknown where these universities came from except 
by the force of the Northern Alliance who imposed them on the Loya Jirga 
Commission in order to instill yet more of their own elements in the Loya 
Jirga,” said the RAWA statement.

According to Human Rights Watch, who monitored the meeting, the Afghan 
intelligence services, controlled by the now elected Karzai, had a strong 
presence at the gathering, actively surveilling the conversations of the 
over 1,500 delegates and creating a hostile and threatening atmosphere. One 
delegate, an experienced Afghan journalist, told Human Rights Watch, “Amniat 
[the Afghan intelligence service] was checking people, overhearing 
conversations, looking into rooms. They were marching around with a camera, 
photographing people.”

On the second day of the proceedings, Human Rights Watch reported warlords, 
who where not authorized to participate in the process, entered the 
proceedings, “Mingling with the delegates and threatening those who called 
for their exclusion or opposed their agenda. Several delegates, including 
some women, reported threats when they complained about the warlords’ 
participation in the grand national assembly.”

Agence France Presse reported that warlords conducted their own meeting on 
the second night of the proceedings, attempting to divide power in the new 
government outside the Loya Jirga process.

“After subverting the voting process in many regions of Afghanistan, the 
warlords are now trying to hijack the Loya Jirga itself,” said Zia-Zarifi, a 
delegate to the Loya Jirga. “If the warlords succeed in their nefarious 
quests the security of the Afghan people will be put squarely in the hands 
of those most likely to threaten it.”

A RAWA spokeswoman said of the unwarranted participation of the warlords, 
“unless the pathogen of fundamentalism is eliminated from the government and 
all its departments, no development, no institutions and no decisions will 
be untainted.”

Women were under-represented ten to one in the body, mostly filling seats 
guaranteed to women by the rules laid out in Germany, and not a regionally 
elected seat. Many reported harassment and threats from Afghan warlords. 
Women’s groups had been pushing for a guarantee of 25 percent of the body’s 
delegates.





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