De verkiezingen in Afghanistan

[Elzenga]

Doe maar mooi een 2e ronde. De hoeveelheid frauduleuze stemmen voor Karzai is zo groot dat hem de overwinning te geven, voor veel meer problemen gaat zorgen dan een aantal weken met verhoogde spanningen.

maar wie zegt dat er in de 2e ronde niet weer gefraudeerd wordt dan? En als Karzai dan wint, wat aannemelijk lijkt, dan zullen er weer beschuldigingen komen van fraude en zullen die ook weer plaats vinden vrees ik. Het zit nu eenmaal structureel in de Afghaanse maatschappij gebakken dat men steun koopt en mensen vervolgens door stamleiders wordt verteld op wie te stemmen. Ook de kosten van nieuwe verkiezingen zijn niet mals...leg dat maar eens uit hier in het Westen waar de crisis heerst...

[Enforcer]

Doe maar mooi een 2e ronde. De hoeveelheid frauduleuze stemmen voor Karzai is zo groot dat hem de overwinning te geven, voor veel meer problemen gaat zorgen dan een aantal weken met verhoogde spanningen.

[Elzenga]

Afghanistan braces for possible election runoff
Sat Oct 17, 2009 6:57pm EDT

By Maria Golovnina

KABUL (Reuters) - Senior foreign officials pressed President Hamid Karzai on Saturday to resolve a disputed election that threatens to undermine the Western effort to stabilize Afghanistan amid a growing Taliban insurgency.

Allegations of fraud in the August 20 presidential election have left Afghanistan in a state of political uncertainty as U.S. President Barack Obama is deciding on sending more troops to fight the Taliban.

U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry said on Saturday that Washington should not proceed with a new Afghan strategy involving more troops without a clear partner in Kabul.

Kerry, who was defeated by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential campaign, was among several high-level visitors to Afghanistan before the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission's expected announcement this weekend on whether there will need to be a runoff between Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah.

"Look, it would be entirely irresponsible for the president of the United States to commit more troops to this country, when we don't even have an election finished and know who the president is and what kind of government we're working in," Kerry said in an interview with CNN's "State of the Union" from Kabul. [nN17307546]

The election is a vital element in Western plans to stabilize Afghanistan and deny sanctuary there to militants believed to have used it as a base for actions across the globe, including the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

U.S.-led troops ousted the Taliban government after the September 11 attacks for offering safe haven to al Qaeda, but the Islamist movement has regrouped into a formidable insurgency.

More than 100,000 foreign troops are in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, but growing casualties and doubts about the Karzai government are undermining support for the effort in the United States, Britain and other countries involved.

SECOND ROUND 'ON RADAR SCREEN'

A Western official said a second election round "is definitely on the radar screen right now. This is why there are delays. There are some tense negotiations going on."

The complaints commission has already said it had found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud."

If it finds the fraud insufficient to overturn the result, Karzai can be declared the winner and would move to appoint a new government.

Karzai has made clear he would prefer not to fight a second round and has spoken out against the investigation, making veiled accusations of foreign meddling.

Some officials believe Karzai may resist accepting the commission's findings or seek to overturn them.

A second round carries risks of new violence by Taliban insurgents, weeks more of instability, heightened ethnic tensions during the campaign and a second flurry of controversy over fraud.

"This is very complicated," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, also visiting Kabul, told reporters. "We want to understand why it is not possible to get a consensus. But you need to work together."

Karzai separately spoke by phone to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai's office said.

Karzai won 54.6 percent of the vote, according to preliminary figures. More than 250,000 votes would have to be thrown out from his tally for it to fall below 50 percent.

If enough votes were disqualified, the incumbent would face Abdullah in a second round -- barring possible legal steps to invalidate the decision or an Abdullah decision to withdraw.

While accusing Karzai's camp of fraud and calling for a second round, Abdullah has hinted he might be open to some discussions after the first round result is announced.

A runoff would be due within two weeks.

(Additional reporting by Golnar Motevalli, Hamid Shalizi and Susan Cornwell; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Peter Cooney)
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Afghanistan-Pakistan/idUSSP50491720091017?sp=true

[Piranha]

Transparantie, dat begrijp ik. Maar wat zou hij met 'Afghanistan en de islamitische waarden' bedoelen?

[Elzenga]

Afghaan stapt uit kiescommissie

AFP, Reuters
Gepubliceerd op 12 oktober 2009 14:00, bijgewerkt op 14:04

KABUL -
Een Afghaanse rechter is maandag uit de kiescommissie gestapt. Volgens Mustafa Barikzai, rechter bij het Hooggerechtshof, is er sprake van buitensporig veel buitenlandse inmenging.

Barikzai was een van de twee Afghaanse leden van de kiescommissie. Ook drie buitenlanders maken deel uit van de commissie. Zij zijn aangewezen door het hoofd van de VN-missie in Afghanistan, Kai Eide. De internationale leden zijn volgens Barikzai 'beïnvloed door bepaalde buitenlandse circuits'. Zij hielden geen rekening met de principes van de Afghaanse grondwet, aldus de rechter.

Barikzai stelt dat hij uitgesloten werd van beslissingen. 'Ze realiseerden zich dat ik Afghanistan en de islamitische waarden verdedigde. Ook drong ik aan op een transparante aanpak in overeenstemming met de Afghaanse grondwet.'

De commissie onderzoekt klachten over fraude tijdens de Afghaanse presidentsverkiezingen. De uitslag van dat onderzoek wordt binnen enkele dagen verwacht.

[Lex]

Hertelling deel stemmen Afghanistan

KABUL - Afghaanse verkiezingsautoriteiten zijn maandag begonnen met het hertellen van een deel van de stemmen van de omstreden Afghaanse presidentsverkiezingen van 20 augustus.

Door nieuwe regels, die door een verkiezingswaakhond zijn opgesteld, lijkt het echter onwaarschijnlijk dat de voorlopige overwinning van zittend president Hamid Karzai kan worden teruggedraaid.

De kiescommissie verwacht enkele dagen nodig te hebben om de willekeurige selectie van verdachte stemmen opnieuw te tellen. Een definitieve uitslag zou dan volgende week kunnen worden bekendgemaakt.

Volgens de voorlopige uitslagen won Karzai de verkiezingen met 54,6 procent van de stemmen. De stembusgang werd echter overschaduwd door beschuldigingen van verkiezingsbedrog. Vooral de belangrijkste rivaal van de president, voormalig minister Abdullah Abdullah van Buitenlandse Zaken, uitte zich uiterst kritisch. Hij won ongeveer 28 procent van de stemmen.

© ANP 
Uitgegeven: 5 oktober 2009 18:17

[Elzenga]

De achtergrond van Galbraith is impressive...Ook voor Koerdistan en verdeling van Irak...al zie ik ook dat hij ambassadeur was van Kroatië tijdens de oorlog in voormalig Joegoslavië. En toen volgens mij ook een rol heeft gespeeld bij het verdeel-plan dat achter de schermen was opgesteld toen en dat ook mede invloed had op de val van Srebrenica en hoe daarop werd gereageerd...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_W._Galbraith

[Elzenga]

Zeer interessant en open verslag van Peter W. Galbraith. De man voelt zich zo genaaid dat hij afspraken tot geheimhouding aan zijn laars lapt. Ook tekenend voor dit conflict. Ik vraag me alleen wel af hoe de positie is van de Amerikaanse Regering in deze. Waarover hij maar weinig los laat of rept. Als die, zoals ik denk, vanaf het begin achter Karzai staat en geen tweede ronde wilde, dan zal dit verhaal van Galbraith niet goed aankomen. En mag ik hopen dat dit geen persoonlijke gevolgen heeft voor hem. Het gaat hier immers om zeer grote belangen.

Vooral dit stuk vind ik ook erg informatief...en bevestigt waar ik al bang voor was. De groeiende etnische verdeling (zoals ook zichtbaar in Irak) en bevestiging dat het hier inderdaad om een burgeroorlog gaat.

"Afghanistan is deeply divided ethnically and geographically. Both Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, which makes up about 45 percent of the country's population. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main challenger, is half Pashtun and half Tajik but is politically identified with the Tajiks, who dominate the north and are Afghanistan's second largest ethnic group. If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognizing the authority of the central government. The north already has de facto autonomy; these elections could add an ethnic fault line to a conflict between the Taliban and the government that to date has largely been a civil war among Pashtuns."

[hdevreij]

(Onderstaand de tekst van een ingezonden brief in de Washington Post van 4 oktober. Geschreven door Peter Galbraith, tot vorige week de nummer twee van de VN-missie in Afghanistan, UNAMA. ZIjn conclusie: de presidentsverkiezingen in Afghanistan zijn aanzienlijk oneerlijker verlopen dan de VN heeft gemeld, en daarover mocht niet worden gepraat).

What I Saw at the Afghan Election

By Peter W. Galbraith
Sunday, October 4, 2009

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a "disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud." Although this was not entirely accurate -- the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud -- I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring "in the best interests of the mission," and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a "personality clash" with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan's recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai.

I also felt loyal to my U.N. colleagues who worked in a dangerous environment to help Afghans hold honest elections -- at least five of whom have now told me they are leaving jobs they love in disgust over the events leading to my firing.

Afghanistan's presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country's transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

The election was a foreseeable train wreck. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than $300 million to hold the vote, and U.N. technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.

Part of my job was to supervise all this U.N. support. In July, I learned that at least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them. Clearly, these polling centers would not open on Election Day. At a minimum, their existence on the books would create large-scale confusion, but I was more concerned about the risk of fraud.

Local commission staff members were hardly experienced election professionals; in many instances they were simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai. If no independent observers or candidate representatives, let alone voters, could even visit the listed location of a polling center, these IEC staffers could easily stuff ballot boxes without ever taking them to the assigned location. Or they could simply report results without any votes being in the ballot boxes.

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission's chief election officer. We urged them either to produce a credible plan to secure these polling centers (which the head of the Afghan army had told me was impossible) or to close them down. Not surprisingly, the ministers -- who served a president benefiting from the fraud -- complained that I had even raised the matter. Eide ordered me not to discuss the ghost polling centers any further. On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.

At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.

In early September, I got word that the IEC was about to abandon its published anti-fraud policies, allowing it to include enough fraudulent votes in the final tally to put Karzai over the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. After I called the chief electoral officer to urge him to stick with the original guidelines, Karzai issued a formal protest accusing me of foreign interference. My boss sided with Karzai.

Afghanistan is deeply divided ethnically and geographically. Both Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, Afghanistan's dominant ethnic group, which makes up about 45 percent of the country's population. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai's main challenger, is half Pashtun and half Tajik but is politically identified with the Tajiks, who dominate the north and are Afghanistan's second largest ethnic group. If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognizing the authority of the central government. The north already has de facto autonomy; these elections could add an ethnic fault line to a conflict between the Taliban and the government that to date has largely been a civil war among Pashtuns.

Since my disagreements with Eide went public, Eide and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The U.N. Security Council directed the U.N. mission to support Afghanistan's electoral institutions in holding a "free, fair and transparent" vote, not a fraudulent one. And with so much at stake -- and with more than 100,000 U.S. and coalition troops deployed in the country -- the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan's election did not make the situation worse.

President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans.

As I write, Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission is auditing 10 percent of the suspect polling boxes. If the audit shows this sample to be fraudulent, the commission will throw out some 3,000 suspect ballot boxes, which could lead to a runoff vote between Karzai and Abdullah. By itself, a runoff is no antidote for Afghanistan's electoral challenges. The widespread problems that allowed for fraud in the first round of voting must be addressed. In particular, all ghost polling stations should be removed from the books ("closed" is not the right word since they never opened), and the election staff that facilitated the fraud must be replaced.

Afghanistan's pro-Karzai election commission will not do this on its own. Fixing those problems will require resolve from the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan -- a quality that so far has been lacking.

Peter W. Galbraith served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week.

(bron: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/02/AR2009100202855_pf.html

[Enforcer]

Een gewenst resultaat maakte fraude noodzakelijk...en om dat gewenste resultaat te behouden worden onder druk nu "lastige elementen" verwijdert...het faillissement van deze missie wordt in alle gradaties zichtbaar....

Daar lijkt het inderdaad erg op. Dus zal het de komende jaren eerder achteruit gaan dan vooruit.

[Elzenga]

Een gewenst resultaat maakte fraude noodzakelijk...en om dat gewenste resultaat te behouden worden onder druk nu "lastige elementen" verwijdert...het faillissement van deze missie wordt in alle gradaties zichtbaar....

[Enforcer]

Des te langer het duurt, des te ongeloofwaardiger het wordt.

[Lex]

UN recalls envoy from Afghanistan

The UN has recalled one of its senior officials from Afghanistan following a row over the August presidential vote.
Peter Galbraith fell out with top UN envoy Kai Eide and angered Afghan President Hamid Karzai by reportedly calling for a complete recount.
The election has been overshadowed by widespread allegations of fraud.
A UN statement said Mr Galbraith was being removed from his post "in the best interest of the mission". It reaffirmed support for Mr Eide.
Two weeks ago Mr Eide, who leads the UN mission in Kabul, said his deputy had left the country after a row between them. But he denied he had ordered him to go.
UN sources say Secretary General Ban Ki-moon decided to end Mr Galbraith's mission after it became clear he was no longer able to carry out his work in Afghanistan, says the BBC's Lyse Doucet.
Some Afghan cabinet ministers had said they no longer wanted to work with him.
It is understood that Mr Galbraith would have been kept in his post until after a final ruling on the disputed presidential election - a process that is in its final stages - but leaks emerged in Kabul before Mr Galbraith himself had been informed of the secretary general's decision, Lyse Doucet says.
The statement issued by Mr Ban's office in New York thanked Mr Galbraith "for his hard work and professional dedication".
"The secretary general has made this decision in the best interest of the mission. He reaffirms his full support for his special representative, Kai Eide," it added.
'Valuable deputy'
Last week, Mr Eide told the BBC the dispute had been resolved by Mr Galbraith agreeing to leave the country for a while.
He described Mr Galbraith as "a valuable deputy" and said he hoped they could "re-establish a good team and work together".
Mr Eide declined to talk about details of his disagreement with Mr Galbraith, but said the UN should respect the constitutional bodies in charge of the presidential election "to avoid any impression that there is foreign interference".
The row is between two men who have known each other for a long time but have very different styles, but a UN source said that had not been the only factor in Mr Galbraith's removal, Lyse Doucet says.
It is understood that Mr Ban would not have dismissed Mr Galbraith - who came to the post with US support - without backing from the Washington, she adds.
The US, along with other foreign missions in Afghanistan, appears to want to move on from the election dispute to deal with the country's other considerable problems, she says, but this will anger observers who believe a more robust response is needed to the allegations.
EU election observers have said that about 1.5m votes - about a quarter of all ballots - cast in August's presidential vote could be fraudulent.
They say that 1.1 million votes cast for President Karzai are suspicious.

Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2009/09/30 16:09:18 GMT

[Elzenga]

Dat is al 3 kwart minder dan in een willekeurig ander Arabisch land.

Je bedoelt die landen en regimes daar die ook allemaal onze vriendjes zijn?! Saudi-Arabië, Egypte, Marokko, Libië e.d....Misschien eerlijker het te vergelijken met de eerste verkiezingen in Irak..die vonden immers ook plaatst onder "Westerse" bezetting.

[HermanB]

Dat is al 3 kwart minder dan in een willekeurig ander Arabisch land.