The Afghanistan Election Conundrum (12): Good News and Bad News About District Numbers
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The Afghanistan Election Conundrum (12): Good news and bad news about district numbers Author : Thomas Ruttig Published: 16 August 2018 Downloaded: 5 September 2018 Download URL: https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/the-afghanistan-election-conundrum-12-good-news-and-bad-news-about-district- numbers/?format=pdf Afghan authorities have solved one of the most long-standing and consequential problems in the country‘s complex election system: the number of districts. It is 387. This is pending a final decision by parliament, as there are some so-called ‘temporary’ districts that could boost the number. If parliament takes this issue up, however, there is a chance that it throws this hard-won unanimity over board again. This is because the number of districts is not just an administrative matter but also one of resources and influence. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig (with input from Ali Yawar Adili) have looked at the figures, what they mean and what questions are still open. Afghanistan’s more than bumpy road to the next elections has led to at least one positive outcome. Almost unnoticed,the country’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) and the Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG) have, for now, come up with a joint, consolidated list of how many districts Afghanistan has. It has handed this list over to the Independent Election 1 / 10 Commission (IEC) that has used it in preparing the elections. The number is: 387 (see the list here, in Dari). Now the three major election-related Afghan institutions are using the same numbers. With this, a major technical hurdle has been cleared on the way to holding the country’s first district elections. Previously, both IDLG and CSO had divergent and inconsistent lists. For instance, in May this year, AAN was given an IDLG print-out titled “The structure of administrative units of the provinces and districts of Afghanistan 1396 [2017-18]” that said Afghanistan had 382 districts. The same number appeared in the CSO’s annual “Estimated Population” review for 2017-18 – but only the total was similar in both lists. They deviated on which districts existed in several provinces. (1) Some international actors in Afghanistan are still using sometimes significantly different figures (more about this below). Even so, it is really good news that the CSO and IDLG have come up with a joint result. The bad news is, as reported by AAN, that the IEC, facing a severe shortage of candidates for the 20 October 2018 district council elections, felt compelled to suggest a delay until April next year, when the presidential and provincial council polls are being held. That sounds like a tall order. It is possible that the delay could re-open the discussions about district numbers – as will be explained below. What does the CSO/IDLG list look like? The new, consolidated district list does still have one small flaw and some major gaps. The flaw is that its serial numbers run up to 389, not to 387. One district – Ghormach – turns up twice. It is listed under both Badghis and Faryab provinces, with the remark – in red – that it had been “temporarily transferred” to Faryab. This means that the authors forgot to give it only one serial number (this looks like an Excel sheet problem). However, even when this is corrected, the list still contains 388, not 387 districts. The remaining discrepancy can be solved by looking at four large gaps in the list where the districts for four provinces, Daykundi, Nangrahar, Paktia and Uruzgan, are completely missing. The reason, as the IEC’s head of field operations Zmarai Qalamyar told AAN in a phone conversation in late July 2018, is that the CSO had yet to provide the population figures of some newly-established districts in those provinces. (2) (The authors could have put in the district names anyway, as they seem to be uncontroversial, and just left the population figures open, but chose not to.) How many districts there are in these four provinces can be gauged from the missing serial numbers in the alphabetical order of the provinces: namely, Uruzgan has six, Paktia 14, Daykundi nine and Nangrahar 24 districts. The same numbers also turn up in a – complete – list of all districts given on the CSO website in its latest “Estimated Populatiuon [sic] of Afghanistan 2018-19.” This CSO list also solves the riddle of the superfluous 288th district: it is Nawmesh (sometimes 2 / 10 called Nawamesh) which, similar to Ghormach, is listed under two provinces and counted twice (more background in this AAN dispatch). This district– a Hazara majority area – was split from the Pashtun-majority Baghran district in northern Helmand by a presidential order in March 2016 and the IDLG temporarily transferred the administration of its security, administrative and logistical affairs to Daykundi in June 2017. But the IEC announced that the elections would still be managed from Helmand, which has led to protests among the local population who prefer to be handled by Daykundi – see this photo in an Afghan media report, saying, “We Don’t Accept this Decision”.) (3) Nawmesh is also a so-called ‘temporary’ (mu’aqati) district – in contrast to ‘official’ districts that are uncontroversial (but not yet officially delineated and recognised by parliament). The IDLG defines a ‘temporary district’ (in an 11 June 2017 official letter to the IEC of which AAN obtained a copy) as those districts that have been approved after entry into force of the 2004 constitution by the president due to security or other considerations, but have not yet been approved by parliament. MPs have the final say on this, according to the constitution. Other district lists The most recent quarterly report from the United States government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) (here, on p131) published in July 2018, cites two sets of district numbers when it analyses district control: “There are 407 districts in Resolute Support’s dataset and 399 districts in USAID’s third-party monitor’s dataset.” Both differ from the CSO/IDLG list. It is surprising that even the different institutions of Afghanistan’s largest donor have not reconciled their own data. Resolute Support’s list of 407 districts includes the 34 provincial centres, but taking them out would leave only 373 districts, still different from the USAID and CSO/IDLG lists. (It can be seen in Appendix F of the report, pp 239-49.). The United Nation’s humanitarian coordination agency, UNOCHA, uses a list – like USAID – of 399 districts when compiling the data on conflict-induced internal displacement. The European Asylum Support Office (EASO), an European Union institution that, among other tasks, provides security-related data about the countries of origin of asylum seekers, including Afghanistan, cites 368 districts in its most recent country report from December 2017. The most recent UN Office of Drugs and Crime’s opium survey (for 2017) has a list of 413 administrative units which also includes the 34 provincial centres, so that this results in a list of 379 districts. Districts as perks and the for-ever delay of district council elections One of the reasons why district council elections have never been held, despite being mandated by the 2004 constitution is that the number of districts is highly controversial. In particular, the delineation of their borders is disputed, ie which areas, villages etc belong to which district and where their inhabitants should vote. This means that an authorised list has never been finally approved by parliament. (4) Despite the consolidated CSO/IDLG list, this still remains to be resolved. 3 / 10 When this author, as a United Nations member of staff, was involved in helping to organise the Emergency Loya Jirga (ELJ) in 2002, the delegates for which were determined through a district- based selection-and-election process (5), the figure of how many districts existed in the country was already a problem. There was no generally accepted list of districts, but after long discussions, the Afghan interim authorities, the Independent ELJ Commission and the UN in an advisory (but driving) role settled on 339 districts. (6) That is almost forty districts or 12 per cent fewer than are counted now. The additional problem is that there are not only ‘temporary’ districts created after 2004, ie under presidents Hamed Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, but others which are sometimes called “unofficial.” These were created before 2004, by previous governments, often by splitting older, existing districts. This was done under the various regimes of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) (AAN background here), as well a the mujahedin and Taleban regime. Since 2001, under Presidents Hamed Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, new ‘unofficial’ districts have been created in the same way. (New provinces have also been created using this model.) (7) Sometimes, these rearrangements answered to local demands by certain population groups who felt underrepresented in the larger ‘old’ district or simply in order to create paid administrative jobs for the clientele of a particular powerful politician. Badakhshan, with its record number of 27 districts, might be a point in case (former president Borhanuddin Rabbani was from there), Panjshir with its very small population but now nine districts, or Kandahar, where the Karzai family’s home area, Dand, was made a district. It looks, as if the list of existing districts has been uncontroversial up to the breakdown of state institutions in the violent transition from the PDPA to the mujahedin government in the early 1980s and then further on to the Taleban regime and after its fall. (8) Now, no one dares ‘dismantle’ districts from those periods, in order to not confront those who created them, as some of those politicians or their followers are still powerful in parliament and elsewhere.