Number 3, August 16, 2009 A publication of Afghanistan watch
was once experienced in Musa Qala. The final Introduction reaction of media about reconciliation and
The third edition of biweekly Haqiqat/The Truth is negotiation propositions by some of the published for its readers with a little difference candidates, government of Afghanistan, British with the two previous issues. The difference and American authorities have been of different includes two notes or short analyses on the issues position. Some called it positive; some wrote it to be hoopla for nothing and some had neutral of Transitional Justice and corruption, interview with two presidential candidates and a report viewpoint. We Need International Court to added to this edition. Like the two previous Elections Transparency: During the past two Implement Transitional Justice editions, the most important and significant weeks the main topic of most of the print media issues are transitional justice, reconciliation and in Afghanistan focused on elections transparency. negotiation with the anti‐government forces, Anxiety about the fraud in election was the main corruption and elections transparency that were point of many print media. Pursuing tens of in the published or unpublished media. During complaints during the election campaign are the last two weeks, elections transparency and other issues, media has reviewed. negotiations and reconciliations with the anti‐ The dispute between the campaign teams o government forces covered most of the articles in f the print and electronic media of Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah was the Corruption stood on the third rank while hot topic on the comments of Sattar Murad, Head of Dr. Abdullah’s campaign team who had said in Transitional Justice the last. What was chosen for an interview with a UAE Newspaper that they will this issue are important topics in four sections as not sit silent if Abdullah loses the election and will such: organize violent demonstrations. The statements Transitional Justice: This part although had the ignited hot discussions in media and especially least material in the media during the last two between campaigning team of Hamid Karzai and weeks, it did have the most significant issues. The Dr. Abdullah. Deployment of international No Security in the Absence of Justice Afghan media has reviewed transitional justice observers to monitor the election was another fate during five years term of next government. issue. And finally all the media emphasized the The ethnic issue of transitional justice has created transparency in holding the elections. anxieties in some of the Afghan media. Misusing
and taking political advantages from transitional Corruption: Some presidential candidates justice is another concern that media has highlighted corruption. The media has also reviewed corruption during the past two weeks. reviewed and has put some questions about the In the meantime the large amount of expenses b fate of transitional justice. Transitional justice can y candidates during their campaign for presidential not be implemented without peace is another election was mentioned as a kind of corruption question put by some of the media. Overall, we and was considered as a catalyst to expand can say that raising transitional justice needs corruption in case these candidates won th more work and time therefore the next e government must do its best to pursue this social election. Some newspapers have called corruption as the stimulating factor of terrorism issue. This is the focal point of media during past and emphasized on rooting it out to get rid of the two weeks in this regard. terrorism danger. Bribery and misappropriation in Reconciliation and Negotiation with the the state agencies are named as the widespread Anti‐Government Forces: In the past two type of corruption and proposed the government weeks many of the media at the section on the to take special measures in this regard. negotiation and reconciliation with the An interview with two presidential candidates, opposition, specifically pointed to the negotiation Ahmad Bashir Bizhan and Frozan Fana is also and reconciliation with the Taliban as the armed included in third edition of biweekly Haqiqat/the opposition forces and the point was raised by Truth. governmental authorities and the presidential candidates. Opening of the negotiation by They are interviewed about four main issues: America and Britain with the Taliban seemed an transitional justice, reconciliation and negotiation important part in this regard. The possibility of with the anti‐government forces, corruption and fraud in the election followed by negotiation with elections transparency. The two interviews are the Taliban is another concern put forward by combined as the topics were common. A report media. The failure of negotiation with the Taliban by the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) is also in Bala Murghab in Badghis province is raised as included in this edition. AAN is one of the of the start of defeat in reconciliation process which Afghanistan Watch's partners.
The Truth is a bi‐weekly publication of the Afghanistan Watch supported by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). It is intended to provide a snapshot of how the Afghan media and candidates for Presidential and Provincial Councils Elections debate and approach these key issues facing the country: transitional justice, corruption, elections transparency and negotiationsPURL: with the https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/ armed insurgents. If you wish to subscribe please send an email to [email protected] or visit our website: www.watchafghanistan.org Inside This Issue Transitional Justice The Election Observers Will Be Trained 11 Only I Can Finish War in Afghanistan 3 The Quality of Ink, another Challenge … 11 Stop Secret Negotiations with Criminals 3 85 of 250 Complaints Investigated 12 Implement Plan for Transitional Justice 3 Who Will Observe the Elections? 12 From Affirmative Discrimination to Blind Justice 4 Due to Technical and Security concerns Some … 12 Peace not established without Justice 4 State‐run Media Coverage Not Balanced 12 Transitional Justice, Social Justice and Democracy 4 Political Nonsense by Abdullah’s Campaign… 13 Transitional Justice and National Sentiment 5 Karzai’s Rival Warns His Victory Will Be Rejected 13 If Karzai Wins, What Will He Do In Five More… 5 EU Elections Observers: We Can Not Observe… 13 Dr. Sima Samar:Instrumental Use of … 6 Election Commission: Special measures are… 14 Asking Flower from an Armed Store 6 Election Campaign or Power Demonstration 14 Negotiation with armed position Groups Head of European Union Election … 14 Karzai, Plan For Negotiation With Taliban… 7 Concerns Regarding Electoral Fraud by … 14 Negotiation with the Taliban, a need for… 7 Corruption Reconciliation with Taliban, a desire of all 7 Great Job by Enayatullah Kamal 15 America and Britain to Attract Moderate Taliban 8 A Letter to President:If You Want To Gain… 15 Taliban Rejected Ceasefire with… 8 New York Times: Abdullah a Potential President … 15 If the Taliban Stop insurgency, we will negotiate 8 Nine Narcotics Traffickers including… 15 Cease‐Fire with Taliban, a Fuss for Nothing 8 ECC Fines Eight Presidential Candidates 16 Elections a Corridor for National Reconciliation 8 Daily Telegraph:The Family Corruption of … 16 Taliban Passive in the Agreement of… 9 Who Observes the Independent Human Rights … 16 Some of the Taliban fighters want to accept… 9 An exclusive Interview with Minister of Transport 16 NATO Chief: Negotiation with Taliban will… 9 Problems faced by human development 16 No Tangible Output from Negotiations with … 9 The ministry of interior never favors making … 17 The Taliban Are Irreconcilable 9 Afghanistan again under the leadership of Karzai? 17 A Number of Insurgents Led by… 10 Long Live CorruptionPolitical Sociology of … 17 The British Plan to Negotiate With Taliban … 10 Parliament remains closed as parliamentarians … 17 The United Nations demanded for … 10 Berlin will not send new troops to Afghanistan 18 Kouchner Calls for Negotiation with the Taliban 10 Economical Challenges of Justice 18 Elections Transparency Security Chief of Balkh province accused of 18 Javier Solana’s Meeting with Some Candidates … 11 Poverty and Lack of information has paved the 19 Holbrooke:It is not possible to have… 11 The continuity of Terrorism in Pakistan… 19
Exclusive Topics We need International Court of Justice to Implement Transitional Just 20 No Security in the Absence of Justice 22 How to Win an Afghan Election 24
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No 3, August 16, 2009
Transitional Justice crimes against humanity. The results of the consultation were published in the ‘Call for Justice’. But the Action Plan for transitional justice which was adopted by the government is yet to be implemented Aziz Rafaee, an activist of civil society says that failure to implement transitional justice has resulted into disintegration of all foundations and principles on which the current system is based on. Lack of attention towards justice has brought the current system into a deadlock because none of the forces have paid attention towards justice.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ A Notice for Presidential Candidates:
Implement Plan for Transitional Justice
Nukhost Daily, No 118, Page 1, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 The Transitional Justice Coordination Group asked the candidates not to allow the war criminals to enter in the Only I Can Finish War in Afghanistan structure of next government and implement the action plan of Exclusive Interview of Dr. Ramazan Bashar Dost with Tolo Television the government for peace, reconciliation and justice. Question & Answer Program, July 29, 2009 In a statement published by this organization they have asked Mr. Bashar Dost said in many of the provinces Taliban rule after the presidential candidates to extend the timetable for 5 o’ clock. I went to these provinces and did not confront any implementing the transitional justice program, end the non‐ problem because I have no criminal record. He added that there transparent negotiations with the criminals and those who are two kinds of Taliban: the oppressors and the oppressed. caused war and eliminate those who are accused of war crimes and human rights violations from the structure of next The Taliban are fighting with government because it is indulged in corruption and its hand is tainted with the blood of people. It government. oppresses the people. are killers of people and they oppress on Members of this group say their previous proposals to the people. In Afghanistan only one person can finish the war and government of Afghanistan to clear state structures from war that is me (Bashar Dost) and the reason is I am not a killer and criminals have not been implemented. have not had a hand in killing or violating human rights. The Action Plan for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation was .declared by the government in 2006 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Transitional Justice Coordination Group called on Candidates: The plan include five key actions such as acknowledgement of Stop Secret Negotiations with Criminals the suffering of the the people of Afghanistan, formation of
8am Daily, No 643, Page 1, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 credible and responsible state institutions, truth‐seeking and documentation, promotion of reconciliation and national unity During a press conference yesterday, the Transitional Justice and establishment of reasonable and effective accountability Coordination Group called on presidential candidates top clean mechanisms. It was supposed to be implemented within three state structures from alleged war criminals and human rights years after its proclamation by the President violators. Now the implementation period for this program is over and The Transitional Justice Coordination Group is comprised of 20 except a few symbolic events the Afghanistan State has failed to internal and external organizations acting in the field of implement its key actions. The Afghanistan Independent Human implementing justice during past two years. This group also Rights Commission has made some efforts to map and asked the election nominees to implement the transitional document past crimes. It has criticized what it sees as lack of justice for a durable peace in the country and extend the government attention to the process implementation period of transitional justice. The human rights activist groups are calling on the presidential The processes of transitional justice and national consultation in candidates to implement the program of transitional justice relation to past crimes and ways of dealing with perpetrators after their victory at a time when none of the candidates has were parts of the Bonn Agreemetn. uttered a single word in this regard. Most of those criminals The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission have now turned into powerful political figures in political launched a national consultation regarding past war crimes and system of the country. 3 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 From Affirmative Discrimination to Blind Justice Dr. Sima Samar emphasized that if the issue of implementation of justice was pursued in 2000 and 2003 we wouldn’t see all Be Soy Farda Daily, No 45, Page 3, Wednesday July 29, 2009 these injustices in Afghanistan today. She pointed out the cases Writer: Farhad Salami of land grapping in Sherpor area of Kabul and added, if the case No one has forgotten the tyranny of of Sherpor was pursued then we the Taliban. The period of Taliban wouldn’t observe lands to be was a period of total oppression and grabbed in other parts of the violation of human rights. country. Thousands were condemned to The head of Human rights death due to their nationality or Commission emphasized that to tribal identity. In the meantime the implement justice in the country we women suffered the most inhuman must pursue the previous oppressions and tyrannies. Besides commitment in our country so that losing their father, brother, husband a better future is provided for the and children they were locked in the next generation. corner of houses. They were beaten Implementation of Justice does lashes on the roads and moreover not mean execution: they were prohibited from leaving their homes without male escorts. The government of Afghanistan in The women were called the second class of human beings and cooperation with the Independent Human Rights Commission they were not given equal rights with man from legal point of and the international Community proposed the program of view. transitional justice to pursue the previous war crimes in 2005. This program was approved by 95% of the people of The human rights and gender equality in our country can be Afghanistan. achieved when all kinds of excesses in favor men and women are avoided. The human rights organizations should not act in a Dr. Sima Samar, Head of Human Rights Commission says that way that our men feel these organizations are violating justice can not be implemented with the execution of the religious, legal and human rights and are destroying foundations criminals; however there are other ways to do implement of their families. justice. She says: “it is not important that we imprison someone, execute or exile someone. Implementing justice has many other ways. Even if someone confesses that he has ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Peace not established without Justice committed the crimes and apologizes to the victims families for
his deeds are a type of justice.” 8am Daily, No 644, Page 1, Thursday July 30, 2009 Writer: Zafar Shah Royee Abdul Salam Rahimi, Head of Saba Production and an organizer Dr. SIma Samar, Head of Independent Human Rights of the campaign said that implementation of justice is a basic Commission says that in post‐war countries it is difficult to bring need for Afghanistan today and in the post‐war countries the peace without implementation of justice. infrastructure of the country is based on justice and equality. Mr. Rahimi who delivered the manifesto of the campaign Dr. Sima Samar who was talking in a ceremony titled “Campaign added: “Afghanistan is a country which is newly experiencing to Support Justice in Afghanistan” emphasized: “Peace can not democracy and it can not achieve social and political be established without justice.” development without implementing justice.” Miss Sima Samar said that justice is one of the basic pillars of The organizers of this campaign said that democracy cannot Islam and the problems our country face today is due to lack become institutionalized without the application of justice and true Implementation of justice. without considering the rights of people we can not be hopeful According to her, justice is not only essential for today or that they will participate in the political system of the country. tomorrow but it is a needed of every era. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Head of Human Rights Commission says that implementation of Transitional Justice, Social Justice and Democracy justice in the post‐war countries and the country indulged in war is a must. Jamea Weekly, No 104, Sunday, Aug 01, 2009 She said: “lack of pursuing the previous crimes legally has The acceptance and expansion of democracy in a society strengthened the culture of exemption and the continuity of requires that all the people are provided with their basic social injustice. It makes no difference whether it is Afghanistan, and natural rights, however unless we implement the social Sudan or any other country. If previous crimes are not seriously justice then democracy can not be implemented as a basic pursued then the culture of exemption will continue as we see political system for the people. in Afghanistan.” The basic points with the social justice and democracy are: 4 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009
National justice Afghanistan is that the Transitional Justice process has become national or tribal. The above example proves the fact of Cultural Justice nationalization of transitional justice. Those who are favoring Linguistic and Religious Justice the killing of Talibs in Dasht e Laily have forgotten the barbaric Justice amid the social classes of people from poor to rich attack of Talibs on Hazaras and Uzbeks in Mazar e Sharif and Yakawlang district of Bamyan? Justice between men and women Transitional Justice and Governmental Sentiment: Justice amid all the citizens of the country as an equal Miss Sima Samar says that without implementing the citizenship rights in their common country Afghanistan. transitional justice we will not have stability in the country and I The culture of justice amongst people by political leaders can say that without pursuing the cases of war crimes neither enhance the political trust between the nations and the tribes government is legal nor the officials in this government. of Afghanistan. This trust can bring about political unity, a Although corruption has blocked the way to pursue the cases of sound leadership skills, government, legislative power and these violators of war crimes and justice, however from the judicial power. Otherwise central governments and those based people point of view these officials are not legal. It is true that on an individual interest with a culture of divide and rule policy they participate in the election and the previous warlord has brought political mistrust among the people of Afghanistan. commanders become ministers and sometimes advisors or This political understanding in addition to the government often the respected Talib brother of Hamid Karzai. However, belongs to the political parties who are rivals and allies of the when they find opportunity, they talk of fighting in Kabul and government. This agreement creates trust and guarantees the the crimes Russian and communists committed. rights of minorities in a democratic country and the violators of It is injustice if the people of a country forget the struggles, human rights will be brought to justice according to the rules sacrifices and sufferings they paid without compensation. It was and regulations of the transitional justice. possible in a way that these revolutionary friends, “Party Brothers” and “Taliban” cooperated with the interim The massacres are pursued legally from past and present and government to eradicate corruption and reconstruct their those violators of human rights who are still alive should be country that they destroyed for political and military reasons in tried and brought to justice, however if they are dead since the the past. king era until today they should be tried so that people will be convinced of the justice seeking of the authority. But these groups have acted in contrast. If they killed people yesterday at gunpoint, they are doing this work by increasing This review does not mean that the political parties and people corruption in the governmental offices and running away from can not struggle to determine the rights of minorities and law. It is therefore that people observe no difference between ordinary people however the national political parties, past and present. democratic parties and Islamic parties (not fundamentalists) can ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ :establish the rights if they consider the following points The Justice Law If Karzai Wins, What Will He Do In Five More Years?
Governance of Majority Nukhost Daily, No 121, Page 2, Sunday, August 2, 2009 Civil Rights Writer: Muhammad Yusuf Yasa The rights of national and ethnic minorities The approval of National Reconcilation Charter in 2006 exempted all those who were involved in the fighting of the Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and thought past three decades from any legal prosecution. Hamid Karzai has been silent on many occasions. Sometimes he ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Transitional Justice and National Sentiment might have thought it is against his interest or because of what he calls national interests and sometimes he calls the opposition 8am Daily, No 646, Page 4, Sunday, August 2, 2009 of foreigners as the reason. Writer: Frogh Jawidan Karzai calls the disagreements of foreigners a big problem in The program of Transitional Justice which is again proposed by front of government’s actions against the violators of human Independent Human Rights Commission on the eve of elections rights and tyrants. He has many times said that whenever we has brought many challenges for the statesmen of the country. want to put someone on trial then the foreigners interfere and it is not important that these statesmen are left hopeless rather they support him and these countries are in contact with the they have tried, during past several years in different ways, to armed and non‐armed groups. silence the voices of transitional justice by organizing many programs and the approval of National Solidarity Charter by The real reason behind reactions of Karzai is actually the parliament. following: The human Rights activists know that one of the important Reactions of Karzai to National inclination challenges in front of implementing the transitional justice in Karzai’s Optimism to win again the elections 5 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 About the primary issue we can say that it refers to a special The transitional justice case against Abdul Rashid Dostum has group of people who are around Mr. Karzai, they make three angles. This triangular concept explains three angles of decisions and Mr. Karzai puts their decisions into practice. He the electoral process as well. has always used his legal authorities in their favor. In some First angle, the Uzbeks of Afghanistan, incidents he even has changed the law for their interest and whatever he could he did. Recently he ordered the release of 5 The Uzbek votes, the fourth largest community, are decisive in drugs traffickers. They are the family members of current Head the electoral process. There are anxieties that whom they will of Hamid Karazi’s campaign team. These are important cast their votes for? examples that put in doubt the transparency of Judiciary and Second angle, the Pashtuns of Afghanistan Legal organizations of the government. While there are claims that innocent people are put in jail instead of the criminals and Since Pashtun votes are going to be dispersed due to the lack of legal proceedings for those who have no connections multiplicity in the number of Pashtun candidate, efforts are and languish for long times in prisons. being made to attract Uzbek votes for one of the most prominent Pashtun candidates. An important part of government’s action plan was to implement the program of reconciliation and justice which is Third Angle: Transitional Justice Case against Dostum not implemented yet and billions of dollars aid by the The transitional justice case is a tool that can automatically international community is wasted. And a small percentage of influence Uzbek leadership and force Dostum to support the the aids that was spent were done in an unjust and unbalanced most powerful Pashtun candidate. manner and the residents of country complain about it. The only tormenting and worrying issue is that why the Then what Karzai is going to do? In the past he has many times transitional justice is always being political exploited as a tool? stood against the international community which raised a lot noise against him but eventually died down. Karzai, like in the The question is whether this kind of approach towards Dostum past, will disregard the wishes of the people and the and removal of threats against him with the assistance of Hamid international community, violate the law, the human rights, Karzai not undermine the process of transitional justice? Will citizen rights, freedom of speech and social and individuals this not weaken the Action Plan [for transitional justice] of the freedoms and will sacrifice everything for his ethnic interests. government? I believe justice must be at the centre of our efforts and must not be exploited as a tool. Afghanistan Watch: This article relates to the lack of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ implementation of justice in the society. Approval of National Amnesty Charter in the first government, why was this Charter Asking Flower from an Armed Store approved? It actually is not the end of transitional justice program in the next governments. An important and sensitive 8am Daily, No 653, Editorial, Monday, August 10, 2009 issue for the next government would be to reopen this case. While the Taliban have warned that they will stop the elections However the issue seems difficult to be implemented in and they are practically at war with the national and Afghanistan. Therefore the responsibility of next government international forces and there is no sign that they are ready for will be to administrator justice for those whose rights are talks, the council of scholars of Afghanistan has asked them to violated during the past several years of war. stop the war and take part in the elections. Hence it is not only Karzai who is responsible to pursue the This Council has asked that they participate in the election and issue of transitional justice after winning the election rather all stop fighting. The council has included in their demand the Hez the candidates are obliged to pursue this issue. It is also the b Islami and the terrorist network of Jallaludin. They have called obligation of civil society organizations, human rights, print and them opposition forces not anti‐government armed forces and electronic media. have put forward no conditions for the negotiation. Mr. Fazlul Hadi Shinwari, Head of this Council has expressed in his demand that we are three thousand scholars from 34 provinces of the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Dr. Sima Samar: country. He requested all the Mullahs, Parties and the Instrumental Use of opponents: “You are Muslims, so show us the way to peace. Transitional Justice in Afghanistan There is no guarantee to kill innocent people.” It seems as if
Taliban has not killed any one yet and this advises can stop Hushdar Weekly, No 7, Page 5, Aug 5, 2009 Writer: Yosuf Khiradmand them from it. The transitional justice in Afghanistan is meant to o address Does Islam allow you to forgive the rights of thousands of crimes against humanity during the period between the Soviet innocent people in such a simple way? Is it the sympathy you invasion of Afghanistan and the formation of the Interim give to those mothers who have lost their loved ones? How do Government. The process of transitional justice is based on the you dare to neglect the integrity of those families whose young logic that according to other experiences implementation of girls are abducted by Taliban and they have not complained to transitional justice can facilitate a durable peace in the country. any one to preserve their family prestige? We just know that Transitional Justice Misused Islam does not allow you to do it. That’s all. 6 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009
Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups
Karzai, Plan For Negotiation With Taliban, A Trick To Win Votes
Hushdar Weekly, No 6, Page 1, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Writer: Faqir Muhammad Tawab In his speech in Kabul, Hamid Karzai promised to call a grand Jirga after he wins the elections in which he will invite the Taliban to join the government. However the Taliban have already influential presence in the government and political system. The militants associated with Hizb e Islami Gulbaddin Hikmatyar which is a strong anti‐government party are living under the shadow of current political system and have declared their support for Mr. Karzai. The question that comes to mind from this speech and statement is what does Mr. Karzai expects from the negotiation with Taliban? Where for years the peace process of Mr. Mujaddadi has been working with the government to bring Taliban to the negotiation table? Lately we hear the terms of armed Taliban and non‐armed have direct relation with the election and it is a short term Taliban. Making these terms may be a preparation for the process. We can conclude that America and the International negotiation with Taliban. When the Taliban are divided as the Community are anxious about the security of election therefore armed and unarmed, later there will be new terms for opening they want to pay attention towards the Taliban to reach a short the doors for negotiations. term agreement with this group. Or if they can not achieve their objective through war they accept the demands of the Taliban ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ so that they do not threaten the process of election. However Negotiation with the Taliban, Karzai wants to win the votes of pro‐Taliban groups and nothing a need for a new strategy more.
Hushdar Weekly, No 6, Editorial, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 2. Secondly, it can also be interpreted that due to the casualties Negotiation with Taliban is not a new phenomenon and it has of their troops in Afghanistan the public opinion in the United been going on for the past two to three years. However the States and the West has compelled their higher authorities to main point is that why whenever there is talk of negotiations, end the war even if it is against the objectives designed to there are no prearranged rules or criteria for the talks. These combat terrorism. defects and lack of strategy are observed in the strategies of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ United States of America and the International Community to Reconciliation with Taliban, a desire of all combat terrorism in Afghanistan which brings with it many concerns regarding future stability of the country and the Bakhtar Daily, No 69, Editorial, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 process of implementing democracy in the country. If the The Taliban movement is comprised of many different groups. A government of Hamid Karzai could plan a strong strategy great majority of these fighters live in the villages and regarding terrorists and the Taliban from the beginning, then mountainous regions of the country. The reasons they have we wouldn’t see the security of the country in such a critical joined the rank of Taliban can be different as they are angry situation. with the government and the operations of foreign forces in the Keeping in mind the statements by high authorities in the country. Many of them do not agree with the ideology and United States, the latest statements by Hamid Karzai about views of the leadership of the Taliban and they do not see any reconciliation with the Taliban, the recent agreement between programs in the service for the people. Hence there are theTaliban and governmental forces in Badghis province and the possibilities that their demands are fulfilled by government and publishing of new regulations by Mullah Ummar the leader of they join the reconciliation process. Taliban we can come to two conclusions that are not far from The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai has been trying to reality: show his willingness to negotiate with the Taliban and if they One of the interpretations from the issue is that the recent accept the peace process they will be given part in the interest by Karzai and the high authorities in the United States government. But the leadership of the Taliban has rejected the 7 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 negotiation process and wants fighting and war. Many of the not established in one province. people who live in the areas under the control of the Taliban have The spokesperson for the Taliban said that they will continue understood that if they remain with Taliban they will be deprived their opposition with the government of Afghanistan. of reconstruction, education, development and progress. The talks with the Taliban come at a time when American and During past two years as the war is intensified in the country, British forces are busy in a big operation against this group in president Karzai has made many efforts to bring the Taliban to the south of country so that the ground is paved for organizing the negotiation table and consistently declared that war is not a election in the region. solution. However there are many people inside and outside the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ government who are trying to disrupt the process of election and take advantage of the process. As this thought expands in If the Taliban Stop insurgency, we will negotiate the minds of those who are under the influence of the Taliban, the leadership of the Taliban will be stimulated towards peace Irada Daily, No 655, Page 1, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 and reconciliation because they may not have any other choice. The president Hamid Karzai proposed Taliban to negotiate on the condition that they stop insurgency in the country and declare their readiness publicly. However Karazi said that he is ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ America and Britain to Attract Moderate Taliban not yet ready to draw a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign
Bakhtar Daily, No 69, Page 7, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 troops from Afghanistan, something that is the basic demand of the Taliban. He says the presence of foreign troops in the The high authorities in America and Britain have expressed country is to the national interest. willingness to attract the moderate Taliban. Richard Holbrooke, US Special Envoy to the region in an interview with the BBC said On the other hand Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi that the moderate Taliban are neglected. David Milliband, rejected any dialogue process with the Taliban and stressed that British foreign secretary in an interview said that negotiations the Taliban are committed to continue their operation until the with the moderate Taliban can help the stability of Afghanistan. foreign troops are in the country and will not negotiate with any government. Hamdi Karzai the president of Afghanistan also expressed his ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ willingness for negotiation with the Taliban and said: “if they confess their mistakes and express regrets, I will be very much Cease‐Fire with Taliban, a Fuss for Nothing eager to talk with them for the sake of peace.” Mandegar Daily, No 97, Page 6, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 The Foreign Minister of Britain has supported the negotiation ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Taliban Rejected Ceasefire and reconciliation process with Taliban in his recent comments with the Government of Afghanistan on the situation of Afghanistan. In the meantime Richard Afghanistan Daily, No 858, Page 1, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Holbrooke, Obama’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan
The Taliban have rejected the ceasefire agreement with the also proposed similar plan. government in a northwestern province of the country. The government of Afghanistan, the implementers of this On Monday the government of Afghanistan announced that project has declared that they have reached an agreement with they have reached a ceasefire agreement between the Taliban Taliban in Badghis province to ensure they do not disrupt the fighters and government forces. process of elections. Hours after the news was broadcast, a spokesperson for Taliban These issues are linked with one another just like a chain. British rejected the news. and Americans the real political players in the region have not yet issued the details of their negotiation with the Taliban in The spokesman of the Taliban told the BBC that when fighting is Badghis province. The authorities in government avoid giving in progress in other provinces of the country then ceasefire can any detail about the demands of Taliban in return to the ceasefire and whether the government has accepted those demands.
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Be Soye Farda Daily, No 45, Page 1, Editorial, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 The presidential and provincial council election has another covered face too. In reality the August 20 elections is a breaking point for the political destiny of the country and can used as a corridor for ending the current insecurity and violence. The agreement between Taliban and government in Bala Murghab district shows that this procedure is useful to be used in other insecure areas of the country during 22 days before the polling day. 8 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 This peace process has its own special characteristics and can be up the negotiations with the Taliban. He said in an interview extended to achieve peace and national reconciliation. One of this with Denmark’s Pletkin Newspaper: “there are some moderate basic characteristic is the direct role of Afghan government in groups amongst the Taliban fighters who are ready for talk but managing and leading the issue. The foreign supporters of Taliban there are other groups also who only know military means and are confronted with failures and the international community has there is no possibility of negotiation with them.” understood that the problem of insecurity in many areas of Afghanistan can be solved through Afghan to Afghan dialogue. Rasmussen supported the demands of British Foreign Secretary about direct dialogue with particular Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and added: “another strategy of NATO in ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Taliban Passive in the Agreement of Bala Murghab Afghanistan is to establish cooperation between European Union and NATO and other foreign forces present in Be Soye Farda Daily, No 48, Page 1, Sunday, August 2, 2009 Afghanistan.” The agreement between government and the Taliban in Bala ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Murghab is an important issue from different perspectives: No Tangible Output from Negotiations with Taliban It is not the first time that an agreement is reached between government and Taliban fighters; however it has had many Jamia Weekly, No 104, Sunday August 2, 2009 reflections. These reflections can be seen from three angles: After the fall of Taliban, the war in Afghanistan was planned and In the beginning the anti‐government media sources initiated again and for clear political reasons and with the broadcasted much propaganda about this agreement. They said objective of gaining ethnic privileges have continued to intensify the agreement at first is a lie, secondly not impractical and and prolong. Many proposed the idea of negotiation with thirdly an electoral campaign by Karzai’s campaigning team. insurgent groups particularly Taliban as the second option or the only way to stop war in Afghanistan and the bigger Another point was the reactions of foreign countries and emphasis in this regard were made by government of foreign media to the agreement that it can open new dialogue Afghanistan. possibilities with Taliban in the frontline of fighting. The foreign media had great analysis in this regard and supported pursuing Obviously, the upshot of every war is negotiation and peace and the issue of negotiation with Taliban. reconciliation mark the end of every uprising. However every negotiation in a situation of war requires that both the parties On the third angle is the reaction of Taliban to the agreement. feel the need for it. On the other hand negotiation brings a They rejected the agreement soon after the news was remarkable output when the real opponents are on the table. broadcasted and condemned it. This early reaction of Taliban to the agreement puts in doubt the reality of agreement and In absence of these two conditions, talking of negotiations shows it to be unimportant or a lie. seems like firing in the air. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ It is also heard that Al Qaeda has ordered some of its foreign forces in the ground to operate in the region and show that no The Taliban Are Irreconcilable ceasefire is agreed between the groups. But the reality is that the local Taliban of Bala Murghab has signed the agreement and Afghanistan Daily, No 861, Page 4, Sunday, August 2, 2009 we may soon observe a clash between the two groups of Writer: Muhammad Raza Huwaida Taliban. A few days back, the Taliban published a statement in their website in which they said they would boycott the presidential and provincial councils elections asked the people not to ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Some of the Taliban fighters want to accept the participate in the polling. They have threatened to prevent constitution and coalition people from participating in the process and to block all roads for public and private vehicles one day before the elections Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1230, Page 2, Sunday, August 2, 2009 takes place The EU election supervisor’s delegation for Afghan election The Taliban have tried to create a climate of fear and terror and says, some of the Taliban fighters want to play their role in the prevent popular participations in the process by attacking political dilemma of Afghanistan and ready to accept the individuals and electoral events. constitution of the country. However some other extremist Taliban have no place in the government of Afghanistan. Taliban try to compensate their military weaknesses by publishing pamphlets and statements on internet or through other means at their disposal. It is a psychological war Taliban ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ NATO Chief: have adopted. In view of their history no body can hope they Negotiation with Taliban will pave the ground for would participate in the electoral process as they have shown their animosity in multiple forms. national reconciliation What is most important in this particular period of time is that Nukhost Daily, No 121, Page 1, Sunday, August 2, 2009 the national and foreign forces should take strong measures to Anders Fogh Rasmussen Nato's new secretary‐general backed stop any kind of disruption in the process of elections. 9 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 A Number of Insurgents political figures of Taliban movements. Led by Shir Mohammad Joined the Government Earlier, Foreign Secretary of England, David Milliband and
Be Soye Farda Daily, No 49, Page 2, Monday, August 3, 2009 Anders Fogh Rasmussen Nato's Secretary‐General also asked for negotiation with Taliban. Some 20 insurgents led by Commander Shir Mohammad in Pole Hisar district of Baghlan surrendered to the provincial police These demands are made when days before Taliban rejected headquarter of the province. the ceasefire plan during afghan presidential elections. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ According to Wakht News agency, the authorities at the Press Office of Police Headquarter of Baghlan province said this group Kouchner Calls for Negotiation with the Taliban commanded by Sher Muhammad surrendered their 12 Ak‐47, 2 RPG and a machinegun. Irada Daily, No 561, Page 1, August 4, 2009 According to the source they were accused of planting bombs Bernard Kouchner the foreign minister of France praised the and disrupting the security of the area. Shir Mohammad a efforts of French troops in Afghanistan and said the Afghan
member of this group expressed his regrets for past deeds. He authorities should talk with Taliban. says the reason behind his surrender is that the security should Speaking to reporters he said we must negotiate with the be established in the region and that he wants to take part in Taliban fighters. He said, however, it is the responsibility of the reconstruction of the country. It is said that this group is Afghan authorities to pursue the process of dialogue with affiliated with Mullah Dad Khuda a famous Taliban commander. Taliban. Kouchner added: “I want to thank the French soldiers
In the meantime the peace talks are in progress in some parts of for their efforts in combating insurgents in Afghanistan.” the country between government and the insurgents. According to AVA Press a French soldier who was 22 years was killed in northeastern part of Kabul. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The Foreign Minister of France said: “we can not impose peace, The British Plan to Negotiate With Taliban but we can provide the conditions for it and in this process we Leader Will Not Bring Peace are with the people of Afghanistan.” Cheragh Daily, No 1362, Page 1, Monday, August 3, 2009 According to Associated Press, Kouchner added: we must The highest authority in the United Nations has criticized the negotiate with the Taliban. There are some fighters in the rank British proposal to negotiate with the Taliban and says this of Taliban ready to talk. However it is the responsibility of process will not bring peace in the country. Kai Eide in an Afghan authorities. A popular participation of Afghans in the interview with Sunday Times Weekly said: “if you want to have coming elections means a great defeat for Taliban.” good result you must talk with the people who are most The French Forieng Minister also emphasized on the policy of important.” According to him, current negotiations with the Americans in the region and said: Americans brought a change Taliban will not produce results desirable outcomes. in their strategy after Obama took power and they have come Describing the negotiation with the Taliban as a mistake, the to know that without wining the heart of Afghans they are UN’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan said: “this process will a loosing the war even from now.” flawed peace. Right now a political process is underway in ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan which shows signs of hope for the future.” On the Eve of Election in Afghanistan: In the meantime David Miliband the UK's Foreign Secretary in France Calls for Talks with Taliban the previous week proposed the idea of negotiation with moderate Taliban. In this regard some of the Afghan experts say Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1233, Page 3, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 negotiation with any Taliban figure except Mullah Umar and the The French Foreign Minister emphasized on dialogue between leading council of Taliban has no outcome. Taliban and Afghan authorities to reduce the insurgency in the country. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The United Nations demanded for He pointed that the Afghan authorities are directly responsible for peace talks with Taliban and the Coalition Forces assist them Negotiation with the Taliban in this regard. Cheragh Daily, No 1363, Page 1, Tuesday August 4, 2009 However Kouchner described deals with local Taliban as A High Authority of the United Nations for Afghanistan called fruitless and stressed on the need for braod and serious for negotiations with Taliban to bring peace to the country. negotiations with the insurgents. According to the Associated Press, the United Nations Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Kei Eide without pointing out a particular person or a group called for negotiations with the top Taliban leaders to end up the critical situation of Afghanistan. Eide said that it is a political issue and I think we must move towards 10 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 Elections Transparency The Joint Cooperation Council of Candidates: Javier Solana’s Meeting with Some Candidates against Principles
Nukhost Daily, No 118, Page 8, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 The Joint Cooperation Council of Candidates described the meetings of Javier Solana, the EU external affairs commissioner, with some candidates as illegal. Bashir Ahmad Bizhan the spokesman of council said: Meeting and exchanging ideas between Solana and particular candidates is a type of interference by European Union in the presidential elections of Afghanistan. Motasim Billah Mazhabi a member of the council and presidential candidate said: “there is no problem with the thousand local and international observers have received meeting of foreign diplomats with presidential candidates. confirmation letters who are supervising the process of However when the foreigners are meeting some particular transportation of materials. The representatives of media, candidates and prioritize some particular candidates on others parties and … will receive confirmation letters to supervise then it is a type of campaign for those candidates and this issue election. is against the law and the principles of elections.” In the meanwhile the Election Observer of European Union led In the meantime Mr. Alim Siddiqi, a spokesperson for UNAMA in by Phillipe Morion a member of parliament in a separate news Afghanistan reacting to the issue said that the international conference informed about the start of activity by his group. community is here to help Afghans not to decide for the result The group is comprised of 67 persons is from 25 countries of the of elections. world. The group is invited by the government of Afghanistan to observe the elections in the country. The Council also called the printing of ballots outside of the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ .country as unlawful and as harmful to the Afghan economy It should be said that 15 million voting cards for this elections The Election Observers Will Be Trained
are printed in the UK which has most millions of dollars. Rah‐e Nejat Daily, No 1229, Page 2, August 1, 2009 In cooperation with the National Democratic Institute and the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Holbrooke: UNDP, officials at the Elections Commission are planning to It is not possible to have elections conduct training programs for the elections observers of the political parties and independent candidates. acceptable to all in Afghanistan According to Bukhdi News agency, a press release by the NDI Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1229, Page 1, Saturday, August 1, 2009 country Director requests presidential candidates to name their Obama’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard observers for participation in the trainings that are going to take Holbrooke said: “In current situation an election that would be place in the eight regional centre of the country. acceptable by all the people of Afghanistan is impossible to take The press release says the training sessions shall be conducted place.” in regional offices of NDI and the IEC between 1 and 18 August. According to Rah e Nejat Daily, Richard Holbrooke said that an Meanwhile, during the previous elections the NDI conducted a election acceptable by all has not taken place even in America. similar training but the participants of their workshops were not He added that you might have noticed the problems that the satisfied with the quality of their training. election in America was faced. According to Holbrooke, the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ government of President Obama will do its best to organize Afghan election in a fair, transparent and acceptable by all. The Quality of Ink, another Challenge He also said that it is possible that some Afghans will not be Facing the Elections
able to vote because in some insecure areas the voting polls will Mandegar Daily, No 100, Page 1, Sunday August 2, 2009 not be opened. Writer: Bahman Meanwhile Zakariya Barakzai deputy director of the head of Some sources reported to Mandegar Daily that to buy inks the Independent Election Commission on the basis of distributed Independent Election Commission has reached agreement with cards has said that there are 15 million voters and more than 55 the same company that had supplied inks for the previous 11 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 presidential elections. elections in Afghanistan complicated and intricate. He was talking during a news conference in Kabul and said: “it really is a Meanwhile there were reports that the inks were removed from complex and difficult election. At first the country is indulged in the fingers of voters in the previous elections. The reason war. Secondly all the infrastructure of the country is weak and behind removal of the ink was that little substances that could the ratio of illiteracy is very high. I have never seen elections as make the inks indelible were used in very tiny quantity. complicated.” FIFA believes that media and other election observer He praised the organizations must have a comprehensive and thorough enthusiasm of people observation of the elections on the day of voting and the inks and candidates in the deserve a particular attention. . elections and said this is The organization warns that if the ink proves to be of low the first time elections quality the transparency of the process will be undermined. campaigns and media programs have resulted into high level of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 85 of 250 Complaints Investigated enthusiasm and
participation amongst Mandegar Daily, No 100, Page 4, Sunday, August 2, 2009 the voters. The Electoral Complaints Commission of Afghanistan says that it has reviewed 85 out of 250 total complaints submitted to them He added that all have so far. common responsibility regarding elections. During press briefing yesterday in Mazar‐e Sharif, a UN member of the EEC said the commission will investigate all of the Keeping in view their responsibilities everyone has to do his complaints. best to make the conditions of election easy. He said, “I repeat, this is a common responsibility. Whoever wins the elections He added during the investigation they found two of the must lead the country.” provincial council candidates were still holding their governmental position because of which their names were He also asked the media not to broadcast any program that removed from the list of candidates. provoke the public opinion. Mr. Eide said many things are being said regarding fraud in elections: “I insist that the Independent He also informed that another candidate fined by the Election Commission will do its best to stop any irregularities on commission because during his campaign he had attacked and the day of polling.” undermined the human dignity of another rival candidate. He said special measures are adopted to ensure safe movement and transportation important electoral materials and these ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Who Will Observe the Elections? measures are based on the experiences of international community. Mandegar Daily, No 101, Page 4, Monday, August 3, 2009 The Special Envoy of United Nations said that the list of polling The number of international observers is going to be below two stations is prepared by Election Commission. He added: “Due to hundreds. Which parts of the country will they cover with this technical problems or security concerns, some of the polling limited number? As they have confessed that they can not make stations will be created in other places and efforts are being assessment of every ballot‐box and they are not experienced with made to reduce such polling stations.” the atmosphere in Afghanistan. They might watch the elections ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ .fraud with European glasses and may not notice a single one The FIFA or the so called organization for free and fair elections State‐run Media Coverage Not Balanced also expressed their weaknesses in this regard and do not want 8am daily, No 647, Page 5, Monday August 3, 2009 to accept any responsibility in this regard. They will be present Writer: Zafar Shah Royee in places where their security is guaranteed hundred percent. The Media Commission of the Independent Election On the other hand they are trying to spend the $2.7 million they Commission says state‐run media and some private channels do received from the UNDP on observation of the process. They not observe balance in broadcasting news regarding are currently moving around the cities. The question is how will presidential candidates. they protect the votes of the people across the country? According to this report the national Radio and Television have broadcasted 67.48% news related to Hamid Karzai, more than ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Due to Technical and Security concerns Some Polling 9.42% of Mr. Abdullah, 3.16% of Syeed Jalal Karim, 3% of Stations will be Relocated Mirwais Yasini, 2.80 of Muatasim Billah Mazhabi, 2.69 % of Muhammad Sarwar Ahmadzai, 2.27% of Shahnawaz Tanai, 8am Daily, No 647, Page 1, Monday, August 3, 2009 1.75% of Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, 1.13 of Ramazan Bashar Dost Kai Eide, UN’s Special Representative to Afghanistan called the and one percent of Dr. Habib Mangal. 12 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 The report also says the Tolo Television has covered 37.23% It is clear that the statements by Mr. Murad to welcome the news related to Dr. Abdullah, 22.83% of Hamid Karzai and result of election with violence take the country into political 19.99% of Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai. instability and will endanger the national unity. In the meantime it is a misuse of freedom of speech which is enshrined in the Amongst private channels the Noor Television has covered article 34 of Afghanistan’s constitution. mostly the campaign of Dr. Abdullah. However, Shamshad ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ television and Ariana television has had more news related to campaign of Mr. Karzai than other candidates of presidential Karzai’s Rival Warns His Victory Will Be Rejected elections. Bakhtar Daily, No 71, Page 8, Monday, August 3, 2009 The private non‐governmental print media also covered more Writer: Chris Sunds (The National Daily of UAE) news of Hamid Karzai’s campaign than other presidential election candidates. Kabul: The campaign head of president Karzai’s rival has warned that if Karzai wins the election they will reject the result. In the meantime, Mr. Sidiqullah Towhidi, Head of the Media Commission of the Independent Election Commission has said With harsh words Abdul Sattar Murad, Abdullah’s Campaign that the governmental media has broadcasted more news Manager said, if Abdullah does not win the election, his related to campaign of Hamid Karzai than other candidates. He companions will organize strikes and demonstrations. He said: added: “the news related to campaign of Mr. Karzai “we will not accept Karzai’s victory. Karzai can not win the broadcasted by the RTA is about 67.48% a figure beyond election without manipulating the results. We do not accept proportion of coverage of other candidates.” these manipulations. The nation is not going to vote for him. He can only rely on the provincial governors and corrupt practices ”.in the electoral process ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Political Nonsense by Abdullah’s Campaign Manager Mr. Karzai is a popular candidate for majority of the voters and
Bakhtar Daily, No 71, Page 1, Monday, August 3, 2009 many of the analysts believe that he is the winner either in first or second round of the elections. The campaign process has Recently, in an interview with the UAE National Daily, Mr. Abdul reached its peak and candidates are busy in campaigning and Sattar Murad, the Campaign Manager of expressed nervousness organizing functions all over country. As a result the gap might and lack of confidence in the camp of Dr. Abdullah. be closing between Karai and his rivals. Abdullah a former In the beginning of the interview Mr. Murad says: “we will not foreign minister and Ashraf Ghani a former finance minister are accept karzai’s victory.” These words of Mr. Murad ensure that believed to his closest rivals Karzai is the winner and the campaign team he belongs to is the During the interview Mr. Murad showed signs the violence loser. Mr. Murad attributes this possible victory of Karzai not to might be underway. At a time when the elections is just few his being a real man of the battle and his political skills insight weeks away and in a city yet to recover from the wounds of but to his attempts to manipulate the outcomes of the votes. past war and violence, his words can carry important meanings The fraud he has talked about is not yet reported and the and consequence He said, “A big public demonstration will be results of the polling are clear yet. organized and a violent situation will occur. The country will In another instance Mr. Murad says: “the nation is not going to deeply be drowned in crises.” vote for him (Karzai).” It is not known which nation he is talking Haroon Mir, Director of Centre for Research and Policy Studies about. If he is talking about Afghans then let me confirm that warned: of Afghanistan has warned: there are chances for great according to many voting polls published in different media violence after the elections. In the case of second round sources, Hamid Karzai is a leading candidate. However if he is elections, the country will be divided along ethnic lines.” pointing towards the small number of Mr. Abdullah’s supporters, the existence of small minority groups are nothing During 1992 to 1996 Kabul was drowned in internal war among new in the political scene of Afghanistan. Mr. Murad should not Mujahideen factions. Many of those figures who were involved think that this small group can change the destiny of a nation. in the fighting are the important figures of election today. The world in which we live has many defects and elections can “If Abdullah rejects the results of election, what will happen?” not be held with complete transparency. Even in the biggest Mr. Mir says: “we may not have peaceful demonstration like democracy of the world in United States of America, sometimes demonstrations in Iran. People will come out with A‐K47. In the voting ballets are found from sea, often the voting machines every home in Kabul people are armed with guns.” do not work or confront problems, sometimes the polling ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ stations are opened late or closed early and seldom some of the EU Elections Observers: election workers manipulate the voting results. We Can Not Observe Most of the Polling Centers Therefore the probable existence of as such defects can not be the reason for some of the candidates and their representatives Nukhost Daily, No 122, Page 4, Monday, August 3, 2009 to question the results of election before it is officially declared The Head of European Union Election Observation Mission says and announce they would resort to arms and violence after the that the insecurity present in different part of the country has elections. hindered their activities. . 13 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/
No 3, August 16, 2009 He also has said, there are two major challenges facing their transparent and responsive. Unfortunately we lack this kind of mission in the country. At first the security situation is very mechanism. For example there is no rule that can regulate critical. It is possible that many polling stations are not opened. campaign spending by the candidates and it is not clear to what Second, their mission will not be able to cover all polling extent can supporters can donate to their candidates. This has stations meant some candidates have greater chances of winning the elections and receive more donations and a result there is not In the meantime the authorities at the Election Commission of balance and equal opportunity amongst the candidates.” Afghanistan also accept that some of the polling stations may ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ not be opened. However Zakariya Barakzai, Deputy Head of Independent Election Commissions Secretariat has expressed his optimism that from seven thousand polling stations of this Head of European Union Election year, many of these polling stations will remain open for the Observation Mission Emphasized On eligible voters. Transparent Election in Afghanistan
However authorities in Defense Ministry say that security of six Cheragh Daily, No 1365, Page 4, Thursday, August 6, 2009 thousand polling stations are guaranteed. Head of European Union Election Observation Mission Phillipe Morillon assured of their all‐out efforts to ensure fair and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ transparent elections. Election Commission: Special measures are taken to Mr. Morillon in his meeting with Hamid Karzai, informed the prevent fraud in the elections President of the deployment of the observers in key provinces and said the EU mission is mandated to conduct a Be Soyee Farda Daily, No 50, Page 2, Tuesday, August 4, 2009 comprehensive assessment of the electoral process with Zakariya Barackzai Deputy Head of Election Commission complete transparency. Speaking on the occasion, Hamid Karzai Secretariat the previous day told reporters that until today hailed the efforts of EU observers, saying his government would thousands of observers from national and international extend all possible support to EU mission in making sure the organizations have received observer cards. The commission elections are held as free and transparent. has issued more than 70,000 cards for observers of the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ elections. He warned that the deadline for the cards is 13th of August and after this date no card will be issued. Concerns Regarding Electoral Fraud by Tribal Militias Barakzai added that so far sensitive and insensitive electoral materials have been sent to 18 provinces and for other 12 Nukhost Daily, No 125, Page 1, Thursday, August 6, 2009 provinces is ready to be sent. He added: for this task three Writer: Sahar thousand cars and some helicopters will be used. Barakzai also The United States of America earlier decided to equip and arm said that in those areas where there is no road, 3 thousand the tribal militia in order to stop Taliban influence in insecure donkeys are to be used. areas and in this way establish security in the region. The plan Barakzai added that 3150 observers and 170 thousand officers was strongly opposed by civil society organizations and the are appointed. members of parliament. However the Ministry of Interior says Barakzai ensured of their preparations if the election goes to those who are armed in the areas are not militias. second round and said that 223 million dollars approved before Noorul Haq Ullomi, a military expert and the Representative of is sufficient for the process. Kandahar in Parliament says there are concerns that these In the upcoming elections of 20th August 2009 one thousand militiamen will support the candidate that has armed them. polling station and seven thousand voting centers are Hence all government authorities are handed over to tribal established and about 300 thousand security forces will elders. He added: “when a tribal elder is responsible for safeguard their security. everything then surely he will support a particular candidate.” In the election held in 2004, % 75 of qualified voters had Ullomi added, since these armed tribal groups are organized participated and in this round there are 18 million people are and supported by the current government they will first act in qualified voters and it is not clear how many will participate the interest of the current government next for security of the elections. Mr. Ullomi believes these armed groups will not only create doubt about the transparency of the process but will ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Election Campaign or Power Demonstration pave the ground for frauds in the elections.
Mandegar Daily, No 103, Page 4, Wednesday August 5, 2009 .
Jan Dad Spin Ghar, Head of Foundation for Free Elections in Afghanistan or FIFA says: “I believe that there are some important points in the Afghan election; the rules and regulations that regulate the elections campaign must be 14 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/
No 3, August 16, 2009 Corruption
Great Job by Enayatullah Kamal
Nukhost Daily, No 118, Page 1, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Writer: Ahmad Saeedi Mr. Enayatullah Kamal has claimed that they have reviewed hundreds of cases related to bribery and fraud and hundred others are on the table. It was the first time I heard that some of the current ministers are also indulged in corruption and fraud. According to constitution a separate court must be established fro prosecution of these disrespectable ministers. Mr. Sarwar Ahmadzai a presidential candidate in an interview with a newspaper said that he has a list of 1566 high authorities in the government who are accused of corruption and crimes. Unfortunately, officials rejected earlier reports of corruption in He wished that these 1566 persons do not escape the country state agencies. This denial further encouraged all officials and two weeks before and after the elections. officers to openly loot every thing. It was because they realized In order to stop the daily growth of bribery in our country, we that there was no official trying to address massive illegal must find out its root causes and the reason causing a person to exchanges. High officials were seen as supporting these take bribe at the heart of the leadership of this system. This practices and promoting corrupt individuals. system itself encourages bribery and do not take any measure We hear in the news that that some governmental authorities to stop it. Whatever other reason be, the real causes are weak or officials are arrested on corruption cases and brought before political governance, lack of a capable management and the law. But we never learnt whether those arrested faced implementation of law. punishments or were released like drug traffickers. We do not follow the law which we ourselves have approved. If Therefore the next president of country! If you wish to leave a we talk frankly and confess to the fact we see that bribery, good name behind, if you want to regain the lost confidence of fraud and narcotics production result from lack of loyalty in the people in the system and if you do not wish to be hated by both government and taken together these factors drives the nation nobles and commoners lay out a good plan to combat towards devastation and destruction. corruption and put it in practice. In reality, bribery has a single stimulus and that is lack of a good ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ administration. Though in our country the real cause of bribery is believed to be poverty and joblessness but in reality it is not New York Times: Abdullah a Potential President of Afghanistan true. In Afghanistan bribery is taken by those thieves and irresponsible authorities who are neither poor nor jobless Payam Mujaheed Weekly, No 643, Page 1, Saturday, August 1, 2009 therefore the poor and jobless of this country have no role in Dr. Abdullah has promised to eradicate the ongoing corruption expanding this issue. They are those professional and expert and will make new plans for the aids provided by international people who have previously been in the non‐governmental community to increase the everyday income of people and organization (NGOs). They are now in high authorities in the combat poverty and joblessness. He was talking to a crowd of government. They are expert in making false documentations thousands of people in Heart Stadium, city of Herat. and before spending the money given by donors to them make ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ their expense invoices and send them to the donors. They are those shameless and national traitors who have filled up their Nine Narcotics Traffickers including two own pockets with this money. Government Officials Condemned to Imprisonment ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Nukhost Daily, No 120, Page 1, August 1, 2009 A Letter to President: The Special Anti‐Narcotics Force of Afghanistan has arrested
If You Want To Gain the Trust of People, nine accused of narcotics trafficking. Combat Corruption The authorities in this department say there are two government 8am Daily, No 643, Page 4, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 officials among those who are convicted. One of them is Director of Writter: Muhammad Ali Ahmadi Anti‐narcotics Department of Nimroz province who was alleged to The future president of country! hav cooperated with drug smugglers. Corruption has become routine in all offices. Both public and This police authority is condemned to five years of private organizations are indulged in this calamity. imprisonment and payment of 270,000 Afghanis as fine. The 15 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/
No 3, August 16, 2009 others who were caught last week include a police officer, two about the Commission. The concerns and anxieties boost up farmers and some professional narcotics traffickers. when there is no organization that would observe and ask for reports from the Independent Human Rights Commission. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Comment and Opinion: ECC Fines Eight Presidential Candidates Any way, the Law of the Commission is wrapped up in the pages 8am Daily, No 652, Page 4, Sunday, Aug 9, 2009 Writer: Zafar Shah Royee and no one is to supervise its enforcement. People awhy the Commission does not report to the public like other Ahmad Hakim, one of the members of the Electoral Complaints government agencies? If it didn’t, then there exists problem in Commission said that the presidential nominees are obliged to its structure. The commission in one hand is part of political report their campaign expenses every 15 days. Eight of these system and on the other hand does not have any other power candidates have been fined from 5 to 70 thousand Afghanis to supervise it. Hence it proves the theory that “power brings because they failed to file their campaign finance reports. corruption.” In the meantime the Election Commission reported that they ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ have registered 350 complaints that include 20 percent participation of governmental high authorities in the election An exclusive Interview with Minister of Transport campaign and misuse of public resources for the interest of one and Civil Aviation of Afghanistan nominee and against the other. Bakhtar Daily, No 73, Page 3, Saturday, August 8, 2009 The other complaints registered include intimidations against We are trying to utilize the income sources in a transparent presidential and provincial council elections nominees and manner to add to the treasury of government. destruction of their campaign materials. We are serious to create income sources and we are continuing Mr. Fahim Hakim added that the Election Commission has sent our fight against corruption, joblessness and lazy workers. With five cases to Attorney General’s Office that include one implementing tough policies against corruption, we will never presidential candidate, two provincial council candidates and recline with the corrupt officials and entities that are using the two electoral campaigning members. government sources or are misusing the public treasury and we will confront them seriously. A reason behind increase in the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Daily Telegraph: income was the same. Corrup Karzai Family We have increased the income without raising the standards or Strengthens Taliban changing the percentages. However we just increased our pressure on those areas where corruption existed and due to Mandegar Daily, No 106, Page 1, Sunday, August 9, 2009 laziness and lack of work there was no handsome income. The Daily Telegraph of London has written that the politicians in
Washington has warned that allegations made against Karzai’s A major part of this income was in the private sector. family has weakened the activities of International Forces in the It is natural in Afghanistan that corruption exists where there is region and strengthened the operations of Taliban group. money and cash income. To keep in mind this point we tried to According to the report Karzai’s brothers (Mahmood and Ahmad make our colleagues, who are working on the issue of income, Wali) are accused of saving billions of dollars since Karzai became understand that we are serious against corruption and will president and this has caused people to hate Karzai’s leadership; accept no excuses in this regard. hence the Taliban group can misuse of the issue to their interest. Our colleagues received the message and they are doing their The Newspaper adds: “Ahmad Wali Karzai is accused of best to increase the volume of income. In reality we regain the handling three billion dollars narcotics trafficking.” On the other income that was wasted before. We are hopeful to increase the hand Mahmood Karzai has established an economic empire level of income by introducing new technology and a better misusing his brother’s authority. system. According to the report, 48 years old, Ahmad Wali Karzi denies ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ any kind of allegation and says that they are trying to weaken political position of his brother by these allegations. In the Problems faced by Human Development meantime 54 years, Mahmaood Karzai also denies the Afghanistan Daily, No 862, Page 4, Monday, August 3, 2009 allegations of misusing the authorities of his brother. Writer: Qasim Qamoos The Bon Conference could have been a beginning for a new ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Who Observes Afghanistan. Eight years passed with this belief and mentality. the Independent Human Rights Commission? During this period, Afghans endeavored with all the difficulties and problems so that they will observe some days a change in Be Soye Farda, No 53, Page 2, Sunday, August 9, 2009 the economic and social situation of the country, but Writer: Yousuf Shikohmand unfortunately after years the situation is beyond tolerance in The theory that “Power causes Corruption” increases concerns many fields. 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/
No 3, August 16, 2009
A research by “Center for Policy Researc and Human He said about the mechanism of fighting corruption: “we will Development at Kabul University” places Afghanistan on 174th continue the process which we started two years before to position from amongst 178 countries. The other countries that eradicate corruption in public offices.” Afghanistan preceded were Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Mali. The slogan of combating corruption by government officials has The results of these investigations have really been shocking. changed today into a motto to deceive public opinion and this Eight years of false claims of development and progress with program for fifty more years will not have any significant impact spending billions of dollars with no results has made the people due to poor governance and a failed system where the system of Afghanistan hopeless of any development. operators are doing corruption. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The amount of money provided as aid to Afghanistan, was stored in one place and was prevented from being used in Long Live Corruption appropriate places. Today it is clear for all even the foreigners that the money sent to Afghanistan are deposited in the Political Sociology of Corruption in Third World account of only some persons and that it is not used for the Countries
development, reconstruction and renewal of this country. These Sorosh Millat Daily, No 142, Page 6, Saturday, August 7, 2009 are the bitter facts that can not be ignored or left aside easily. Who is responsible for curbing the development and The following points clarify situations where some benefit from reconstruction process of the country during past eight years? activities of the government and others loses in between. Billions of dollars sent to Afghanistan to strengthen democracy Finanacial corruption results from bilateral interation between could be used to expand human development. the government and market economy. In those situations where government is indulged in some of the activities of However, before that our country should have moved towards, market economy, there they get major benefit. Financial economic, social and cultural development. In the meantime corruption can be regarded as phenomena with different there has been no such incident and after eight years reasons and complex that can include cases like small illegal Afghanistan is still the biggest consuming country in the region payment to a government official and failure of political system and the world and it has even not been able to extract and use where a high official in the government misuses his authority. its minerals and underground treasures. Followings are some cases that illustrate corruption: ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Giving bribe to a public official in order to influence his The ministry of interior never favors making militias decision to award contracts to companies that supply goods and
Nukhost Daily, No 126, Page 1, Saturday, August 8, 2009 products or to change the conditions of contracts The local and international media has had many discussions Giving bribe to influence the distribution of government about the negative impacts of making militia forces. The police benefits such as state subsdies for particular companies or of country have suffered a big loss recently from private militias individuals, access to unemployment and retirement benefits in Kandahar province where two Police Officers were killed, so and other forms of benefits such as education and health care, is not it the time to reject this fake idea and empower our Police Lower taxes or payment of bribe to reduce the level of taxes or and Army who are in uniform rather than spending a lot of other charges that may be proposed by a tax collection official. money on irresponsible and incapable persons? Giving bribery for getting a license like taking privileges of a The failure of Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan land to use or taking advantage of a natural resource Mandegar Daily, No 108, Page 1, Tuesday, August 11, 2009 Sometimes the politicians and authorities design policies in a Wall Street Journal writes that the Taliban insurgents in the way that will serve their benefit indirectly. south are trying to divert public opinion in the south in a way to ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ make people believe that the government of Afghanistan is a corrupt and a fragile regime. Parliament remains closed As parliamentarians are absent ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Kabul Weekly, No 366, Page 4, August 5, 2009 Afghanistan again under the leadership of Karzai? The absence of some of the members of parliament during last one Nukhost Daily, No 129, Editorial, Tuesday, August 11, 2009 year has left this institution with several difficulties. However it is the Hamid Karzai declared his programs for five more years in the first time when general meeting of the parliament is not held for a hall of national television, if he wins the election again. Hamid long period of time due to absence of its members. Karzai emphasized on strengthening the Afghan security forces, Recently a large number of parliamentarians have been because fight against corruption, better governance and foreign policy of their involvement in elections campaigns. aimed to establish peace in the region. They were the top agenda of Hamid Karzai’s programs which was broadcasted live Almost 6 members of parliament are either presidential or vice‐ from National Television. presidential candidates 17 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/
No 3, August 16, 2009 Ahmad Behzad, a member of parliament from Herat province monopolized by a particular group of people due to wrong says that the absence of members of parliament is not a new policies of the government. The money and other tools for the issue and we have been confronting this problem since long development of a country can be dominated by a particular ago; however the current closure is actually a plot by group that has blocked the way towards progress and government to prevent members of parliament monitor the implementation of justice in the country. process of elections. Therefore a reformist move for reforming the government Some members of parliament say they had prepared plans to policies is essential and best solution. In the meanwhile the monitor the electoral process, prevent the exploitation of public cooperation of people with this movement can put a major resources for particular candidates and come up with specific impact on this move. plan to prevent fraud in the process ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Najib Mahmood, a Lecturer at Kabul University says: Security Chief of Balkh province Accused of Bribery according to the law if a member of the parliament wants to run for presidential elections or campaign for another Afghanistan Daily, No 860, Page 1, August 1, 2009 candidate he or she should resign. Otherwise his work is One of the security officials of Balkh province accused the illegal and this will put a negative impact on the work of authorities in the security department of Balkh province of national assembly. taking bribe and arbitrary displacement of security chiefs. Hasibaullah Qurishi, a Security Officer in Balkh province says: “ I ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ have the order of Mr. Hanif Atmar the Interior Minister of Berlin will not send new troops to Afghanistan Afghanistan in my hand as the security chief of one of the Cheragh Daily, No 1367, Page 1, Sunday August 9, 2009 districts, but the security chief of Balkh has appointed some one Joseph Yung, the German Defense Minister has rejected the else in my place. He claims that he has previously worked as demand for more troops for Afghanistan by Andres Fog security chief in other districts of the province and has passed Rassmussen, Head of NATO. through police reform too, but the authorities in the province disregard hi appointment. Yung in an interview with a German newspaper “Beld am Zontag” said: “Germany does not intend to deploy more troops and aid to He says the police chief has appointed another person in his Afghanistan. This country already has four thousand and five position in return for $5000 that he has received as bribe. hundred soldiers in Afghanistan. According to a report from On the other hand General Sardar Muhammad Sultani, Police Germany he emphasized: since 2002, Germany has provided a total Chief of Balkh province says Quraishi has been a coward and of £1.2 billion to Afghansitan which received £200 million per year. lazy person and the people of the district do not like him as According to “libnews” Rasmossen in an interview asked commander. Germany for more troops. He rejected the claims by Quraishi and said all the orders of The rejection of this demand of A. Rassmusen, Head of NATO by ministry of interior are applicable in this province. Joseph yung, defense minister of Germany is to be pondered Sultani has rejected the allegations of bribery and says he will about. It means that Germany does not want to send more pursue the case through military investigation to find who is the troops and aid to Afghanistan. real guilty. This sentence of Germany’s Defense minister is to be pondered ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ about: “Germany has no need to send more troops and aid to Afghanistan.” Poverty and Ignorance Facilitates Ground for Human Trafickers It shows the Germans are serious in this regard. However he has not described why Afghanistan does not need any more Bargozida‐e‐Rasanaha, No 77, Page 3, August 3, 2009 financial and military support. Maybe Germany has become hopeless from the process of reconstruction of this country. The authorities and experts in the country say poverty, Maybe this country has reached to the fact that all the money joblessness and lack of information are the problems that have during past several years has been wasted due to corruption in paved the way for human traffickers. Afghanistan and inside the organizations that implement the Every year many Afghans are trafficked to foreign countries for projects. Now there is no need to help Afghanistan as this aid hard works, sexual abuses and other purposes, but accurate can not change the situation for better. data is not available. The Head of Criminal Investigation Department of the Ministry ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Economic Challenges of Justice of Interior said: During month of Sarathan (Persian Calendar 4th Month) we have arrested about 37 traffickers. According to him Afghanistan Daily, No 867, Page 4, August 9, 2009 the important reason behind human trafficking in Afghanistan Writer: Qasim Qamoos are poverty, joblessness, war and other problems. He says those The economic resources of a country that belongs to the people arrested wanted to traffic individuals most of whom were of that society will block the way towards progress if it is children to other countries. 18 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009 In the meantime, Head of Human Rights Commission regional office in Kabul said the conditions of human rights in the country are getting better everyday. He added that one of the important problems in Afghanistan is human trafficking that is still going on in some ways. He added that those who are trafficked are either taken from Afghanistan to Pakistan or from other countries to Afghanistan, where many of them are children and women and are used for sexual purposes or hard works.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The Continuity of Terrorism in Pakistan or Corruption?
8am Daily, No 651, Saturday, August 8, 2009 A popular candidate who has followers among politicians and distinguished personalities in the society has expressed his knowledge and plans about the reasons behind the continuity of terrorism in Afghanistan. He says: “60 percent of reasons behind the continuity of terrorism in Afghanistan have internal roots and 40 percent foreign roots.” According to him, corruption, poor governance and weak justice system has helped terrorism to remain active in Afghanistan. There are countries in the world where corruption is far more than Afghanistan; however if corruption has caused 60 % of suicide attacks then why in these countries which are miles away from the border of Pakistan in African soil we do not see any systematic suicide attacks or road mines?
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PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/ No 3, August 16, 2009 We need International Court to Implement Transitional Justice
The following are the text of interviews with Ahmad Bashir Bizhan, and Frozan Fana, presidential candidates on 5 and 9 August respectively. During the interviews Ali Payam of Afghanistan Watch asked their views and plans on past crimes, corruption, negotiation with the anti‐ government forces and transparency in the electoral process.
Transparency of Election: Bashir Bizhan: Poverty is not the real problem. We believe that lack of commitment by statesmen of the country in creating What is your opinion about the transparency in the principled bodies and neglecting merit has caused corruption to presidential elections? Will the 2009 elections be transparent expand everywhere even in official lives. and fair? Corruption has come down from high officials to common Frozan Fana: There was no transparency in the first presidential persons. Following the principals of merit or professional in elections. However we are hopeful that the international management is the only way to reduce corruption. In addition if community, UNAMA and other organizations operating in we provide people jobs and financial support we can boost up Afghanistan could do their best to pave the way for transparent their living income and make better their living style. elections so that we go ballot‐boxes with confidence and satisfaction. Negotiation with Taliban: Bashir Bizhan: After the final list of presidential candidates was declared, I took the initiative to form the Cooperation Council of Some presidential candidates say they will talk with the Presidential Candidates and now I am spokesperson for this Taliban after they win the elections. Will you also invite council. The council has 24 members. The reason behind Taliban for negotiation? establishing the council was transparency of elections. We have Frozan Fana: Taliban and Hezb e Islami are from Afghanistan. good reasons to claim the elections are not transparent, They have accepted our propositions. They have problems with national and democratic. the current government. How can we have transparent and fair elections and what are Bashir Bizhan: Before stating my position about Taliban, let me your opinions and suggestions to make the process clarify my position against the NATO occupation forces. I will transparent and fair? expel the NATO froces and then we will have a new definition Frozan Fana: A transparent election can take place when we from Taliban. We will see a reduction [in opposition activities] have lasting security in the country. I request the international too. We must consider two other points before talking about community, UNAMA and all those responsible organizations in anti‐government armed groups. Afghanistan to feel their responsibility and try their best for a First the presence of foreign troops in the region and secondly, transparent and just election so that we could go to the ballot‐ those factors that cause poverty in the country. Young people boxes and cast our votes with complete satisfaction. join the Taliban because they offer $300 as salary. I believe that Bashir Bizhan: I am disappointed and there is no hope that we projects that provide jobs will have its impact in the short term. could say the elections will be transparent, democratic and just. It is possible that negotiation with Taliban would create The Independent Election Commission (IEC) is the real violators problems, because they will continue insurgency against your of constitution of the country. It is emphasized in the government. constitution of the country that there should be free and fair elections but they have allowed for unlimited expenses in the Frozan Fana: they will create no problem and no insurgencies campaigns and illegal money are being spent in the process. The for us as Taliban are our brothers. In our government they will transparency of the process is in doubt. create no problem for us. Corruption: What are your programs about the violation of human rights by Taliban? What is your opinion about corruption? What are the programs of your government to fight corruption? They do not have any problem with our government but they are against the current government and fighting this regime. Frozan Fana: I have some particular programs on the table in this regard. I have a working plan. For about two year I have Prior to the Transitional Administration, during Imarat Islami been working amongst my nation. I have heard all the Taliban, they committed many crimes against humanity. There suggestions and criticism by them and on some points we have are many victims and evidences of those crimes. What will you had agreements too. do with them? 20|Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/ No 3, August 16, 2009 Frozan Fana: there is a saying that goes as ‘every action has a In my opinion pursuing the cases of human rights violators is reaction’. Why the number of Taliban increased since the not in the authority of president, however people have this beginning of current government? When bombs are dropped by authority. Now it is up to people whether they forgive them or air plane on them from the air and the army target them from punish them. the ground then they will surely become angry. Would not you What are your programs that can satisfy the victims if you win fight against the current government in such a situation? the elections? I mean before transitional government Frozan Fana: We will bring them into justice. We will enforce Frozan Fana: Maybe at that time their activities were reactions such a law that they will be required to answer their every against others. Maybe they had some achievements. Therefore deed. My government will not be alike previous government. they have stood against the government. We will review and try them. According to the law we will act
Transitional Justice: with them. What do you think about the process of Transitional Justice? Bashir Bizhan: I will not surrender to any deals. I promise that I
What is your definition from Transitional Justice? will bring a ideal government. Frozan Fana: I have some particular programs in this regard. Which one you choose between peace and justice? Which one
After I win I will have all my programs based on reasonable you think will bring a sustainable stability in the country? plans. We have courts and judiciary. We have Attorney General. Bashir Bizhan: Unless Justice is implemented, peace will not be We will bring them into justice through Supreme Court. We will established. act according to law. We will put complaint‐boxes and who ever Frozan Fana: I have included national peace and reconciliation have complaints should send us through these boxes. Based on through out Afghanistan in my programs. the complaints who ever has violated the law or human rights will be brought to justice. They will be interrogated and receive Establishing peace and reconciliations needs some basic punishment. conditions. Wouldn’t peace and reconciliation be impossible without satisfying the victims and compensating the damages? Bashir Bizhan: there are commitments that the governments review the time of incidents and identify those who caused the Frozan Fana: Problem exists naturally. I ask all the people of my incidents. Whoever it be, either a person or a party they will be country to help me in this regard so that we overcome brought to justice according to the will of people. problems. The timeline for implementation of transitional justice ended The victims of war will demand your government to prosecute in March of this year. It was not implemented according to the crimes against humanity. If you put forward the reconciliation action plan of government. What is your opinion? process and neglect their wishes, what do you think about them? Will they not create troubles for your government? Bashir Bizhan: The obligation rests with the government and authority with the people. I shall provide justice to who suffered Frozan Fana: Why not? If we are not responsible against our but can not draw a specific timeline. This case will not be closed people we will not be able to move forward. I have stood up in my government, it is the right of people and I will return their from the masses and it was the demands of the masses I rights. nominated myself for the post of president. I will explain the problems of people. I will implement the real constitution. We There have been many human rights violations during past will have a responsible and popular government that will thirty years of war. Many of those human rights violators are answer all the problems and requirements of the people. still a part of current government. What is your plan about them? Will you keep them in the power or have any other What do you think about the achievements of Peace Program option? led by Mr. Mujaddadi? Bashir Bizhan: let it be clear that it was not only internal groups Bashir Bizhan: it is a business. It is not a process to bring peace. responsible for war crimes, however, there were some foreign Insurgency has increased since these activities were initiated. countries contributing to the crime. We need a national and international court to implement transitional justice. The court should be monitored by impartial lawyers both national and international. The groups you mentioned will never be a part of my government and I have this ability not to include them in my government. Frozan Fana: we have courts judiciary. We will try to bring into justice those who are violators of human rights and they should defend themselves against the history, people and homeland. Bashir Bizhan: I believe that there is a need for establishing a court of justice, once the government of people is established. 21 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 3, AugusNo 3, Augustt16, 200916, 2009 No Security in the Absence of Justice
A short report on the televised debate between three prominent candidates of Afghanistan’s presidential elections: the incumbent Head of the state Hamid Karzai, Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai and Dr. Ramazan Bashardost aired by the state‐controlled television and Radio Liberty on Sunday, August 16, 2009 What follows is a short summary of the key points made by the candidates during the debate. Hamid Karzai had previously refused a number of invitations to participate in debates on private TV Stations describing as biased. For the first time, Karzai faced his chief rivals in this debate which was aired on the Radio and Television of Afghanistan (RTA). Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, another leading figure in the race refused to participate for unknown reasons. The Key Points Made by the Candidates: Security and Accountability for Past Crimes Dr. Ramazan Bashardost: The biggest problem of Afghanistan is the presence of killers in the body of government and if we reduce the number of these murderers from the system without justice”. security will be improved. In my government there will be no Karzai said that “I believe the terms like “warlords”, assassin related to any party, faction or ethnicity. “communists” and others are imposed on us by our enemies To bring security we must remove corruption. Someone told me and others have propagated them in our society and amongst that whenever we go to a public office they “not just eat our our people”. flesh but our bones too”. It is an important factor behind Corruption deterioration of security. Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai responded that “according to the He continued with saying that “everyone says we are ready to law, the president and his government members must declare negotiate with Taliban but they never think whether Taliban are their properties. But I say that candidates also record their ready to talk to them or not”. properties. “Taliban have no problem with foreigners but they fight with Dr. Ramazan Bashardost answered that “I urge that candidates those whom they defeated once, and they are now in the not only record their properties but identify their source as well. government of Mr. Karzai. They drag us out of our houses for For example some people say that some one helped me with interrogation”. that amount of money, I say why they do not help Bashardost When I wanted to go to Helmand and Urozgan provinces I asked as well. Only warlords and narcotics traffickers are not ministry of defense for airplane but they didn’t provide me one. responsible, however those who wear beautiful suits with a tie They said that our airplanes are busy bringing martyred from they are more powerful thieves because they know how to different places. It shows that the security situation is critical. remove the evidences to avoid being caught tomorrow”. Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai said that “I have not made deals and Women promises with any of the warlords to include them in my future Dr. R. Bashardost answered that “we must remove the title of government. I want people to support my government. I want second gender from the forehead of women. We talk of women to bring basic changes in the legislative system of the country right and never act about it. Women should not eat the leftover of and will react with the violators of law seriously. For example a men. I was the only person who appointed a female as the Deputy child is raped and the accused is freed after some times. Minister of Planning when I was Minister of Planning. She did According to the Islamic Law the person who is accused can be belong to my ethnicity, my religion and my language or region. In freed only if the victims consent with his freedom.” the meantime Mr. Karzai instead of improving the condition of Dr. Rmazan Bashardost stated that “I do have a great deal of women reduced their number in cabinet from four to one”. respect to Mujahideen. If there was not any Mujaheedin, today Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai: Firstly, the guards in prison for Bashardot’s son could have been named Gorbachov or women should not be male and females should not be Sakharov. I like Mujaheedin but I want to hold all those inspected and frisked by male authorities, as there has been criminals who have killed innocent people accountable whether great number of cases of rape in prisons. they are Tajik, Hazara, Pashtun or others. People will not favor National Unity any government that includes even only one traitor, whether that is communist, Mujaheed or Talib. Security is impossible Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai replied that “national unity does 22 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org 22 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/ No 3, August 16, 2009 exist among the people. All the people want justice. But problem erupted when ethnic dealers took the place of politicians and in the name of nation started their trade and bargain. We should have adopted a transparent system in appointing governmental employees so that national solidarity came into being on its own. The problem of national solidarity is with the lack of justice”. Dr. Ramazan Bashardost replied that “national solidarity can be seen in our country from two angles: One kind is inviting a representative from every ethnicity to an extravagant eating table. The other approach is to highlight the problems of people and provide solutions to them, which is the real type of national unity. Pashtuns are not the problems; actually they are the victims. Karzai: National Unity exists completely now. I agree with Bashardost that Pashtuns are not the problem but the victim. Questions Directed at Individual Candidates Question: Mr. Bashardost! It is said that you live in a tent, you are a poor man and you do not drink Coca Cola. Does it all suit a president? Isn’t it too much? Dr. Ramazan Bashardost: About 30% of people in Panjsher eat barley bread and in Bamyan people still live in caves. It makes no difference whether I sit on the plastic made chair or golden chair. When I was in France during the time of crisis I stopped drinking Coca Cola and fruits. I do not live with words but action. Living in palaces makes you forget people. We must live like the Four Caliphs. Our prophet says that if some one lives satiated and his neighbor is hungry he is not Muslim. Question: Mr. Ashraf Ghani! People say that you have a short temper and your health condition is not normal? You indulge in a lot of fights and there have been cases when you have slapped your close associates. Do you think you are a suitable person for the presidency with these conditions? I have been suffering from illnesses since past two years and my cancer is now cured. My health condition is fine and I can work for ten hours now. I was serious with only those who were thieves and misappropriated the governmental authorities. Question: Mr. Karzai! It is said that you enter into coalitions very frequently and change your strategy. Is it not a weakness? Hamid Karzai! When I took power in the country it was ruined and state institutions were functional. I entered into coalition for the interest of Afghanistan. Whenever it is needed I will enter into coalitions once, twice or million times.
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PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/324377/ No 3, August 16, 2009 How to Win an Afghan Election
Perceptions and Practices
In its second report the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) behaviour, to engage with a wider range of political players. holds the magnifying glass to the Afghan elections, exploring The report discusses the likelihood of electoral malpractice and the impact of high‐level deals, local‐level decision‐making fraud, and concludes that the methods that have been used in processes, and electoral manipulation. The author, Martine van earlier elections all look likely to be repeated. The report calls Bijlert, used her extensive in‐country experience, contacts and on the international community to acknowledge electoral language skills to provide a detailed analysis of the deal‐making realities and in doing so start re‐setting the standards for future and politicking that underlie the current elections, arguing that elections. the analysis of political dynamics is key to understanding the wider process of democratisation and institution building in About the author: Afghanistan. Martine van Bijlert has worked in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan The report describes how Afghans view the elections with since the early 90s, most recently as a diplomat for the mixed feelings. On one hand they believe that the outcome of European Union Special Representative (EUSR) Office in Kabul the vote will be determined by others: the internationals, their and as an independent political analyst. She is now one of the leaders or electoral manipulation. On the other hand there is a Co‐directors of AAN. vibrant process of consultations, negotiations and communal decisions making. The report cautions against simplistic About AAN: appraisals of probable voting patterns, describing how voters AAN is a recently established non‐profit, independent policy are pulled in different directions, under the influence of research organisation. It aims to bring together the knowledge instruction, loyalty, patronage and proximity, pressure, and experience of a large number of experts to inform policy positioning, and considerations of substance. and increase the understanding of Afghan realities. AAN will The report argues that the international community should shift publish regular in‐depth thematic reports, policy briefings and its approach from the current emphasis on partnering with comments. The main channel for dissemination of the reports is whoever seems powerful, regardless of past or present the AAN web site. To download the report please visit: www.aan‐afghanistan.org
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No 3, August 16, 2009
Dari Editor: Qasem Qamoos is only responsible for what it writes Translator: Murtaza Sharifi like notes, analysis and comments. Haqiqat is Designer: Ahmad Zia Mohammadi not responsible for news, reports and articles Typist: Frishta Barakzay selected from media sources, the responsibility Interviewer: Ali Payam is returned to the publisher.
ABOUT AFGHANISTAN WATCH
The Afghanistan Watch is an independent, non‐governmental and non‐political organization registered with the Ministry of National Economy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. It envisions a democratic, peaceful, tolerant and just society in which all citizens have equal opportunities to realize their human potentials. Its mission is to undertake activities that will promote peace, justice, and a culture of mutual tolerance and respect for human rights in Afghanistan. As its core values the organization is strongly committed to democracy, justice, human rights, sustainable and balanced social and economic development of the country and impartiality, independence and professionalism as guiding principles of its activities.
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