Number 4, August 31, 2009 A publication of watch

Forth Note past two weeks. The mass media Justice Is Permanent strongly pushed for a transparent The fourth issue of Haqiqat/The Truth election. However as we were getting Not Transitional contains a lot of news and reports on closer to the election, concerns election transparency and during this regarding transparency and integrity of period transitional justice received very the process increased. In this regard little attention. Efforts have been made some cases of fraud and election I am afraid of another to pick up news and analysis related to problems are reflected in the media. four key issues of transitional justice, Injustice for the Sake of reconciliation and negotiation with anti‐ Corruption: Justice government groups, elections The media had little focus on corruption transparency and corruption. during past two weeks. In many cases corruption is said to be the only cause Transitional Justice: of failure in the government of

The issue of transitional justice received Afghanistan after the collapse of very little attention in the media during Taliban. Media and political

the period of fourth issue of Haqiqat. commentators highlighted that the The only point in this regard is the success of next government can be return of General Dostum from Turkey measured against its success in fighting to Afghanistan. The Afghan media has corruption in the state offices. covered issues that were believed to be most important during the past two Interviews: weeks. An interview with two presidential candidates, Dr. Negotiation and Reconciliation with and General Shahnwaz Tanai is also Taliban: included in this issue. The questions The issue of negotiation and during the interviews focused on the reconciliation with Taliban also received four constant topics of Haqiqat little attention in the media. The issue Newsletter i.e. transitional justice, of negotiation and reconciliation was reconciliation and negotiation with anti‐ almost forgotten as the elections and government forces, election its related violence dominated transparency and state corruption. The reporting and analysis in the Afghan candidates offer two different media. This lack of interest can perspectives on issue of transitional probably explained by the fact that justice and accountability for past offers of negotiation has so far been crimes. Dr. Ramazan Bashardost made unilaterally by the Afghan believes the process of transitional government and some foreign countries justice is very important to be which has so far faced rejection or implemented as it is the right of those indifference by the insurgents. who were oppressed during war in the past. On the other hand General

Election Transparency: Shahnwaz Tanai presents a pessimistic Concerns and issues regarding view and says it is impossible to

transparency in the elections were implement transitional justice in the widely reflected in the media during the current situation of Afghanistan.

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/1b0bf0/ 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 We Will Cut the Fingers of Voters 9 Transitional Justice and Ethnic Emotions 3 US Ambassador emphasized on transparency in… 9 America and Karzai Face to Face with the Arrival… 3 United Nations: 95% of people participate in… 9 Negotiation with armed position Groups Elections was Fair 9 The Votes from Western Provinces Misused… 4 Fraud and Vilations of August 20 Elections 9 Negotiation with Anti‐Government Forces… 4 Election was not transparent 9 Cease Fire ends with Reconciliation 4 A Fraud in Herat: total population 5000 and… 10 Britain and US Preparing to Talk to Taliban 4 The Election Process Was Positive 10 Negotiation with Taliban Fruitless 5 No Election Result Unless the Complaints Are… 10 Karzai’s Five Year Strategy Struggle for a Vicious… 5 Lack of Legitimacy in the New Government of… 10 Hushdar Editorial 8 5 Electoral Complaints That Could Falsify… 10 Preconditions That Makes Impossible… 5 Corruption Please Negotiate with Taliban 6 Cabinet Chief Executive: Solution or Problem? 11 A Western Writer Revealed:America Will Pull Out… 6 Razaq Mamoon: Coming Election and the End… 11 Elections Transparency US Officials In Search Of a New Post for… 11 The Hands behind Insecurity in the North 7 Two Committees Established To Monitor Foreign… 11 Taliban: We will disrupt the Elections 7 Some High Authorities in Interior Ministry Collect 11 Will the Rivals accept the Elections Result Easily? 7 Corruption Reduced in the Ministry Of Transport 12 Special Measures to Prevent Fraud in the Elections 7 Why Cases are not pursued? $17.5 Million… 12 Will Fraud Be Prevented In The Election? 7 Campaign Spending Higher Than First Elections 12 We Are Unable To Prevent Fraud 8 How to Eradicate Corruption? 12 Phillipe:Candidates should accept official result… 8 Security, Political, Psychological and… 12 Elections a Period of Business for the Media 8 USA to Make a Complete Assessment of Afghan… 12 Obama’s Special Envoy Arrives in to… 8 Democracy is Not about Elections Only 13 The Probability of Second Round Elections… 8 What Will The Second Republic Do? 13 Violence increased on the eve of Afghan Election 8

Exclusive Topics Justice Is Permanent Not Transitional 14 I am afraid of another Injustice for the Sake of Justice? 16

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No 4, August 31, 2009

Transitional Justice

Transitional Justice and Ethnic Emotions

8am Daily, No 646, Page 4, Sunday, August 2, 2009 In my view after the failure of the government and international community to support transitional justice for reasons of stability and peace, negotiations with the Taliban is the next most damaging blow to the process. Now we can rarely hear any word regarding transitional justice by government or international community. At a time the West and the government are trying to open doors for talks with a terrorist group, talk of transitional justice is becoming difficult and meaningless. Apparently, Mr. Karzai is trying to remove the names of Taliban leaders from the black list of United Nations. When Mullah Omar is not questioned for his crimes and terrorist activities then the process of transitional justice is in vain. Those who have power and arm might not be held accountable for long years because government whose higher officials are comprised of law breakers and war criminals can not point to crimes committed by others? ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

America and Karzai Face to Face with the Arrival of Dostum in Afghanistan

Nukhost Daily, No 135, Page 6, Aug 18, 2009 , a Member of Parliament from Herat province calls concerns of US Embassy unfair regarding the case of General Dostum. He says: “it is very outrageous if other bloody incidents and human rights violations are neglected and only the case of General Dostum is pursued.” Mr. Behzad added that if we are to pursue the human rights violations and war crime cases in Afghanistan, then all those who were involved in the massacre of Afshar and other internal conflicts between rival parties should be brought into justice and tried. According to him many of them are now part of Karzai’s government and present in the parliament. .

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No 4, August 31, 2009

Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups

The Votes from Western Provinces Misused The Badghis Insurgents Took the Money and Broke the Ceasefire

Mandegar Daily, No 98, Page 1, July 30, 2009 The Mandegar Daily in its editorial say the recent agreement between Taliban and the government of Afghanistan is a game and levy by insurgents. Following the report the Daily Telegraph an English Newspaper revealed that government of Afghanistan paid a sum of 20 thousand pounds to Taliban for the ceasefire agreement in Badghis province. The Newspaper quotes a senior western diplomat that the current plan is part of a strategy to misappropriate the north‐ western votes. In the meanwhile the government of Afghanistan says the agreement in Bala Murghab district of cordially and logically accept the negotiation process, if they Badghis province was the result of efforts and struggles by tribal understand that Taliban admit to negotiate with government elders in this province. However Mullah Malang, a member of and there is no more force, explosions, suicide bombings and House of Representatives says the agreement was based on helicopters flying above their head. money and after the money was received it was broken. has been pursuing the process of negotiation with Daily Telegraph in the end adds that Dr. , a Taliban for along time and now the negotiation in Bala Murghab presidential candidate called the plan of agreement by Kabul district of Badghis province and Ghurmach district of Faryab government as a joke. province will bring reasonable results. In these provinces Taliban have promised to supervise the building process of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ highways, the reconstruction projects to be started again and Negotiation with Anti‐Government Forces people have committed to ensure the security of elections. For A Common Agenda Amongst The Candidates sure there will be future attempts to establish ceasefire in other

Cheragh Daily, No 134, Page 2, July 30, 2009 parts of the country. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Beside a general understanding and other common slogans amongst all the presidential candidates of Afghanistan the Britain and US Preparing to Talk to Taliban slogan of “reconciliation with the anti‐government forces” is included in the action plan of every presidential candidate. 8am Daily, No 645, Page 9, August 1, 2009 Writer: Richard Norton‐Taylor/ Translaor: Ali Alimi Kirmani Whenever any of the candidates stands on the dyes of Source: Guardian, July 28 presidential election of Afghanistan, after the opening speech which is surely some verses of holy Kora’an or Hadith, they talk Attempts at initiating a coordinated negotiation with Taliban by of reconciliation with Taliban and call it an important and special representatives of the US and Britain on July 26, 2009 historical job. resulted into an important change in fighting tactics. Senior political authorities and military commanders in the region believe they have created a conducive environment for ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Cease Fire ends with Reconciliation opening negotiations with the second tier of Taliban leadership

and the Taliban are now forced to retreat into a corner of Bakhtar Daily, No 70, Page 1, August 1, 2009 Helmand province. There is no final option to end war in Afghanistan except They are hopeful that the arrival of thousands of new American negotiation. A major part of Taliban is formed by common forces has strengthened the position of British Forces in people living in remote villages of the country and is known to Helmand and has encouraged the Taliban to give up militancy… the people of their areas. The ‘second tier leadership of insurgency is important However a small minority of Taliban are fundamentalists and because they control many of the fighters in the south of radicals. Therefore, they can be divided into two groups and Afghanistan. The extremist and first tier of Taliban who are they are not a united group with a single ideology. sitting around Mullah Ummar are not expected to accept No one except those who come from Iran and Pakistan are negotiations in near future. The third tier of the Taliban enthusiastic to take the leadership of Taliban. People will who are mainly foot soldiers are not important and 4 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009 effective players. place behind the closed doors and the details of talk should not UK’s Foreign Secretary, David Milliband and Alexander, UK be kept secret from public opinion. This process should not be Secretary of State for International Development, called the based on political, ethnic or factional ties and should not take prospects of talks between Taliban fighters that are ready to place behind closed doors in a foreign country with no clear and give up violence and the government of Afghanistan as an particular agenda. When the negotiation is revealed by any important stop forward to stop insurgency. foreign news agency like Al Hayat, Washington Post or Guardian after one or two months your Foreign Minister utters For more than a year the British intelligence officers had something, you say another thing and your brother offers a contacts with Taliban and their allies. It was a crucial job that totally contradictory account. Remember if you continue these had to at the same time not create troubles for Karzai’s deals under the pretext of negotiation you will drown yourself government in Kabul. and the people of Afghanistan in deep troubles. Therefore it is essential to organize a national consultation ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Negotiation with Taliban Fruitless in which all tribal elders, religious scholars, intellectuals, party leaders and civil society organizations are invited to Mandegar Daily, No 102, Page 1, Tuesday August 4, 2009 discuss the framework of talks with the fully armed Taliban Dr. Abdullah described the current efforts for negotiation with fighters so that we get effective and tangible results. The Taliban as fruitless and said that the lack of trust of people on outcomes of this debate should be announced as the the government will reinforce militancy in Afghanistan. He said framework of national reconciliation. It is only through this the current government has lost the support of people and this way that a real negotiation with the opponents can be helps insurgency and we must stop it before the situation is initiated. depreciated. The experiences have shown that any successful negotiation Abdullah mentioned that thousand of Afghans have joined the requires that both parties show flexibility during the process. If rank of insurgents not because they share Taliban ideology and there be no flexibility no positive outcome can be achieved. You goals but because of terrible economic situation. They operate must prove your opponent that you are not imposing your under the flag of Taliban but their goal differs from Taliban who opinions and viewpoints and show you are in search of a want to topple down the government of Afghanistan. common solution to the current crises to bring peace and put an end to war. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Karzai’s Five Year Strategy Struggle for a Vicious Cycle Preconditions That Makes Impossible the Reconciliations between Taliban and Government Hushdar Weekly, No 8, Page 1, August 12, 2009 On several occasions Karzai has talked of negotiation with Nukhost Daily, No 130, Page 1, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 Taliban but Taliban never showed any positive reaction to Moulawi Arsalan Rahmani, the former deputy minister of higher this issue and always refused the offers with harsh answers. education at the time of Taliban and currently Senator at Senate It is not a fresh plan by Karzai. The important point in this House has been trying to pave the way for talks between regard is the confusing and ambiguity of the peace process government and Taliban. He said in an interview with Nukhost by Taliban. He sometimes declares that he will negotiate Daily that we can call two types of Loya Jirga (Grand Council). with moderate Taliban and sometimes promises to project One is the Loya Jirga defined in constitution and its members Mullah Omar in his own house and in other occasion says are also specified and the second is tribal Loya Jirga. He believes talk with Taliban is a wish and desire for him. However he Tribal Loya Jirga is the option that can pave the way for talks never proposes a framework of talks with Taliban. On the with Taliban. other hand Taliban has always rejected the term of However he believes that before calling the Loya Jirga there “moderate Taliban” and say that there is no moderate or must be talks between the anti‐government forces and extremist Taliban in their group, they all fight under the government officials. He says, “If there will not be talks with leadership of one person and for a single goal. insurgents before calling Loya Jirga, they will not participate in the Jirga.” Mr. Rahmani says that the Loya Jirga in which ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ insurgents are not present will not be effective. Hushdar Editorial 8 On the other hand the experts believe that the offer of talks Hushdar Weekly, Editorial, No 8, Page 2, August 12, 2009 with insurgents by the presidential candidates are all one sided The main question to ask in the process of negotiation with and the insurgents have always rejected their offer. anti‐government forces is that how values like democracy, Due to many differences in the viewpoints of Taliban and the freedom of speech, human rights and other civil society values government there is no ground of understanding between them are dealt with? as Taliban always demand withdrawal of foreign troops and the On the other hand any kind of talks with Taliban should not take government of Afghanistan calls on them to accept the 5 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009 constitution of the country. These differences of opinions make the reconciliation impossible between the two sides.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Please Negotiate with Taliban rada Daily, No 1637, Page 3, August 13, 2009 Translated by Sara Ma’soomi Any of the Taliban members willing to take part in the government of Afghanistan must abandon the terrorist techniques of Al Qaeda. The National Army of Afghanistan is now in a position to fight extremism and other attitudes close to Al Qaeda.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ A Western Writer Revealed: America Will Pull Out Of Afghanistan Soon

Irada Daily, No 1644, Page 1, August 23, 2009 A direct talk is going on these days between Taliban under the leadership of Mullah Omar and Washington. Though the parliamentary election of 2010 in Afghanistan is called a marking event, however White House tries to achieve its objectives from talks with Taliban before August 20 presidential election. It is interesting that the Pentagon has no role in the policy making of White House and the Obama team. The policy makers of White House are working on a pull out strategy. In this way they try to bring victory back home and prepare themselves for the Congress elections to be held in 2010.

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No 4, August 31, 2009 Elections Transparency

The Hands behind Insecurity in the North

Mandegar Daily, No 99, Page 2, Saturday August 1, 2009 The north of the country was called the secure region in the country during past years. But recently violence and insecurity is increasing in the region and everyday security situation is deteriorating. As the government does not have control over all parts of the country, it is likely that the rival candidates take over the nominee of the current government. It is probable that the government is resorting to a policy of fishing from polluted water and encouraging the militant forces in the north to show the north as insecure so that people do not participate in the election due to fear of violence.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Taliban: We will disrupt the Elections announced that special measures are taken to prevent fraud in Mandegar Daily, No 99, Page 1, Saturday August 1, 2009 the elections. Deputy of Independent Election Commission The Taliban called on people to boycott the elections and Secretariat Zakariya Barackzai, in a press conference in Kabul threatened to interrupt the process. A statement posted at the said they ensure there will not be any fraud in the elections. website of Taliban by its leadership council describes the He added: “I do not say that there will be no fraud in the elections as an American trick. elections; however the IEC has taken all measures to prevent The statement adds that all the roads to the polling stations will fraud like quality of electoral materials, security of sensitive be closed one day before the elections and all the government materials, control and packing, the presence of media and vehicles will be stopped. political party representatives and we are sure that these measures will reduce the probability of fraud in the election.” In the meantime the government of afghansitan declared that they have reached an agreement with Taliban in Badghis province. The IEC ensures of Fraud prevention while the candidates for presidential election has expressed concerns about the .possibility of fraud in the election ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Will the Rivals accept the Elections Result Easily? ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Sokhan Jadid Weekly, No 37, Sunday August 2, 2009 Will Fraud Be Prevented In The Election?

It is not only threats by the opposition group that threaten the Afghanistan Daily, No 866, Page 1, August 8, 2009 security of people’s vote. We have not provided conditions for informed elections. In other countries fraud takes place with The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) ballot‐boxes but in our country it is done with public opinions. reported 52 cases of violation during past 18 days by Our people chose their candidate keeping in mind their presidential and provincial council candidates. ethnicity, party and faction. Is it not a fraud? Jandad Spin Ghar Head of FEFA said that the violation cases are We are getting closer to elections at a time when emotions are registered by 66 observers of the organization in all provinces. tense and threats for return to the past are in the horizon. According to him 44 cases are by presidential candidates and 8 Those who can not appear in the election with great will by provincial council candidates and their supporters. manipulate ethnic and factional feelings. We see that how the Spin Ghar informed that 25 cases are registered in Parwan, 7 in peace of mind of people is put in the playground of leaders and Khost province, 5 in , 4 in Paktiya, 4 in Laghman and the political dealers. rest in other provinces. According to him, most of the violations include the support of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Special Measures to Prevent Fraud in the Elections government authorities from one or several candidates, participating in the campaign functions in the official timing and Mandegar Daily, NO 102, Page 7, August 4, 2009 use of state resources. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) yesterday The Head of FEFA said that most of the violations have been to 7 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009 support of particular candidate but he did not name any Afghanistan is due to arrive in Kabul to supervise the process of candidate. Moreover he said that polling stations can not be elections. In a press conference in Washington, a US State opened in 14 districts because Taliban control these districts. Department official said President Obama has asked Hollbroke to travel to Afghanistan during its elections. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ According to another report by Lechnistein Institute of America, We Are Unable To Prevent Fraud it is possible that the presidential election of Afghanistan be Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1240, Page 2, Thursday August 13, 2009 held for second round and that there has been no preparation The Head of Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) said that in this regard by the US and the international community. The during reviewing the complaints they have sent 6 cases to the report has pointed to concerns regarding the possibility of fraud Attorney General’s office, 13 of the candidates are fined and 12 in the elections and called on the international community and other are sent warnings. the US to ensure transparency of the process. The presidential and provincial council elections are due to held on 20, August Mr. Kipen, Head of the ECC expressed his views about Ahmad 2009. Behzad’s statement that members of the Independent Elections ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Commissions will be under the pressure of governmental authorities and reminded that: “we are not able to prevent The Probability of Second Round Elections and violations, but we can pursue them if there we receive complaints.” Outbreak of Violence

Kipen said he was satisfied with the way the complaints were Cheragh Daily, No 1372, Page 1, August 15, 2009 handled so far and said the EEC staff will receive training in the coming days. The latest opinion survey by an American organization named “Gluvem Associates” conducted between 8 and 17 of July in 34 provinces of Afghanistan, shows that Hamid Karzai has got only ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Phillipe: 36 % of the voters, while Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, previous Candidates should accept official result of elections foreign minister of Afghanistan and a prominent rival of Mr. Karzai has won 20 % of the voters. Dr. Ramazan Bashar Dost, Afghanistan Daily, No 872, Page 1, August 15, 2009 previous Planning Minister 7% and Dr. Ahmadzai, European Union Elections Observer Mission to Afghanistan says previous Finance Minister of Afghanistan has won 3% of the they have met almost 30 of the presidential candidates and voters. shared with them the concerns about the protests after the The remaining 37 nominees can win only 31% of the votes. results of elections are announced. From 3566 persons interviewed, 20 % said they had not yet Speaking to reporters on 13 August in Kabul, Philipe Morrilan decided who to vote for. . the Head of European Union Elections Observer Mission said This survey was carried out independently with financial they had assured the candidates of their full commitment to assistance by United States of America. To confirm the views of observe the elections who in return had committed to accept people they are interviewed face to face and ballot papers were the outcomes of the votes. shown to the respondents to indicate their favorite candidates. The report has covered all provinces, the cities and villages and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Elections a Period of Business for the Media populations in different regions. The final result that can be drawn from this report is that the president of Afghanistan may Bakhtar Daily, No 76, Page 2, August 15, 2009 not be elected in the first round and that a second round Media played influential role in election campaign this year. The elections is more likely. All the people from different tribe, media can be grouped into three categories: state‐run media, region, village and population are included and the final result campaign media and seemingly impartial ones. Most of local obtained from this voting poll suggests that the election in and foreign media channels stood against Mr. Karzai. On several Afghanistan will not finalized in the first round and it will go to occasions the campaign office of Mr. Karzai accused the second round. National Television of reducing the news related to Karzai and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ his everyday work. His campaign reports were sometimes reported without pictures. Violence increased on the eve of Afghan Election

There have been reports that the national media have been Irada Daily, No 1638, Page 1, August 15, 2009 supporting Mr. Karzai. There are concerns that extremist groups will sabotage the elections. We have seen an increase of 4.4 million voters ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Obama’s Special Envoy Arrives in Kabul to registered than 2004 elections that have reached 17 million. In the meantime more than 60 percent of 30 million Afghan Observe the Elections populations are below 18 years and they are not eligible voters. Irada Daily, No 1638 Page 1, August 15, 2009 It is predicted that the black market of selling voting cards in Richard Hollbrooke, the US President’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan may confront the country with serious threats. 8 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009 Richard Holbrooke the US special envoy to Afghanistan and take part in the election with full confidence and without fear. Pakistan also expressed his concerns and said: “Election can not The journey by Deputy United Nations Secretary General comes be fully fair. We are concerned about fraud and the security at a time to Kundoz when the security situation is critical in the situation in some polling stations.” province. He said he had traveled to Kundoz to observe the process of elections and initiatives taken to ensure security of the process. According to authorities hundreds of security ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ We Will Cut the Fingers of Voters forces from National Army, National Police, National Security

Team and ISAF forces have come to the province to ensure the Cheragh Daily, No 1373, August 16, 2009 security so that people cast their votes in a peaceful Two days after a agreement of ceasefire during elections was environment. reached between the government and Taliban fighters, this ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ insurgent groups issued a warning to cut off the fingers of those who participate in this political event. According to a report by Head of European Union Elections Observer Mission: New York Times, Mullah Umar Spiritual leader of Taliban has Elections was Fair prohibited participation in the presidential elections and whoever violates the rule will be punished. Taliban on Saturday Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1245, Page 1, Sunday August 23, 2009 declared that they will cut those fingers stained with ink on the According to Rah‐e Nijat political reporter the AFP reported that day of elections. during a press conference Philipe Morillan the Chief EU Elections Observer said that Thursday’s election in Afghanistan ”.overall was fair and fine but it was not free ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ US Ambassador emphasized on ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ transparency in the elections  Fraud and Vilations of August 20 Elections Afghanistan Daily, No 873, Page 1, August 16, 2009 Nukhost Daily, No 136, Page 1, Sunday August 23, 2009 The people wonder how the presidential candidates afford to spend so much money in their campaigns. The candidates say Ahmad Fawad, a student at Kabul University says elections all they spend their personal money and donations from traders to around the world are not free of fraud and irregularities occur finance their campaign. in developed parts of the world. The major concern in this regard is taking the ballot‐boxes to the houses. The tribal elders In the meantime it is said that billions of Afghani are spent only have taken the ballet‐boxes to their houses under the pretext of on printing and distribution of posters by candidates. casting votes by women. They have filled these boxes as they .want and returned them back to the electoral supervisor of site ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ When the employee of the same polling station revolted to the United Nations: issue he was dismissed. 95% of people participate in the elections

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan Daily, No 874, Page 1, August 17, 2009 The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA): Peter Galbreith, Deputy of United Nations Secretary General, in a journey to Kundoz province told reporters in a news Election was not transparent Ballot‐boxes are filled up for the interest of particular candidates conference that it was expected about 90 to 95 percent of Afghans take part in the presidential and provincial council Mandegar Daily, No 115, Page 1, Sunday August 23, 2009 elections and that security forces with the help of FEFA declared that there international community will ensure the security of the have been major frauds in polling stations. the elections held on 20th As time is getting closer to the elections day, the security August 2009. Nader Naderi, situation is deteriorating every day which might stop many from Head of this Foundation participating on the day of polling. However Peter added that accused members of the the international community is observing the process and so far Independent Election the process has been good. Commission (IEC) of taking According to Peter 5 % of the people can not participate in the sides during the process of election due to security reasons in some of the provinces of the elections. According to country. Naderi, the polling stations in some areas were closed According to Mr. Peter Galbreith more than 7 thousand early and in some areas it was opened late for voters. In some observers are deployed to the north to monitor the presidential provinces men cast votes instead of women of the area and on and provincial council elections. the other hand some supporter of particular candidates Peter asked the anti‐government forces not to prevent people pressurized people to cast their vote in the favor of their own from participating in the election and he called on people to candidates. 9 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009 A Fraud in Herat: stations therefore only 50 % of the voters participated in the total population 5000 and number of votes 19770 election. Time adds that political conflicts might increase if none of the candidates win more than 50 % of the votes and two Mandegar Daily, No 115, Page 1, Sunday August 23, 2009 main rivals compete again in the second round. The electoral campaign office of Dr. Abdullah in Herat province According to Times Weekly there will be no obstacle for says: “keeping in view the low turn out in other districts of Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan, if a flawed election could not Herat, the case of a Adraskan, a thinly populated district, in be able to establish a legitimate government in the country. On which 19770 voters participated and 90 % of the votes were the other hand it will pave the way for the re‐emergence of cast in favor of Mr. Karzai is a clear case of fraud and Taliban.” manipulation in the elections.” ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Some of the residents of Herat believe the total number of residents in this district will not exceed 5 thousand. Electoral Complaints That Could Falsify the Election Results Reaches 300 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Asian Network for Free Election (ANFREL): Mandegar Daily, No 116, Page 6, Monday, August 24, 2009 The Election Process Was Positive Muhammad Fahim Hakim, a spokesperson for the Afghanistan

Afghanistan Daily, No 874, Page 1, Monday August 24, 2009 Electoral Complaints Commission said that the complaints that could falsify the result of elections reach 250 to 300. He said: “in High election standards can not be anticipated considering the some areas where ballot‐boxes are filled, it was possible that newly established democracy in Afghanistan. the boxes are displaced and they are brought with new Damaso Magbual Head of Asian Network for Free Election materials.” (ANFREL) announced that all major candidates misused public Mr. Ahmad Behzad, an MP in House of Representatives talked resource. Although, he did not name any candidate, but about the great number of complaints that reaches 250 to 300 promised to release their report after the Afghan Election and said: “I believe elections will go to the second round Complaints Commission (ECC) reviews electoral complaints. without considering the complaints because the difference He added that they had 50 observers in 13 provinces of between the votes of two main rivals is very less and a great Afghanistan in the north, north east and central provinces who number of votes are divided amongst other candidates.” observed the process of election and the process of election was positive considering its background.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ No Election Result Unless the Complaints Are Reviewed

Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1246, Page 3, Monday August 24, 2009 During a press conference, Head of Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission said during the process of election 225 complaints were registered. He added: “All the complaints should be reviewed prior to announcement of the result of elections.”

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Lack of Legitimacy in the New Government of Afghanistan in the US Interest

Cheragh Daily, No 1376, Page 1, Monday August 24, 2009 The American Times Weekly has written in a report that lack of legitimacy in the in the upcoming government of Afghanistan is finally in the interest of America. Time adds that the result of elections might take a longer period but whoever wins his government will lack legitimacy. According to the Weekly the incumbent president Hamid Karzai and his main rival candidate Abdullah Abdullah on Friday declared that they have won the major number of votes in the first phase of elections. In the meantime Dr. Abdullah accused Karzai’s campaigning team of fraud in the elections. The Weekly writes that Taliban had threatened to attack polling 10 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009

Corruption

US Officials In Search Of a New Post for Karzai’s Rival

8am Daily, No 121, Page 1, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 Source: Washington Post Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, the former minister of finance and a prominent rival of Mr. Karzai in the elections, is the one proposed for the post. A close source to Ashraf Ghani on Monday said that Karl W. Eiken Berry, US Ambassador and Richard Holbrooke, US representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan who lately had a visit with Mr. Ghani have discussed the issue with him. Because of increasing Taliban violence, extensive corruption and inefficient bureaucracy during the past five years US officials are increasingly frustrated with Karzai leadership. In recent months, the idea of a new post of Executive Officer was proposed by Americans in Afghan government and it was Cabinet Chief Executive: Solution or Problem? believed that Zalmai Khalilzad, the previous US ambassador Bakhtar Daily, No 75, Page 2, August 12, 2009 would take this position. Many of management experts and those who monitored the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ activities of government closely during past several years know that problem was not with the lack of posts in the government Two Committees Established of Afghanistan but with the incompetent persons who were To Monitor Foreign Aids appointed in these posts. They brought corruption and worked Sorosh Millat Daily, No 146, Page 1, August 12, 2009 for their personal interest. The Finance Minster of Afghanistan Mr. Ommar Zakheilwal said An efficient cabinet can be established if these people are two committees are established to monitor foreign aids are sent removed from the posts. Therefore, we must solve the problem to Afghanistan and ways they are spent in the country. instead of expanding the administrative burden. t is the core .Zakhilwal added: “in the year 2008 the first year of issue the coming government should take into consideration. implementation of the National Strategy of Afghanistan, The presence of inexperienced and inexpert persons in the body significant increase was observed in the income of customs. of government particularly impositions by powerful persons, Besides, the number of National Police increased to 74 organizations and some governments on it have taken away its thousand and of National Army to 86 thousand. However they ability to function efficiently. Hence, the next government must still require capacity building and material equipment. stop the presence of inexperienced persons in its structure and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ prioritize efficiency and reduce its size and structure. Some High Authorities in Interior Ministry Collect Tributes from People ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Razaq Mamoon: Nukhost Daily, No 132, Page 2, Monday August 15, 2009 Coming Election and the End of Karzai Terrm I am living in the outskirt of the mountain with almost one Hushdar Weekly, No 8, Page 1, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 thousand residents of the area for five or six years. We live a Interview with Razaq Maamoon medieval life. Last year we paid the bill of electricity and solved our problem with the help of neighborhood representative. In Is there any reason other than the poor management of Karzai the summer of last year we reached an agreement with a behind the dissatisfaction of the people with the elections? private company according to which it would build our water Poor management of Mr. Karzai is the first reason. Second system and in the end of work we will pay the company 4 reason is existence of corruption in the state‐run offices. The thousand Afghanis per family. Unfortunately some warlords and corruption starts from presidential palace. Although the powerful men including a police and a logistics officer of the government system in Afghanistan was corrupt since 19th ministry of interior have stopped the work and they want their century and corrupt governments ruled in Afghanistan in the share in the payment. In the meantime a well is also dug and a past but this time it is a mixture of old corruption with modern reservoir is also made but it has been one year that it is left digital corruption which is very dangerous. incomplete fearing these gunmen. 11 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009 In this area almost a hundred plots were given by government provincial council candidates spent millions of Afghanis for the for 112 families and a considerable number of plots snatched by printing and publication of their campaign posters and force by these powerful men who then sold them to other organization of events. The amount of spending is higher than people at prices ranging from 2 hundred thousand to 2 million the previous elections. Afghanis. Moreover, the police force appointed in the area took However people wonder where do presidential candidates get between 5 and 25 thousand Afghanis from each family by force this amount of money. The candidates say they spend from under the pretext that the government did not allow any one to their personal savings and donations from traders. work in the area. The places close to the road include almost 30 palaces of high authorities of ministry of interior and they are In the meanwhile the presidential and provincial council equipped with every thing. They also have many such palaces in elections candidates have spent millions of Afghanis for the the other places of the city and their families live abroad. print and distribution of their posters only.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ How to Eradicate Corruption? Corruption Reduced in the Ministry Of Transport

Afghanistan Daily, No 872, Page 2, August 15, 2009 Nukhost Daily, No 134, Page 5, Monday August 17, 2009 “There has been significant decrease in corruption and The High Office of Oversight & Anti‐corruption has revealed misappropriation in the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation new plans to prevent corruption in the Traffic Department. during past four months” said, Minister of Transport and Civil During the last 10 days, they are implementing the plan in the Aviation, Hamidullah Faroqi in an interview with Roz News Traffic Department in order to prevent corruption and waste of Agency. He emphasized: “we have reviewed some past cases time. and have sent 10 to 12 cases to Attorney General Office.” According to the source during past years people had to pay 20 However he believes there are corruptions in the provinces and to 25 thousand Afghanis for their work to be done and in this promised to eradicate corruption from thee in near future. way more than 13 billion Afghanis were exchanged as bribe in this department. According to the new plan people can get their ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  license in three days. Why Cases are not pursued? ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Million Misappropriation and the Silence of $17.5 Government Security, Political, Psychological and Organizational Challenges and Opportunities of Afghanistan Mandegar Daily, No 111, Page 8, Saturday, August 15, 2009 Interviewee: Mir Ali Asghar Akbarzada, Member of Legal and Civil Society Kabul Shahan Daily, No 20, Page 3, August 17, 2009 Research of Afghanistan A research by Sidiqullah Sahel, Political and Military expert According to Abdul Jabbar Sabith, the previous Attorney‐General the The incompetence of the US supported government has government endured a loss of $17.5 million in two contracts of confronted the country with a challenging and dangerous crisis Intercontinental Hotel during past years. The agreements were of insecurity. Security crisis, rise in the graph of poppy signed between government of Afghanistan and two foreign cultivation and trafficking, corruption and misappropriation all companies. The accused are obliged to pay the stated amount. results from poor management by current authorities in the As the documents, proofs, evidences and images show Mr. government. Ishaq Ndiri, previous economic advisor of Mr. Karzai, Amir The international community thinks that current government is Farhang the former minister of commerce, Neamatullah Ehsan drowned in the corruption and it is dangerous. In the meantime Javid the former minister of transport, Zalmai Rasul the the president of the country also confesses to the fact and every president’s national security advisor, Abdul Salam Azizmi the time changes the authorities. chief justice have left behind documents and evidences. What is On the other hand the Attorney General and the General Anti‐ interesting is that these documents are adorned by two decrees Corruption Department accuse each other of taking bribery and of Karzai 6/ 7/ 1381 and No 1161 on 24/4/1384. violating the law. In the meantime whenever any minister is In the meantime, Abdul Jabbar Sabith and Doctor Zalmay Head questioned about his officials he answers with great confidence of Complaints Commission of Senate House unsuccessfully tried that he has established a fair, corruption free and coheren to investigate the issue. Hence it is clear that Mr. Karzai himself working team since the day he was appointed in the office. is behind all misappropriations and the release of narcotics ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ traffickers, bandits and terrorists. USA to Make a Complete Assessment of Afghan Government ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Campaign Spending Higher Than First Elections 8am Daily, No 661, Page 5, Sunday August 23, 2009 Afghanistan Daily, No 873, Page 1, August 16, 2009 The American authorities are attracted to Mr. Ahmadzai as he is With the official launch of elections campaign, presidential and popular to be anti‐corruption and an economist technocrat who 12 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 4, August 31, 2009 also worked in the World Bank. The American diplomats emphasize that they did not support Ahmazai’s nomination; however they believe he is a good option for the Chief Executive Officer post to bring development in Afghanistan. Gulbaddin Hekmatyar: [where has he said this? This is not complete] The Current Government Is In the Hand of Robbers and Corrupt Elements Hekmatyar called the current government a puppet and emphasized that it is controlled by some criminals, sinister and robbers.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Democracy is Not about Elections Only

8am Daily, No 662, Page 4, August 24, 2009 There is no awareness among people about the expenditure of country’s income and whereabouts of international donations and loans. Media talks of economic corruption and mafias but government does not give a damn to their reports. According to beautiful interpretation of Minister of Information and Culture: government means democracy and democracy is non‐sense. This is democracy in the style of Khurram. Free media! You can say whatever you want. Make criticism, abuse, print proofs and evidences of corruption, and demonstrate and … but no one will listen and pay any attention to you. In absence of powerful democratic institutions, irresponsible governments like this one will last long. We must do our best to establish democracy. Likewise we must also lay down the grounds for formation of political parties and civic institutions so that democracy and the resulting government from ballot‐ government should be responsible and representative of the public interest.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ What Will The Second Republic Do?

Afghanistan daily, No 879, Page 5, August 25, 2009 There are several factors behind mounting corruption in Afghanistan and these factors are serious challenges in combating this phenomenon. At first the salary of government officials particularly the lower and mid level employees is so little that can not cover their family expenses. On the other hand the monitoring organizations are either very weak or they do not exist. Finally, combating corruption is not regarded as a serious and important issue and the authorities do not believe that to achieve progress in this regard they should act very strictly like China, which has taken the plunge to eradicate corruption from the country. Recently, the government of China executed the former Head of Airport of the capital for alleged corruption cases. Now the people of Afghanistan and the donor countries providing enormous amounts of money to this country are waiting to see how the next government will deal with this challenge. 13 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/1b0bf0/ No 4, August 31, 2009 Justice Is Permanent Not Transitional

The following is the text of an interview with Dr.Ramazan Bashardost, a leading presidential candidate and a former minister of planning.

Dated: August 17, 2009 – Place: Kabul © Afghanistan Watch By Ali Payam

Transitional Justice: the life of their grandson. The judge must start his work with fairness including defense for the accused. . If the accused was Q: What is your definition of transitional justice? unable to pay money for lawyer, the government will pay for him. Whatever it may be, the outcome of the trial will be A: As Ms. and others gave detail of “transitional enforced. justice”, but I said No. Justice is permanent it is not transitional. I do not pay much attention to the program of transitional Q: One of the challenges of your government may be that justice made by UNAMA and the Afghanistan Independent human rights violators join the opposition? Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). In my point of view justice A: Under Bashardost, 99 percent of Afghans will see their lives must be in a way that king and beggar should be equal before bright and full of joy. The remaining 500 individuals who have law. If the king commits crime he should he held accountable. If turned the lives of Afghans gloomy will have no option to resist. a beggar commits crime he should be held accountable. If I win I Will they go to Panjsher? They do not have body guards or land will ask the people of Afghanistan what to do in this regard? cruisers. I will tell residents of Panjsher, if they come there that Two ways are experienced so far in the world: One in South you have the choice to take them to graveyard or as a guest to Africa at the time of Mandela. Second approach was your house. Bashar Dost favors justice not execution or hanging. experienced in Nuremberg, Hague, Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. What ever option the people of Afghanistan Q: Has the Peace Commission established by Karzai been choose; Nelson Mandela’s or Nuremberg, I will do that. I am not successful in brining peace? Killing does not end in a dictator to decide. A: The real factor is war not peace. Afghanistan by killing. They should answer where they Q: According a consultation with 6000 Afghans, the people Hanging with hanging or demand prosecution of war criminals. What is your opinion? spent billions of dollars that came to Afghanistan. They should answer torture with torture can not A: Killing does not end in Afghanistan by killing. Hanging with that they had part in killing and end in Afghanistan. Some hanging or torture with torture can not end in Afghanistan. massacring and issuing Fatwa one says he has tortured my Some one says he has tortured my child so I also should torture (religious decree) against anti‐ child so I also should torture him. It is important that the criminals feel sorry for their deeds government forces. They are the him. It is important that the publicly through radio and television. The destructions should government mercenaries and criminals feel sorry for their be compensated. Then we must decide whether the family of Mullahs. If Taliban get the power deeds publicly through radio victims want the trial of culprits or forgive them. they will slaughter them from the and television. The Q: In your way what is the relationship between justice and back of their heads. destructions should be compensated. Then we must reconciliation? Q: What is your opinion about the decide whether the family of National Amnesty Bill passed by A: Justice and security are connected to each other like a chain. victims want the trial of the Parliament? If I occupy office as president at 10:00, at 10:30 all those who culprits or forgive them. are accused of crime and felony will be suspended from A: I said at that time that they whether they are ministers, district governors or officers. If they would gain a bad name with no good result. No one has are sitting on their official seat, they must stand up as they hear the right to forgive the rights of people. God says, I can their suspension order from radio. The Interior Ministry will be forgive my right, but not the right of people. When God has ordered not to let a single of them leave the country. A mobile no authority then how the members of parliament have got court will be established from those judge and lawyers who the power? It is against the Constitution and Islamic have no part in crimes and their lives will be guaranteed even teachings. 14|Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/1b0bf0/ No 4, August 31, 2009 Q: What is your definition of peace and reconciliation? A: I do not favor the peace by Stalin and Hitler that makes graveyard from societies. Q: What is your plan for bringing security and lasting peace if you win the elections? A: I have 52‐article program that is published. Election Transparency: Q: Will we have fair and transparent election? A: Yes we do. The results provided by members of commission after they visited 27 provinces and the result of Obama’s cooperation, compared to Republicans that still want to support the orphans of George Bush in Afghanistan, and are satisfactory. Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups: Q: Some of the candidates have promised to talk with Taliban and Hezb‐e Islami. What is your opinion in this regard? A: All the candidates except me say they will negotiate with Taliban and will give to them posts like ministry and governor. The only candidate who does not talk of negotiation, dealings and seat is me. I have asked the candidates that will Mullah Omar negotiate with you in these suits and ties from which drops of Taliban blood are falling? Certainly “Not”. I only know “Afghans”. For me Hazara, Uzbek, Afghan, Tajik, Khalq and Parcham, Talib all are Afghans. Government is not one to divide between this and that.

Corruption: Q: What is the main factor behind corruption in the current government? A: There are two types of corruption: Bribe in dollars and bribe in Afghani. Those who take bribe are also of two kinds: first, the poor class of the society who can not buy bread with his money. We should feel pity on him and provide him good salary with land and house. The next group is the miser ones. Their desires can not be fulfilled however you give them. They should be punished. I will suspend all those who take bribe from the day I take the power. Q: What is exactly your plan for fighting corruption? A: Good salary for teachers, government employees and governors, opening of hoarded reserves, health insurance and educational scholarship. Salary taking officials will be suspended from their positions and a special mobile court will be formed to deal with these cases. Whatever the violators have violated or stored in any part of the world must be returned back to the national treasury.

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No 4, August 31, 2009No 4, August 31, 2009 I am afraid of another Injustice for the Sake of Justice?

What follows is an interview with Shahnawaz Tanai, a presidential candidate and a former minister of defense in 1980s.

Dated: 12 August 2009 ©Afghanistan Watch By Ali Payam

Election Transparency: Transitional Justice: Q: Will we have transparent elections? elections. A: To bring peace and development we must create the right Q: What is your definition of transitional justice? political culture and consolidate democracy. Then we can say A: Throughout the history of Afghanistan, there have been that elections will be transparent and clean. mistakes because of disunity and selfishness and wars were Security is not established and some of the candidates use their imposed on the people of Afghanistan and interference in our power and resources and are supported by foreigners. The internal affairs have taken place. The responsibility of mistakes government and coalition countries have failed to provide committed in the country is not only of the Afghans but also of better conditions. Therefore, we will have weak elections. foreign countries because they intervened. I believe it is difficult to review all the past mistakes. I believe injustices may Corruption: take place again in the name of justice. Q: What will you do, after your victory, to fight corruption? Secondly, people are indulged with problems today. I believe A: If I win, I will reform the political culture and consolidate that the current problems of people must be addressed first so democracy. Besides, I will also implement justice and rule of they do not confront more difficulties. There should be reforms law and a better politics. We will try to establish an elected in the country and people be trained and reformed and should government. People will reach their desires. Much attention will not be punished. be paid on women and youth. In this way we can attract the Q: There have been human rights violations during the past public support. After we have obtained security and the trust of three decades. What will you do for the victims? people we will eliminate corruption. We had a just and sound A: Firstly, most of the people had There have been many leadership and management during the government of People’s parts in these violations and no mistakes since the monarchy Democratic Party in my previous term and there was no one was impartial. All have but with one difference. Some corruption. committed mistakes including committed few mistakes and Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups: foreign countries. It is difficult to some more. We want investigate all of them. It will be reconciliation and without Q: What is your opinion about negotiation with Taliban and beyond the ability of our people. reconciliation peace and Hezb e Islami? Some of the candidates have expressed their security will not come. So how willingness to negotiate with them. Secondly, the mistakes are taking place right now. Who is pursuing can we demand reconciliation A: The past experiences in Afghanistan showed that no one them? The coalition countries on one hand and transitional can solve the problem of this country alone. The people of present in the country are justice on the other? There are Afghanistan must learn lessons from past experiences and committing mistakes so who is violators of human rights in the get united to overcome the problems. I believe war is not the pursuing them? The current government and parliament, solution. There should be reconciliation and negotiation government is indulged in why they are not questioned between government and opponent forces as they are also mistakes, if no one is able to ask for their deeds? I believe the part of the country. They have the right to live and serve in them then how one can review people of Afghanistan must this country. I will continue the negotiation process and give the problems of past 35 years. It is come together and solve their the government to the people if I become successful in the a difficult and impossible job. problems jointly. 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/1b0bf0/ No 4, August 31, 2009

Q: The victims of war will demand you for prosecution. What is A: Every thing belongs to the will of people. Whom they vote your answer? and who they do not vote. It is not related to persons. If I accuse A: We will consider justice and the rights and wishes of people. you and you accuse me then people will be lost. Secondly, the accused remains accused and it is not suitable that we accuse But it is very difficult to investigate all mistakes committed during the past 30‐35 years. some one. No one has any evidence on me. However if any one brings any proof against me I am ready to defend myself in front Secondly, if the people of Afghanistan are investigated the foreign of my God, people, justice and my conscience. countries will not be investigated. This means only the weak will be prosecuted. It is injustice and we must focus on the current Q: Do you not think your government will face challenges if problems. you fail to regard the demands of the victims? Q: The current problems have roots in the past and if we do A: I do not want to kill people after I get power. However I will not correct the past how fix our future?, bring reforms in the country and people. My obligations starts from the day I sit on the presidential seat according to the laws A: I favor human rights if they be able to do something. of Afghanistan. However I believe that the people of Afghanistan do not have this ability to ask great world powers that were involved in political rivalries. The current government which came into being as a result of Bonn Conference should try to do their job correctly and implement justice. They should pay attention on current situation instead of the past. If we fail implement justice today how can we pursue the crimes of the past 35 years? Q: Which one do you choose between justice and reconciliation? A: There have been many mistakes since the monarchy but with one difference. Some committed few mistakes and some more. We want reconciliation and without reconciliation peace and security will not come. So how can we demand reconciliation on one hand and transitional justice on the other? There are violators of human rights in the government and parliament, why they are not questioned for their deeds? I believe the people of Afghanistan must come together and solve their problems jointly. Q: What will be your mechanisms for peace and reconciliation? A: War is not the solution. Negotiation must continue between government and anti‐government forces, it will result into reconciliation. In view of the interests and the constitution of Afghanistan both the parties must reach an agreement. Q: Reconciliation with violators of human rights during past 30 years, is that what you mean? A: I favor the implementation of human rights but I am afraid that injustices may take place in the name of justice. Q: In the public opinion you are accused of human rights violations during your term as Minister of Defense in the government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and you should respond to public, what is your position? A: I have my party according to the laws of Afghanistan. My party has supported me to become a candidate. Secondly, we had a democratic and legal system in the past and I had defended a legal regime. Q: Some of the human rights violators are part of the current government. What will you do with them? 17 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/1b0bf0/

No 4, August 31, 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.

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PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/1b0bf0/