Number 5, September 17, 2009 A publication of Afghanistan watch

Fifth Note

You are reading the fifth edition of the Haqiqat/Truth biweekly newsletter. Like previous editions, it includes news from Afghan Media on four issues of transitional justice, reconciliation and negotiation with anti‐ Justice Is the government forces, elections transparency and corruption. At the end of magazine two interviews with Foundation of a Fair presidential candidates are also included. The important contents of fifth edition are as follows: and Lasting Peace

Transitional Justice:

In transitional justice section the news about discovery of mass grave in Bamyan and the statement of spokesman for Mr. Karzai’s Electoral Campaign Office are included in this edition as reflected in the media. No Peace Negotiation with anti‐government forces: Similar to transitional justice there were few news about without negotiation with anti‐government forces in the Afghan Media during past two weeks. There have been no significant developments in this regard. The emphasis of Social Trust some authorities in the government about negotiation

with anti‐government forces and International Peace day are the news published in Afghan media.

Election Transparency:

Election Transparency has once again been the burning issue of Afghan Media during past two

weeks. There have been concerns regarding the process of counting votes, announcement of resutls, evidences and complaints collected about fraud in election, statements by presidential candidates and assessment of electoral observers.

Corruption: The essential topics published in Afghan Media

during past two weeks about corruption were different and scattered. All the criticism about corruption has been subject to state institutions and existence of corruption in Herat and Sarepul municipalities and approval of Counter Corruption Charter are the most important news of this section.

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/be39b0/ 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 Warning: All Kinds of Violence Prohibited 8 The process of transitional justice is to be… 3 The Election Fraud and the Responsibility of… 8 Mass Grave Discovered In Bamiyan Province 3 Election Commission: 90 Percent of Frauds Can… 8 Negotiation with armed position Groups Six Presidential Candidates Demanded… 8 Hamid Elmi: Peace Negotiation Is the Top Priority 4 10 Percent of Results Announced The Probability… 8 Mujaddadi: More Than 8 Thousand… 4 ECC Demands Cooperation of Media Regarding… 8 Fourty Days Campaign for “One Day Peace” 4 Partial Results of Elections Doubts in the… 9 The Increasing Power of the Taliban and… 4 Dirty Games Behind the Curtain of August 20… 9 Weak Response of the AIHRC and Religious … 4 To the Independent Elections Commission… 9 Britain Feels More Comfortable with the Taliban 5 Announcement of Election Results will be… 9 America: Change in military strategy in… 5 IEC: Karzai’s Vicory is false 9 New war approach in Afghanistan 5 Corruption Elections Transparency Harsh Criticism of the Ministry of Rural 10 Election and Challenges Ahead 6 US Efforts to Bring Economic and Social 10 Dr. Abdullah: Elections Transparency Questionable 6 Widespread Corruption in Herat Municipality 10 Three Prominent Candidate Went On Televised… 6 Does the Afghan Economy under Mafia Control 10 Voters Registration Started in Nowzad District of… 6 Poor Learning from Free Market the Basic Reason 10 The Refugees: Deprived of Election? 7 Crisis of Confidence the Greatest Challenge in 11 Concerns About Inadequate Stations 7 The Need to Reflect on Widespread Corruption 11 Electoral Observers: Unable to Observe all… 7 Mike Mullen warned: the result of American 11 The Second Vice‐President of Karzai Is Fined 7 The ECC is the Last Hope for Integrity of the 11 Hoping For Tolerance from the “Enemy”: A Sign of… 7 The Saripul Residents Complain against Mayor 11 Fraud and Delinquency But within a Limit 7 Minister of transport and civil aviation in 12 The Russian and French Authorities Called… 7 Amateurish trade has caused poverty and 12 National Interest Must Not Be Bargained At Any… 8 Power Struggle in the IEC a threat to Afghan 12 Nuristan Votes Drowned In Water 8 Continuation of International Conferences on 12

Exclusive Topics Justice Is the Foundation of a Fair and Lasting Peace 13 No Peace without Social Trust 16

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No 5, September 17, 2009

Transitional Justice

Karzai Electoral Campaign Team Spokesperson: The process of transitional justice is to be implemented and individuals other than Dostum will also be included

Mandegar Daily, No 120, Page 1, August 31, 2009 Karzai electoral campaign team Spokesperson, Wahid Omar said that the re‐exile of Dostum is a case of transitional justice. He added that it is not a political issue rather a legal one. While talking in the ‘Election Program” of the Tolo private TV channel, Wahid Omar said: we are very keen to implement transitional justice process.” He said the process is not about Dosum only and other individuals will also be included.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Mass Grave Discovered In Bamiyan Province

Afghanistan Daily, Page 8, Wednesday, Sep 2, 2009 A mass grave has been discovered in Afghanistan’s central province of Bamiyan. According to local residents the mass grave belongs to Taliban period. Sayed Asghar a worker who was digging the basement OF his house faced with mass graves. He said to Pazhwok news agency said after he found seven bodies while digging the basement of his house he reported the issue to the provincial police headquarters. To preserve the bodies they have buried them; but a number of skulls, bones, shoes and clothes are still seen and the clothes show that all of them were men. Amir Mohammad another worker in the area said: the accumulation of soil in this place shows that there might be more bodies buried in grave. Bamyan Governor Dr Habibeh Sarabi said to Pazhwok News Agency that a delegation is appointed to take necessary measures regarding this mass grave.

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No 5, September 17, 2009

Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups

Hamid Elmi: Peace Negotiation Is the Top Priority

Afghanistan Daily, No 880, Page 1, August 26, 2009 Hamid Elmi, deputy spokesperson of President Hamid Karzai says that after winning the election, Karzai will immediately contact with president Zardari to start the process of negotiation with Taliban. Fauzia Wahab, spokesperson for the ruling Pakistan People’s Party welcomed the proposition by president and said: “cooperation between the two countries is in the interest of both countries so that they can combat the threats of terrorism.”

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Mujaddadi: More Than 8 Thousand Anti‐Government Forces Have Joined the Peace Process ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan Daily, No 880, Page 1, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 The Increasing Power of the Taliban and Opposition Professor Sibghatullah Mujaddadi, the Chairperson of the Mishrano Jirga met with Dr. Gorgen Todon a former member of Hushdar Weekly, No 10, Page 6, Wednesday August 26, 2009 Germany’s Parliament and the writer of the book ‘Introducing The citizens of the country criticize the government because of Islam to West’. its focus on issues inferior to the national interests. The According to reports by press office of the National Assembly to optimism about the presence of international community and Bakhtar News Agency, Gorgeon inquired about the operations particularly the United States has also decreased. It is actually a of foreign forces, elections, getting Afghanistan out of the natural phenomenon. During past seven years the government current situation and negotiation with anti‐government forces. of Afghanistan has had no particular program or plans to fight Taliban. Sometimes they are the so‐called brothers of The head of Mishranno Jirga said that the election process was government, some times the Taliban are called enemies and successful for the people of Afghanistan to elect their some times the government has proposed them the process of president. negotiation from a weak position. The attention of government He also added that 8 thousand anti‐government forces have is focused on issues which are inferior to the national interest joined peace process and are living normal lives in and this has caused many other groups to join the rank of Afghanistan. Taliban and strengthen them.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Fourty Days Campaign for “One Day Peace” Weak Response of the AIHRC and Religious Scholars

against to Taliban Atrocities Nukhost Daily, No 139, Page 1, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 The objectives to be achieved through one day peace are to Bakhtar Weekly, No 82, Page 1, Sep 6, 2009 promote peace and demonstrate how a single day of life is in a Unfortunately some of the religious scholars due to fears and peaceful environment. Another aim of the United Nations from others because of other questionable reasons are refraining the campaign is to provide children with vaccination in those from taking a clear position against the Taliban and their areas which are under the control of Taliban or the partially inhumane acts. insecure and remote areas that are deprived of healthcare. Experts believe that Ullema (religious scholars) are silent on the Despite all efforts to ensure a day of peace, the Taliban in the bases of two factors. First, their comments might provoke last three years refused to respect peace and continued their serious threats by Taliban as it will put its impact on the social attacks on state and foreign targets. bases of Taliban and they will easily be assassinated as they do One of the methods we can use to achieve a partial peace in the not see any support behind them. Therefore they do not dare country is to promote a spirit of peace amongst religious scholars stand against Taliban. However the other reason which and encourage them to preach them to preach for peace. complicates the issue is different viewpoints amongst ulema 4 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009 about suicide attacks, jihad, presence of foreigners, democracy Mike Mullen Joint Chiefs of Staff Armed Forces of America and and likewise. It is said that some of the ulema favors the Taliban the findings of military CEO, General Stanley Mac crystal in violence because they attack non‐Muslims and they believe if Afghanistan as the security situation of Afghanistan is the resistance forces like Taliban do not exist, the Westerners deteriorating everyday. What has occupied the Afghan minds will not take the Muslims seriously. how effective the new US strategy is going to be in Afghanistan? Undoubtedly, if the Taliban were considered as a real political ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Britain Feels More Comfortable with the Taliban force and negotiated with on their possible role in power structure the security situation would not have been Bakhtar Weekly, No 82, Page 2, September 6, 2009 Writer: Sadiq deteriorated and there was no need of new strategy as proposed by Mc. Crystal. The British troops in Helmand have neither done any thing serious to fight the Taliban nor taken any step to fight drugs in the province. Though there are 9 thousand British troops in the province, the situation is deteriorating every day and no one in the province believes the British have to the province to fight the Taliban. Following the deployment of British troops in Helmand, the Taliban slowly arrived there and until today have taken control of most parts of the province. In this regard, Musharaf pursued policies of cooperation with the Taliban which deteriorated security situation on both sides of the border. Nobody in Afghanistan believes that the British follows policies similar to those of Musharraf. If Britain find themselves in cooperation with the Taliban particularly with their second level and moderate commanders and does not show enthusiasm in supporting the army and police of Afghanistan in this troubled province how can the people of Afghanistan believe that they are there to fight the insurgents.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ America: Change in military strategy in Afghanistan

Afghanistan Daily, No 887, Page 4, Sep 3, 2009 Writer: Muhammad Amin Mirzad General Mc. Crystal, high ranking US military commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan has called for a review and change of the US military strategy Afghanistan. General Mc. Crystal says that safety of civilians against the Taliban should be the top priority because the report suggests that the people of Afghanistan live in a critical situation with no satisfaction and war against Taliban have brought no improvement in their everyday lives. Given his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, it appears that US political and military experts are trying to adapt the best strategy to encounter Taliban. This military commander has emphasized on the importance of keeping control on the villages freed from Taliban and adds that if the problem of employment is solved for the forces affiliated with Taliban 60 percent of problems in combating Taliban will be solved.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ New war approach in Afghanistan

Sorosh Millat, No 162, Page 2, Sep 3, 2009 The US military officials and White House are struggling to make new strategies for the war in Afghanistan based on the report of 5 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009 Elections Transparency

Election and Challenges Ahead

Cheragh Daily, No 1374, Page 1, August 17, 2009 It is reported the Taliban leadership council led by Mullah Omar has ordered its followers to block the roads leading to voting polls and cut those fingers dipped in ink on the day of election. In the meantime the bloody attack by Taliban yesterday in Kabul shocked all the people and falsified the promises security forces had made about security measures on the day of election and increased the security concerns amongst people. Taliban also warned people to boycott this week’s presidential elections and said they would themselves be responsible if they did not heed the warning. The threats and warnings by Taliban have intensified at a time when the commander of US forces in Afghanistan expressed concerns over civilian casualties. A reported published by the antiwar website stated that the war in Afghanistan has no victory for the west and the Taliban are emerging as victorious. Cutting the finger of voters by Taliban on one hand hurts physically the voters and on the other hand puts in doubt the transparency of elections. If the election commission does not dip into ink the finger of voters in those areas where security threats are high then one person can vote multiple times. It is a key points discussed by the candidates included free market big problem and a solution should be thought for it. economy, women, youth, combating terrorism, security, negotiation with Taliban, corruption and civilian casualty. .Candidates had almost same viewpoints with little differences ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Dr. Abdullah: Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai said that all states officials should Elections Transparency Questionable register their properties. Karzai said that state officials including Mandegar Daily, No 113, Page 1, August 17, 2009 candidates should register their properties. Ramazan Dr. Abdullah, a presidential candidate expressed his concerns Bashardost said that besides registering the properties about the election transparency and said that the integrity of candidates should declare their sources too. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ the process is in doubt. He criticized the process of registration by Independent Election Commission (IEC) and added there are doubts about the independency and impartiality of members of Voters Registration Started in Nowzad District of Helmand Province the IEC. Bakhtar Daily, No 77, Page 7, August 17, 2009 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Three Prominent Candidates The authorities in south say that Nowzad district in Helmand province is out of the control of Taliban now and the district Went On Televised Debate authorities along with Independent Election Commission Bakhtar Daily, No 77, Page 3, August 17, 2009 employees have started their activities in the region. Writer: Bahram Azari Abdul Sattar Mirzakwal Deputy of Helmand governor said The televised debate which people were reluctantly waiting for Nowzad was controlled by the Taliban for the past three years was finally aired on 15th August 2005. However Dr. Abdullah and was recently brought under government control as a result who claims to be in a leading position than other candidates of police and army operations supported by NATO forces. He particularly in relations to Hamid Karzai declined to participate. said distribution of voter cards by IEC is underway in the district Dr. Ramazan Bashardost, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani and will last for three days. Earlier the authorities in Ahmadzai were the three participants of the televised debate. Independent Election Commission had said that as soon as The debate which took place in the hall of the RTA was security is established in the area they will start registration and broadcasted live by state‐run television and Radio Liberty. The election will also be organized in the region. 6 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009 The Refugees: However 120 members of the mission will observe the polling Deprived of Election? stations in Kabul and some provinces and predict other polling stations on the bases of reports they collect from the provinces Rahe Najat Daily, No 1241, Saturday August 15, 2009 under supervision. Lack of budget is said to be the important reason for not ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ conducting the elections in two countries of Pakistan and Iran which host largest numbers of Afghan refugees. At first The Second Vice‐President of Karzai Is Fined appearance, it appears a justifiable reason but one can critique Cheragh Daily, No 145, Page 1, Wednesday, August 12, 2009 the decision after a short reflection The ECC has fined Mr. Karim Khalili, the second Vice‐President At first we must not neglect a great number of voters in these of Karzai. The Electoral Complaints Commission says that Mr. countries. This act will mean that we have ignored the right of a Khalili exploited public resources in election programs. great number of our people to decide for the destiny of their Moreover, the ECC has also fined some other candidates and country and it is not acceptable in any case and with any their vice‐presidents. reason. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ In other words this justification is not logical and shows inefficiency of state officials to prepare necessary ground for Hoping For Tolerance from the “Enemy”: acceptable elections after eight years. A Sign of Weakness or Good Faith

If we suppose the lack of budget to be true, how can we accept 8am Daily, No 659, Page 1, August 17, 2009 that some millions of voters are ignored and deprived of their It is said that the Taliban following their warnings have collected rights to vote? If these people were inside and the costs were voting cards of people in the south. Taliban has said that they lower, how could the state facilitate their participation in the will put on fire these cards, but there are concerns that these elections? cards are used for the interest of some particular candidates. Two months earlier, national and international forces had said ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Concerns About Inadequate Stations they will take the control of all areas from Taliban until the day of election, but ten districts still remain under the control of Nukhost Daily, No 132, Page 1, Saturday August 15, 2009 Taliban. There have been complaints about the long distances of polling ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ stations where many of the voters may not reach. In the insecure areas where the security threats are high people may Fraud and Delinquency But within a Limit not participate in the election as they fear attacks by the 8am Daily, No 662, Editorial, Monday August 24, 2009 insurgents. On the other hand in mountainous regions of Afghanistan where transportation means are poor, people may The people of Afghanistan are ready to accept the result of not walk long distances to the polling stations which are hours elections as they showed their willingness with participating in away from their villages. the elections. But the activities of responsible organizations must be transparent and free to show that people is more Some of the members of parliament have expressed their important for them than any candidate. concerns regarding lack of adequate polling stations and they complain that many of the residents might be deprived of The basic point is not this that who wins or loses. But the voting due to this problem. The representatives of Kundoz and important point is that how a candidate loses or wins. Elections Bamyan have said that there are not sufficient polling stations should help entrench in people’s consciousness this idea that in these provinces. However the Independent Election one can succeed through democratic means. Otherwise, Commission says that distances are considered between polling whoever wins nothing will change as the people their faith are stations and people can participate in these stations. more important. The people that have no trust will never be the backbone of a government. It is clear that no government can .long without public support ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Electoral Observers: ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Unable to Observe all the Polling Stations The Russian and French Authorities Called the Nukhost Daily, No 132, Page 6, Saturday August 15, 2009 Process of Election Successful Writer: Sahar The Independent Election Commission has said that more than 8am Daily, No 662, Page 3, Monday August 24, 2009 200 thousand local and international observers will observe the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Pierre Lellouche, process of elections in Afghanistan. The European Commission Frances special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan described as has taken the responsibility of observing the process of election successful the process of presidential and provincial council’s and will send their delegations to the capital and provinces to election on August 20, 2009. Pierre Lellouche also informed of observe the process. The European Union Election Observation the support of his country with the people of Afghanistan in Mission said that they will not observe all the polling stations. different sectors. 7 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009 Also Mr. Lavrov said that the cooperation between Moscow and in election of Afghanistan is the responsibility of United Nations the new government of Afghanistan will remain intact and they and its offices in Afghanistan. If the results of elections with will increase cooperation in some areas with the new massive are approved by the United Nations, the impartiality of government. Earlier some other politicians of international this organization will be put in doubt regarding Afghanistan. The community had called the process of elections in Afghanistan United Nations has a prominent role in the leadership of successful amid security threats by insurgents. Afghanistan and therefore it does have a part and responsibility in the election frauds. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ National Interest Must Not Be Bargained At Any Cost Election Commission: 90 Percent of Frauds Can Be Prevented Nukhost Daily, No 140, Page 4, August 27, 2009 Afghanistan Daily, No 880, Page 1, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 The election might go to the second round and the legitimacy of the process might be put in doubt. The important concern is The Independent Election Commission says it uses advanced about possible protest by defeated candidates that might computer programmes and tools that are advanced than those deteriorate the situation of the country at a time when it is bad used in elections of 2004 and only 10% of fraud may not be and sacrifice the national interest for their short‐term traced by their computers. They are confident that the new objectives. method of counting and advanced computer will prevent 90% of fraud. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Nuristan Votes Drowned In Water  Six Presidential Candidates Demanded 8am Daily, No 665, Page 2, Thursday, August 27, 2009 Investigations into Frauds Abdul Malik Sulaimanzai, Head of Independent Election Commission in eastern provinces of the country said to Afghanistan Daily, No 880, Page 1, August 26, 2009 reporters that the ballot boxes of a container hanging from a In a joint press conference, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, Mirwais helicopter, carrying the votes of Nuristan residents, fell into Yasini, Mo’tasim Billah Mazhabi, Sayed Jalal Karim Nabigha, water due to a hole made in the container. He said a small Bismillah Sher and Dr. Frozan Fana the presidential candidates number of ballot‐boxes were transferred to Nangarhar claimed there were frauds in the elections and demanded province. However Jamaluddin Badr, Nuristan governor said to investigations of the complaints by the Electoral Complaints Pazhwok News Agency that the container had fallen off the Commission and national and international observers. helicopter in a mountainous region of Waman and Paroon and ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ were destroyed. He added two days earlier, the Taliban  captured ballot‐boxes from two polling stations in Waman 10 Percent of Results Announced

district and threw them into a river. Nukhost Daily, No 139, Page 1, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 The Probability of Second Round Increased ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The Independent Election Commission declared 10 percent of Warning: All Kinds of Violence Prohibited

the vote results. Dawood Ali Najafi, Head of the IEC Secretariat 8am Daily, No 665, Page 4, Thursday August 27, 2009 while reading the results said, Hamid Karzai with 212927 votes Writer: Hamid Roshan and Dr. Abdullah with 202889 votes are in the first and second It seems that the candidates have complains about the existence of positions respectively. Ramazan Bashardost is in third position fraud and rigging in the election. It is better that the complaints are with 53740 votes and Ashraf Ghani is in fourth with 15143 pursued legally. The transparency of assessment and impartiality votes. Considering a close difference between the votes of by the related organizations of elections might strengthen trust Karzai and Abdullah some of the experts believe that election amongst the candidates and their supporters and reduce excuses might go to second round although there have been many for organizing violent demonstrations. frauds and delinquencies on the day of election. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ But if the results of assessment of complaint do not be satisfactory for the people and the legal institutions also do not ECC Demands Cooperation of Media Regarding observe impartiality talks of peace and security will seem artificial. Election Fraud Nukhost Daily, No 139, Page 8, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 The Electoral Complaints Commission asked all the national and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The Election Fraud international media to provide them with documented and the Responsibility of United Nations information regarding fraud in the presidential and provincial 8am Daily, No 665, Page 5, Thursday, August 27, 2009 council elections. Writer: Muhammad Hashim Qiyam Fahim Hakim a member of this Commission on Tuesday said: One of the issues that can be discussed in relation to the fraud “the commission is ready to review the complaints of election 8 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009 day provided by the media.” assessment and investigation of all the complaints.” He added: “In some occasions the media has broadcasted In the meantime we demand the IEC to assess all the complaints reliable documents regarding fraud in the elections and we before it declares the election results and stop illegal want them to provide us those documents as soon as possible. announcement of results. It helps the process of election transparency and proves the (Dr. Abdullah Campaigning Team) fraud in elections.” ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Announcement of Election Partial Results of Elections Results will be Postponed Doubts in the Transparency of Elections Mandegar Daily, No 121, Page 1, Sunday August 30, 2009 Iqtidar Milli Weekly, No 327, Page 8, August 29, 2009 An informed source that did not wish to reveal his name has The second partial election results show that Karzai and said to Mandegar Daily that discussions are going on to delay Abdullah are still leading. Comparing to the first declared vote announcement of results of election. The source also noted that results (17% of total) Karzai’s percentage has increased. the IEC and ECC have conflicting opinions regarding the Yesterday Karzai was leading with two percent from Abdullah counting votes. with two hundred and twelve thousand votes against Abdullah’s In the meantime the election commission has so far declared two hundred and two thousand votes. The election results about 35% of primary results of votes, which is called illegal by announced on Wednesday showed that the gape between both some candidates and electoral foundations. has increased to 10% as Karzai has received four hundred and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ twenty thousand votes against Abdullah who received three hundred and thirty thousand votes. IEC: This partial result includes the votes from thirty provinces which Karzai’s Vicory is false is a particular percentage; however the votes from some largely Cheragh Daily, No 1378, Page 1, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 inhabited pro‐ Abdullah provinces are still remaining undeclared. Head of Independent Election Commission (IEC) rejected the rumors about Karzai’s victory with 68% of votes in the Some of the candidates like Ramazan Bashardost called the presidential election. partial announcement of votes against constitution and said it was better that the votes were counted separately in each Azizullah Lodin, Head of IEC in an interview with Radio Voice of province and then declared. But arrangement and engineering America about the rumors spread by Umar Zakhilwal, Finance of votes from every province increases the doubts about the Minister of Afghanistan that Karzai has won the election with transparency of elections. 68% said: “IEC is the only organization that can declare the result of election.” He said: “I can not confirm or reject the news about the victory of Hamid Karzai, because it is early and the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Dirty Games Behind results from some of the provinces are remaining to be the Curtain of August 20 Election counted.”

Nukhost Daily, No 141, Page 1, Saturday, August 29, 2009 The international media published news about the volatile meeting of Hamid Karzai and Richard Holbrooke, the United States Special Envoy to Afghanistan. Based on this information, the meeting became volatile when Holbrooke expressed US concerns about the fraud in election and stuffing of ballot boxes by Karzai’s campaigning team. Holbrooke suggested that to gain trust in public opinion election should go to second round. However Karzai reacted with anger and the meeting ended before appointed time.

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Mandegar Daily, No 120, Page 1, Saturday, August 29, 2009 The election commission is neglecting the provision (4) of Article 49 of Constitution by declaring the election results before full investigation of all complaints. The article says: “the commission is obliged to declare the result of elections after the 9 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009

Corruption last goal includes the traffickers and dealers of narcotics not the Afghan farmers cultivating narcotics.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Widespread Corruption in Herat Municipality

8am Daily, No 665, Page 2, Thursday August 27, 2009 During a press conference yesterday, Muhammad Salim Taraki, the new acting mayor of Herat said: “Corruption is widespread in Herat municipality.” Mr. Taraki is appointed lately as new Head of Herat municipality. According to Roz News Agency, Muhammad Rafiq Mujaddadi, the former Herat Mayor was sentenced to five years imprisonment and fined a sum of US$90 thousand for misusing his official authorities and misappropriation by Attorney General of country. The Acting Mayor of Herat added many official in different departments of the municipality misuse their authorities which created concerns for the Herat residents. Harsh Criticism of the Ministry of Rural He says that he has prepared his action plan in three sections Rehabilitation and Development by MPs which, if implemented, corruption will be eradicated from Herat municipality. Nukhost Daily, No 140, Page 8, Thursday August 27, 2009 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ On Wednesday Ehsan Zia, Minister of Rural Rehabilitation and Development was confronted with strong criticism by MPs. He Does the Afghan Economy under Mafia Control was criticized for not implementing the development projects of Afghanistan Daily, No 880, Page 5, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 the ministry. The representatives of people in their general Writer: Shukrullah Seerat/ Second Part session accused him of negligence regarding implementation of projects in the provinces. Mafia established close relationship with the corrupt local officials; it makes them act openly and easily. They accused him of deceiving people and said: “in some cases they (MRRD) have dug wells which did not have water and to This results from expansion and growing power of bureaucratic deceive people they filled them up with water during nighttime structures and institutions. The existence of this condition is the with water tankers. The wells dried after the projects budgets base or ground for state‐corruption. In such situations bribery, were finalized.” land‐grabbing and other activities become widespread and these practices appear as norms and unwritten laws. With the Sardar Muhammad Rahman Oghly, the representative of Faryab existence of corruption it is mafia who take the most of in the House of Representatives accused the authorities in this benefits. They can easily remove or appoint state officials and ministry of looting the entire budget allocated for the appoint their personals in important public posts. In this way development projects. they take the control of production and export of products and production and illegal trade are the important goals they try to ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ bring under their control. US Efforts to Bring Economic and Social ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Development Together with Military Operations

Nukhost Daily, No 140, Page 7, Thursday August 27, 2009 Poor Learning from Free Market the Basic Reason behind the Increase in Market Prices Holbrooke, leading these efforts say: I should admit that the US military support for Afghanistan will finish one day but non‐ Afghanistan Daily, No 884, Page 5, August 30, 2009 military support by Americans to Afghanistan will last longer. Writer: Shukrullah Seerat We are considering to the new government and we will support There have been major complaints against the increase of prices it because it is part of our non‐military efforts in Afghanistan.” with the start of Ramadan in Kabul and other cities and villages. The political goals of this program are to establish an According to the statistics the prices of food items have raised agricultural system in Afghanistan, establishing the legal from 5 to 20 %. In addition to the food materials there has been infrastructures, discussion and debate on corruption and focus increase in the prices of other materials in recent days. on efforts to reduce narcotics. It is worth mentioning that the Now the 20% increase in the prices of primary items has 10 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009

confronted the people of Afghanistan with great difficulty. Poor indulged in corruption during past seven years. This has on one economy, lack of security and corruption has been the three hand allowed mafia groups to infiltrate the government and on building factors of evil circles that Afghans have suffered from the other hand prevent the government from fulfilling its since long time. mandate of ensuring security and addressing the needs of the citizens. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ We can also say that during the past seven years, this corrupt Crisis of Confidence the Greatest government has utilized all its energy and time in the wrong Challenge in Afghanistan direction. Therefore today we are beginning to feel increasing Afghanistan Daily, No 884, Page 5, August 30, 2009 despair and frustration among the citizens towards their future. Writer: Raza Azad Manish Lack of hope among people toward their future, employment Corruption: and security has pushed large sections of the population to turn Corruption which includes misappropriation, embezzlement, their back to the government or even join the ranks of enemies bribery and abuse of official position, favoritism and violation of and terrorists. effective laws of the country is the fundamental cause of the It seems that Taliban feel free in every part of the country, in crisis of confidence in the society. contrast to governmental authorities feeling insecure in all The International Transparency Organization an organization corners. It is because of this that insecurity has spread in recent that has followed the growing corruption in Afghanistan has months to areas that were previously peaceful. called Afghanistan the fifth most corrupt country of the world. In view of these factors, we can claim deterioration of the This unholy phenomenon has caused lack of trust from two security results from the wrong policies of the USA and the angles: corruption in Afghan government. Peace and stability can only First, in other countries when there exist corruption it reduces be improved if the USA corrects its systematic mistakes in the by the passage of time and the hand of criminals and corrupt fight against terrorism and the government of Afghanistan does officials are handcuffed with law but in our country state not sacrifice the nation for their group and ethnic interests and corruption increase everyday and as the age of government gets gets itself rid of corruption in the next five years. older the corruption also increases. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Secondly, Afghanistan has formed a number of anti‐corruption The ECC is the Last Hope for Integrity of the System departments such as the Central Control and Audit Office, the Anti‐Corruption and Bribery Department, the board appointed Hushdar Weekly, No 10, Page 1, Tuesday August 26, 2009 by the president and etc. None of these agencies have so far The Electoral Complaints Commission has informed that since proved to be effective perhaps because they are also involved in election day they have received and registered 125 electoral this business. Naturally, if the current situation continues, public complaints. From the complaints received almost all of them confidence in corrupt institutions will also disappear. are serious but 35 items can affect the final result of elections. Grant Kippen Head of ECC on Sunday in a news conference said ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  the body has the power to address the complaints. According to The Need to Reflect on Widespread Corruption him, if required the commission can nullify, order recount of Afghanistan Daily, No 882, Page 5, August 29, 2009 votes from suspicious polling stations or demand fresh elections Writer: Shukrullah Seerat in suspected regions. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The factor behind corruption in Afghanistan is a little different than other war torn countries. This difference lies in cultivation  and traffic of narcotics. Narcotics comprise a major part of The Saripul Residents Complain against Mayor

Afghanistan’s small economy. According to economists 58 8am Daily, No 667, Sunday August 30, 2009 percent of Afghanistan’s economy includes narcotics trade and trafficking and this leads to mafiazation of our economy. The residents of the Saripul province have accused the provincial municipality of taking bribes. Shopkeepers in the The increase in production of narcotics in Afghanistan is of province claim the municipal official have locked 50 shops major blocks in the way of security in Afghanistan because the without proper reasons. In the meantime Kamaluddin, the income from trafficking narcotics is a major source of funding of mayor of the province said that the shops were government insurgents and Al Qaeda. property and distributed among people illegally by Ghaffar Khan .a commander of General Abdul Rashid Dostum ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Mike Mullen warned: It is said that a large part of public property is distributed the result of American wrong policies a corruption illegally for the people in the Saripul province by the government in Afghanistan commanders of General Dostum. Right now the government is struggling to reclaim the lands occupied illegally by the people. Hushdar Weekly, No 10, Page 1, Wednesday August 26, 2009 Kamaluddin the district mayor of Saripul province said they are Afghanistan is a country run by a government that is widely taking back a hundred shops distributed illegally for the people. 11 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009 Minister of transport and civil aviation in Parliament: Afghanistan is a threat that can affect the results of presidential There is no corruption in the ministry elections of Afghanistan. There are discussions amongst the MPs: officials regarding how many votes should be declared as Millions of dollars misappropriated every year by invalid. Head of IEC who is appointed by President Karzai puts pressures on its personnel the personnel to include and count illegal air‐companies all the votes regardless of the evidence of massive fraud and Mandegar Daily, No 125, Page 7, Sep 3, 2009 rigging. Many of the fraud allegations are made against Mr. Hamidullah Farooqi Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation says Karzai. there is no corruption in this ministry and corruption exists out ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ of his authority. Continuation of International Conferences Mr. Farooqi added: 250 flights take place everyday at Kabul on Afghanistan airport, which is against the international norms and standards. According to him if the situation remains as such, the Kabul Nukhost Daily, No 148, Page 1, Sep 6, 2009 International Airport will be out of use after three years. The United Nations has announced that the early arrangements The MPs in the parliament believe there are several foreign air‐ for a grand conference of international donors to Afghanistan companies using Kabul International Airport for the past seven are being undertaken. The event is scheduled to take place in years and they do not pay any tax to government of Afghanistan. If Kabul in spring next year after elections results are announced. these foreign private air companies become legal the government It appears the most important question coming up in the of Afghanistan will receive millions of dollars as tax every year. conference is why billions of international assistance has failed During past seven years millions of dollars are spent on to bring tangible changes governance and development in reconstruction of airports in the country but still none of them Afghanistan. However Kai Eide, UN’s special representative has meet the international standard. More than 15 provinces in said that the aids to Afghanistan have been wasted due to lack Afghanistan have airports and many of them are constructed of coordination amongst donor countries. with gravel and cement that can not bear the big airplanes. Lack The international conference for renewal of international of urban cars, density of population, high fares and traffic commitment for reconstruction and development of dumps are serious challenges faced by citizens in Kabul. Afghanistan is planned to take place in Kabul at a time when complaints that billions of international aid are being wasted ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  because of widespread corruption in the Afghan government Professor of Economics at Kabul University: and implementing agencies are increasing. Amateurish trade has caused The international community claim that they can not provide poverty and joblessness the aid to Afghan government because the governmental Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1259, Page 5, Sep 8, 2009. organizations lack capacity and can not implement the projects A Professor of Economics at Kabul University believes that three effectively; on the other hand the government of Afghanistan decades of instability and crises have pushed our traders into claim that aids spent through government of Afghanistan will be unprofessional trade and profit seeking which has increased more effective and less costly as compared to national and poverty and immigration. international NGOs. Taj Muhammad Akbar in an exclusive interview with Rahe Nejat The government of Afghanistan during past three years has not emphasized that unsound business and trade is going on in been able to spend more than 50 percent of its development Afghanistan since long ago and during last years many of traders budget which show their weakness in this regard. However they have started unprofessional trade to earn profits causing poverty, blame complex bureaucracies of donor countries but the joblessness, immigration and immoral activities in the country. international community says the government of Afghanistan still lacks the capacity to spend its development budget. Professor of Economics at Kabul University said: “in current situation profit seeking has brought serious challenges in the It is also reported that most of the budget spent by country and it is obvious for every one that some of the people government Afghanistan are wasted on buying luxurious cars with nothing in hand have earned much through corruption and and organizing costly seminars and ineffective projects. embezzlement. These people make the situation bitter for the people by increasing the rates to gain profits. He called this unprofessional trade not useful.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Power Struggle in the IEC a threat to Afghan Presidential Elections Mandegar Daily, No 128, Page 1, Sep 7, 2009 Power struggle inside the Independent Election Commission of 12 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/be39b0/ No 5, September 17, 2009 Justice Is the Foundation of a Fair and Lasting Peace

Interview with Habib Mangal Presidential candidate of the Inclusive Democracy and Progress Party of Afghanistan Date : August 15, 2009 – Place: Kabul © Afghanistan Watch By Ali Payam

Election Transparency: jobless today and are working in streets and bazaars. Instead of them there are some officials who are taking several times Q. Will election be transparent, free and fair? greater salary; in dollars and Afghani or have come in the name A. Unfortunately the last three months of campaign has proved of advisors from foreign countries. it. The transparency and free and fairness was in doubt since Q. Are these people you named included in the process of the beginning and were extensively violated. Freedom, some administrative reforms and civil services?Have the people you have undermined it by importing millions of dollars from mentioned gone through the administrative reform process? unknown sources. Fairness for some the government officials A. Some of the officials are hired after they have gone through campaigned. Ministers, governors and district mayors have examinations. But many others are appointed through been in the service of some candidates. Airplanes and security favoritism and connections. measures were at the disposal of some of the nominees. For some other candidates there is not even one helicopter to carry Negotiation with Taliban: him for campaigns in the provinces. I should have been to three Q. Some of the presidential candidates have said that they will provinces but as there was no helicopter so I could not go. open the door of negotiation and reconciliation with Taliban There is the probability of fraud during the votes counting. and Hezb‐e Islami. What are your programs in this regard if Hence election cannot be trusted as democracy and the young you win the elections? democracy of Afghanistan is badly affected. A. Some of those who raise these voices have no interest in Corruption: negotiation with Taliban; what they say these days is just for Q. What is the real cause of state‐corruption? campaign and nothing more than that. During past several years they have several times called upon Taliban but did not have A. The main cause is system and its composition. The power is any result. I favor talks with Taliban within the framework of in the hand of some robbers. The fish turns rotten from head. In Islamic, national and civil values and constitution of the country a department if there is a talented, clean and loyal minister and democracy. there is no corruption. In a place where its officials are trying to rob the public property there is corruption. Then corruption Q. Some of the Taliban are accused of human rights violation spread from government structure, forces and the corrupt during their Imarat Isalami. Are they also included in the officials. reconciliation? Q. What are your plans to eradicate corruption after victory? A. Justice cannot be sacrificed in the name of peace and reconciliation. A. I will hire clean officials who are patriot and committed to constitution, rule of law and social justice. There are thousands Transitional Justice: of as such officials in the country, who have no opportunity to Q. What is your definition of transitional justice? work in the departments. If I appoint those persons who fight with corruption and are not corrupt but are patriot and The transitional justice is related to the crimes and violations progressive we can have a sound and healthy system. that took place during past regimes and the people of Afghanistan have the right to judge the past. Those who Q. Where do you find these clean and virtuous officials in committed crimes in the past should be tried in a just and Afghanistan? impartial court. A. Some of this officials, professionals and experts who are Q. What is your program about transitional justice after educated outside and inside the country and many of them are victory? What measures and mechanism will you take? 13|Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/be39b0/ No 5, September 17, 2009 A. I will act keeping in view the political stability, peace and Q. What is your opinion about the National Amnesty Charter of normalization of the political situation. I will act according to parliament in relation to transitional justice? Is this not against standards of the UN and human rights principles. the Action Plan? The action plan of government of Afghanistan says that the A. We must separate today from Our country is in a process should have been implemented by March 2009. The yesterday and think of future. We critical situation and it is date has expired. What is your opinion? must think that the holocausts, violation of human rights, wars, in the interest of our Steps should have been taken in this regard. I believe the sorrows and the animosities are situation developed in a way that the government of country that Afghans sit not repeated again tomorrow. If Afghanistan was unable to finalize the process for justifiable together and put aside we are to assess the previous reasons or not. deeds we cannot reach a solution. all ideological, political Q. What is your program in this regard? In this regard we must accuse and other differences great sections of the society in A. If I win I will take measures in this regard keeping in view the and think to save their security and political situation of the country. some waus. I believe the previous crimes should not be repeated in country. Q. What is your definition of Peace and Reconciliation? the future and the political elites A. At first, reconciliation takes place between the fighting and the people of Afghanistan must preserve their national parties, particularly at that time when both the parties solidarity. In this regard we must to some extent show understand that they can not be victorious on the other. tolerance, forgiveness and patience. Secondly, reconciliation takes place for the sake of national interest. Just like now that our country is in a critical situation Q. The problem is this that the victims of war claim of their and it is in the interest of our country that Afghans sit together rights and no one can forgive the rights. What is your opinion? and put aside all ideological, political and other differences and A. It is true. Eventually, only the victims can decide to forgive think to save their country. In such a situation we can reach a the violators of human rights after they are investigated and just peace. found guilty in a just court. Q. How do you see the relationship between peace and justice Q. The current is facing problems because it includes violators and what is your definition of peace and justice? of human rights. What will you do to remove perpetrators of A. They are dependent on each other. There is no peace human rights violations after your victory? without justice and there is not justice without peace. Justice is A. There will be no place for criminals and violators of human the foundation of just and lasting peace. In the meantime rights in my government. justice can be implemented when the situation is normal and Q. In that case your government will face problems. If you peaceful and not in a violent situation when armed people are remove them they might stand against you or join the rank of fighting with each other. anti‐government forces? Q. During past three decades there have been many human A. In that case Afghanistan has thousands of patriot and clean rights violations. How successful has Peace and Reconciliation hearted citizens who are not the violators of human rights and been to implement justice or lay the foundations of justice? are not accused of any crimes. They will be hired to serve A. In spite of great national and international opportunities, our people. Those who are accused of human rights violations last government has not been able to lay the foundations of should face trials. If not proved, there are many other ways to justice. Only punishment is not included in justice. Social justice live. They should trade or earn in some other ways. We have is most important of all. Social justice is nothing more than system, law and government. providing equal opportunities for all citizens. Socially, In reality those who stand against the government are in the economically and culturally, these equal opportunities have not wrong way and it is not lawful that they perpetrate. There are been created during the past seven years and a big gap is drawn opportunities stated in the constitution and it is not right that between poor and rich that has created the grounds for people stand against the government and fight to get the violence and discontentment of people. I believe the pillars of political power. justice generally is social justice, however implementation of justice and the rule of law are integral components of a Those who fight the government are actually fighting the committed state. people. Q. How successful has the Peace Commission of government Q. It looks you are advising and making a moral statement. been to implement justice? What are your practical solutions? A. I believe we have not yet taken any measure in this regard, A. It is not moral statement or advises rather it is a political particularly when parliament has declared the National approach. Those who could not and can not serve the people Amnesty Charter and has created problem in implementing the have no place in the government. The government and the process of transitional justice. system should be controlled by some patriots, those who really 14 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 5, September 17, 2009No 5, September 17, 2009 serve the people and are not criminals or violators. It is unusual all over the world that to control a country some people get on the mountain and get political bribes. Q. Which one of models for implementation of transitional justice in other countries do you propose for Afghanistan? A. I believe that copying models from foreign countries has not been successful in Afghanistan. It does not seem suitable in the field of ideology, politics, economy and transitional justice. We will do our work with respect to the condition of Afghanistan, particular situation of country and the demands of political and social process in this regard. Q. What will be your plan in particular to satisfy the victims and also implement the process of transitional justice so that your government does not confront any difficulty? A. I will act keeping in mind political stability and national unity. Q. Just like the Commission for Strengthening Peace of Mr. Karzai? A. No. Karzai has unfortunately not been successful in solving the problems of Afghanistan. We will work together and with the advice of national progressive forces, civil society and political and democrat intellectuals of the country. Q. What will be the program of your government in particular to implement transitional and do not face any challenges? A. Reconciliation and rule of law and consolidation of social justice principles Q. If the victims of war do not agree with reconciliation as an opinion poll from 6000 victims showed that more than 80% of them wanted the trial of war criminals and if they demand justice, what will be your response? A. I will pay attention to their demand. We will listen to them and together with them act while keeping in mind the high interest of the country. Q. Will you have the power to bring into justice the accused? A. The law is above all and more powerful than anyone.

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No 5, September 17, 2009No 5, September 17, 2009 No Peace without Social Trust

Interview with Mahboob Ullah Koshani Presidential Candidate 2009

Date: August 16, 2009 – Place: Kabul By Ali Payam © Afghanistan Watch

Transparency of Elections: interests. There are different factors behind corruption and the most important ones I believe are as follows: Q. Will the elections this year be free, fair and transparent? 1. The influence of moral authority into political authority. Jihad A. the Independent Election Commission is obliged to be an is a luminous period of political era. Those who have fought in impartial body throughout the process from voters registration the way of God during the period of Russian invasion, they have to counting of votes. But this commission is appointed by Hamid defended the independence, beliefs, freedom and culture. They Karzai the incumbent president and a running candidate. It has are respected by the people. It never means that we use jihad been acting as a tool to the Head of State and in the to take part in the political power. In the meantime the postponement of election it relied on government. Mujahedin also suffer from corruption. In Bon Conference the There are limitations for the commission. It has acknowledged leader of factions had role in replacing the authorities and state that it was unable to treat some candidates according to officials. In such a situation those who violate the law can not electoral standards and legal requirements. Exploitation of state be brought to justice by the others. offices police and vote counting can take place under the 2. There are illegal armed groups influence of state institutions. In addition, there is a climate of The main violators of that exercise power on the people terror and fear which is deliberately inflamed so that fewer in some ways and the state human rights should be people participate in the elections. This can be early steps for institutions have gone without brought into justice, first, stuffing ballot boxes. considering their demands. to prevent future crimes, There are huge spendings from unknown sources. Whether they Therefore those who are second to restore the are moneys accumulated during the years of war or supported by them enjoy embezzlement from public funds they can be used to buy votes impunity. honour of victims, third, to and lure influential figures. Armed illegal groups are also caress the victims and to 3. The other issue is economic present. All these put in doubt the freedom and fairness of create national solidarity. elections. There might be a question why you participated in mafia. We can not remove the election when there are great frauds and embezzlements? corruption until these factors However the president has We want to propose a plan and I want to convey my message to exist. As they say that the salary of said in one of his speeches state employees are is low, it is a the people from this opportunity. that talking about demagogy. To prevent corruption Q. What will you do if you are not successful in the elections? we must enforce the law. Law transitional justice is like A. Victory has a relative meaning. Those who only think of should be freed from personal wearing fashionable politics only will strike all sorts of deals and perpetrate treason. paws and they should allow the clothes. My only goal is to serve people. Power is a tool and a medium. I rule of law to be established. The participated in the elections to open a new window and to illegal armed forces should be disarmed. In reality, the power revive the self‐confidence among the people. must be monopolized by the state and salaries be increased to Corruption: the extent the allow the employees to live an honorable life. Q. What do you think is the most important factor behind Q. What is your program to eradicate corruption? corruption? A. First, a responsible and legitimate state on the basis of A. Corruption means misuse of power for personal or ethnic peoples’ votes should be established. It should feel its 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/be39b0/ No 5, September 15, 2009 responsibility and be accountable to the people. they raised the voice of justice for the first time. We owe to those mothers who lived in those environments of terror and Second, the military force should be under the control of the state. Money and property is also involved. Only the electoral suffocations. responsibility is not a proof. It is not enough to say we are In Afghanistan the 7 Saur cope happened two years after elected. It should be a working entity. A consultative democracy Argentina’s. In reality the violation of human rights occurred. should be established. Until today there have been human rights violations in large Those who are doing jobs at district levels must be given extents. These violations start with the three communist executive power. They know the problems of reconstruction regimes, the mujahedin factions and Imarat Islami of Taliban and rebuilding. They know better the planning and and are still going on in period of the current government. improvement of their areas than the capital. They should not Q. What are your programs to implement the process of have advisory role only. As it is proposed in the Constitution transitional justice after you win the elections? they should have advising role, they should have executive A. The main violators of human rights should be brought into roles. We must establish a government that starts from the justice, first, to prevent future crimes, second to restore the bottom and all the people are participants. Without the honour of victims, third, to caress the victims and to create participation of all none of the governments can work. national solidarity. However the president has said in one of his Negotiation with Taliban: speeches that talking about transitional justice is like wearing Q. Some of the presidential candidates have said they will fashionable clothes. In reality we are not to take revenge, but negotiate with Taliban and Hezbe Islami after they win reform. We want peace, security and stability. election. What is your opinion? There should be fact‐finding committees. Documents and A. Those that raise these voices are too optimistic. Taliban want evidences should be collected. It is long process. We do not something as Imarat Islami. In principle we want to negotiate, have an influential and independent organization, including but negotiation has its pre‐conditions. those human rights organizations that only had the consulting role. Steps have been taken in this regard, but they are not First, both the parties must have reached the belief that they pursued. We want them to be pursued further. can not reach their political objectives through war. Q. How do you see the relationship between peace and justice? Second, the foreign supporters also stop their financial and other forms of aids. However Taliban want to reach their objectives A. Peace can not be established without social trust. through fighting. In the constitution of the country, human rights Q. The action plan of government regarding transitional justice and democracy are enshrined. There should be an axis to was limited to March this year, but it was not implemented. negotiate on. Is the opponent ready to talk? We do not have any What is your opinion about it that the process of transitional evidence yet. Those who propose Loya Jirga, it should undergo all justice was not implemented on time? the rules that Constitution has predicted otherwise the legitimacy of Loya Jirga will be put in doubt. There are some Taliban fighters A. We lack those organizations that follow the cases and also who have joined the rank of Taliban due to military operations on fact‐finding committees such as those in South Africa. We will them. Considering the fact that Taliban want to establish Imarat act in areas where the current government has failed. Islami, and the emotional titles of “Brother” and “Friend” are Q. How do you see the role of the Peace Commission? nothing more than election campaign. A. This commission has had some symbolic aspects. They spend Transitional Justice: large amounts. They free some people under different pretexts, Q. What bout those Taliban who are violators of human rights. even the criminals and violators of human rights. Should there be talks with them? Q. What is your opinion about the National Amnesty Charter A. Why do say this about Taliban? I believe that during past 30 of Parliament? Do you oppose it or agree with it and the years the country was indulged in war and the human rights were reality of transitional justice. extensively violated. The current government also has its part. Do A. I am certainly against it. you not see the human rights violators in the current government? Q. Some of the violators of human rights are present in the Q. How do you define and describe the process of transitional body of government. What will your government do to them? justice? A. Regarding violators of human rights, this process should A. Transitional justice is about war crimes, crimes against continue. In the meantime we do not want to revenge. humanity and violations of human rights. After the second Q. Your government will confront two major challenges: first World War Nazi leaders were tried in Nuremberg. . Related to the demands of war victims and second the opposition of transitional justice a military cope in Argentina 1355 that took a accused with your government. lot of lives. This movement started by those mothers who had lost their sons. Every Thursday they raised their objections with A. If a popular government is established no one can oppose it, the handkerchiefs covering the pictures of their sons. 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No 5, September 17, 2009

Media Analyst: Faezeh Ibrahimi 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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