A publication of Afghanistan watch Number 14, June 30, 2010
Fourteenth Note justice, finally suggesting the ways for Wolesi Jirga election. Lack of security implementation of justice. across the country, participation of the
Dear readers SALAAM, The last section of this volume contains people and the likely frauds and We are glad to present to you the 14th some relevant Articles and reports irregularities have stirred much volume of the Truth, or Haqiqat, published by other resources. controversial debate in the print media of Afghanistan. As the election is magazine, containing 85 news articles Negotiation Talks with the Insurgent selected from the print media of looming, the inefficient system of issuing Groups: The peace talks between the voter cards is being challenged by the Afghanistan. In this issue, there are 33 Taliban and the government of media. articles on peace negotiations with the Afghanistan is still feverish and insurgent groups, 24 articles on elections remains as the headlines of the most of Corruption: The foreign countries are transparency, 18 articles on corruption the papers in the country. President intended to investigate the corruptions and 7 articles on the transitional justice. Karzai’s efforts on removing names of in Afghanistan by organizing supervisory
The analytical article of the issue is a the Taliban leaders from the UN teams while the government of legal analysis written by Dr. Muhammad Blacklist were proceeded by a UN Afghanistan is accusing foreigners of Amin Ahmadi, Dean of Ibn‐e‐Sina delegation visit from Kabul. The secret being responsible over the widespread Institute for Higher education and a meeting between President Karzai and corruption in the country. The issue is member of the Supervisory Commission the leader of Haqqani Network, closely debated by the print media of for the Implementation of the Sirajuddin Haqqani, with the Afghanistan. Constitution, discussing on peace, ambiguous and much‐suspicious role of Transitional Justice: The controversial Pakistan in the talks is still an obscure reconciliation and the role of justice in talks with the insurgent groups have puzzle, leading the media to publish these issues. The article looks into triggered debates on justice and its diverse analysis on the issue. reconciliation after conflicts and implementation in the process. Human transitional justice from legal perspective Elections Transparency: Though the rights organizations and the civil society and continues discusses on the relations parliamentary election race has just got agencies have expressed concerns over between reconciliation and transitional underway, there are hot debates on the the process of the negotiations.
Sustaining peace
by making it just
Justice requires compensation for the rights violated. When there is inequality in a society and some have lost opportunities of a better life and their life and possessions are encroached on, justice requires that measures to compensate for their lost opportunities and harms they have suffered. Page 20
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 debate and approach these key issues facing the country: transitional justice, corruption, elections transparency and negotiations with the armed insurgents. PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/d494ff/ If you wish to subscribe please send an email to [email protected] or visit our website: www.watchafghanistan.org Inside This Issue Transitional Justice Elections Transparency A Reconciliation Accord Conditional on Justice 3 IEC Starts Voter registration 11 United Nations Ill‐fated Moves 3 Insecurity a Serious Challenge to the Forthcoming Election 11 Blacklist: Punishing Criminals or Removing their Names 3 IEC Announces a Two‐month Voter Registration Process 11 Establishing High Peace Council and Concerns on fate of the Justice 3 Security Challenges and Its Consequences for the Human Rights Commission: Removing Militants’ Names from Parliamentary Election 11 UN Blacklist not Diminish Their Crimes 3 Symbolic Process of Issuing Voting Cards 12 The Second Parliamentary Election: More Challenging than Ever 4 Voter Registration and Unaccounted Voting Cards 12 AIHRC Reacts to Revision of UN Blacklist 4 Transparency and Security, Unsecured Conditions of the Negotiation with armed opposition Groups Forthcoming Election 12 Who Benefits from Election Delay? 12 UN to Review Blacklist 5 Noor Muhammad Noor: Candidates not Permitted to Use UN Also Pays Tributes to Taliban 5 State Facilities 12 International Community and the Talks with Taliban 5 Turkmenistan Provides Political Space for Peace Talks 5 Election Media Commission Started Work 12 UN Should not Forget Afghan People’s Side 6 Parliamentary Candidates Finalized, Unanswered Questions Consequences of Karzai’s Distrusts 6 Remaining 13 300,000 Security Personnel to be Deployed for Election Government’s Move, Succumbing to the Taliban 6 Security UN: UN Blacklist to be Reviewed 6 13 Zalmay Rasool: Pakistan Should Fulfill its Commitment 6 FEFA Not Authorized to Oversee the Election 13 Who is the UN with, Al‐Qaeda, Taliban or Afghan People? 6 Lots‐Drawing Process of Candidates’ Names Gets Underway 13 UN Blacklist Revision: Inclusion, not Removal of Militants’ Names 6 13 People Deprived of Participating in Parliamentary Election 14 Karzai: Peace in Kandahar at Any Cost 7 Qanooni Expresses Doubts on Holding Parliamentary election 14 Peace Jirga Declaration Has no Novel Initiatives 7 Zahir Azimi: Parliamentary Election to be Secured 14 Supreme Peace Council to be Established 7 The Final List of the Candidates announced 14 20 Insurgents in Herat Province Join Peace Program 7 How will be the Level of People’s Participation in Election? 14 UN Blacklist and the Blindly Process of Insertion and Removal Limited Voter Registration Centers Hinder People’s of Individuals 7 Participation in Election 15 Invention of Supreme Peace Council, Another Attempt for Voter Registration Process and the Challenges in Herat Province 15
Releasing Terrorists 7 Candidates Begin Campaign Before the IEC Scheduled Date 15 25 Prisoners to Be Freed from Bagram Base 8 Japan Supports Afghan Peace Negotiations 8 Corruption Pakistan Mediates between Karzai and Haqqani Network 8 Setting Priorities in Fighting Corruption 16 Negotiations between Kabul and Islamabad on Reconciliation Without Retribution, Eliminating Corruption Impossible 16 with Taliban 8 Failed Government and Silence of the Opposition Waiting for Pakistan: a Peace Mediator in Afghanistan 8 Unforeseen Tomorrow 16 Insurgent Group in Herat Joins Peace Process 8 US Intelligence Reveals Corruption Cases in Afghanistan 16 A Crisis is Looming 9 Two NSD Personnel Indicted for Bribery 16 Obama Administration not to Support Peace Talks with Karzai: Peace in Kandahar at Any Cost 17 Haqqani Network 9 People Get Informed on Assets of the Government Officials 17 20 Taliban Released, Others to be Freed Soon 9 Corruption‐Charged Official Rewarded 17 Increasing Attacks, Taliban Seek more Concessions 9 Japan’s Aid to be Used Effectively 17 Russia Concerned Over Talks with Taliban 9 A Committee for Inspecting Corruption in Foreign Whose Names will be Removed from the UN Blacklist? 9 Organizations 17 United Nations: Militants Who Have No Links With Al‐Qaeda Bank Accounts of Corruption‐Charged Officials blocked 17 Will Be Delisted of the Blacklist 9 Collective Determination for Eliminating Corruption 18 People in Zabul Province Support Peace Jirga 10 MPs Oppose Likely Misuse of Mineral Exploitations 18 A Jirga With 80 Participants Organized in Helmand 10 Corruption and Intransparent Regulations more Dangerous than Insurgency 18 Construction of Azizi and Gulbahar Centers to be Suspended 18 Ministry of Mines Officials Complain against Shahrani 19 Articles & Interviews Sustaining peace by making it just 20 New Publications 23
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No 14, June 30, 2010
Transitional Justice
after being identified. A Reconciliation Accord Without justice, peace and security are not achievable in the Conditional on Justice country, even if they are achieved, they would be very fragile
and transitory, he said. Sorosh ‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 385, June 13, 2010, Page 1 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Though the efforts by the United Nations to facilitate negotiation process in Afghanistan are much praiseworthy, but Establishing High Peace Council and Concerns undeniably, in this regard the justice should not be sacrificed. Those who have committed murders by staging vicious terrorist on fate of the Justice
attacks and their hands are tainted with the blood of the 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 361, June 16, 2010, Page 2 innocents, should not be seen deserved for the recommendations of Kabul Peace Jirga. They should be dealt In order to start peace negotiations with the insurgent groups, more patiently and deliberately. the Afghan government is struggling to categorize the terrorists into different types. This is while a major part of the people do Necessarily, in order to provide peace and security in the not trust the efforts, considering the categorization efforts country and administer justice as well, such efforts for peace unjust and providing impunity to war criminals and human
must be conditional on implementation of justice and the rights violators. Nevertheless (On the other hand), the National Taliban leaders should be dealt with according to the Reconciliation Law ratified by the parliament earlier and then recommendations of the Peace Jirga and will of the people. approved by the president, provides amnesty for all who have United Nations Ill‐fated Moves been involved in past three‐decade war. Though the law excepts individual's right to seek justice, it is almost impossible Mandegar Daily, volume No 345, June 14, 2010, Page 6 to seek justice individually considering the widespread
Despite of widespread distrusts, the UN Security Council says it corruption in Afghanistan’s judicial agencies. The corruption and is considering Afghan‐led peace process in the country and bureaucracy in Afghanistan’s judicial system paves the way for heads to delist Taliban leaders, who are accused of crimes violations of human rights and no individual would be able to against humanity, from the so‐called Blacklist. The move claim lost rights through courts in the country.
inevitably stirs distrusts of the people as well as discrediting the Therefore, the main concern is how the High Peace Council indispensible values of the United Nations for transitional would be able to answer the issue of human rights while justice and challenging oblivion of human history. following peace negotiations with the insurgent groups. In order Past experiences show that the UN officials deal arbitrarily with to prevent violations of rights of the people, it is crucial that the the issues such as justice and human rights which are axiomatic High Peace Council is just and transparent while classifying the values of humanity in all nations. The latest move by the UN insurgent groups. means that the world high‐respected body is heading to forgive Regrettably, the issues of justice and dealing with past war the criminals without considering public views in Afghanistan. crimes were neither deservedly discussed by the commissions The UN Security Council is set to review the list of those of last‐month Kabul Peace Jirga and nor reflected in the final extremists who were irreconcilable enemies of our properties, declaration of the assembly. lives and freedom. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Human Rights Commission: Blacklist: Removing Militants’ Names from UN Blacklist Punishing Criminals or Removing their Names [ not Diminish Their Crimes Charagh Daily, Volume No 103, June 15, 2010, Page 2 By Razia Abdullahi Daily Afghanistan, Volume No 1124, June 19, 2010, Page 1 Shamsullah Ahmadzai, head of regional offices of Human Rights Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) Commission, interviewed by Charagh Daily, said the decisions to said removing names of Taliban leaders from the Blacklist will review the UN Blacklist was political, adding that only martyrs’ not affect the status of their crimes. Recently, the Human Rights families have the right to condone the criminals who are Commission opened a museum entitled “Transitional Justice” in accused of crimes against humanity. Ahamdzai said the content Herat city, exhibiting relics of the long‐time war and pictures of the Blacklist was only 137 Afghan names, while there are from the victims of the conflicts. much more people who had been involved in war crimes. Sima Samar, head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Ahmadzai3 |Page emphasized that they must be brought to justice http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 Commission, speaking on removal of Taliban leaders’ names from the UN Blacklist said both the inclusion and removal of the names had political motives.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Second Parliamentary Election: More Challenging than Ever
Erada Daily, Volume No 808, June 22, 2010, Editorial Regrettably, the people of Afghanistan are not satisfied with the achievements of the first parliament of the country during past five year; because the people have witnessed that the MPs mostly were absent from the sessions or bogged down haggling their personal interests. The outgoing parliament slammed the people with the National Reconciliation Charter and pardoned all of the past three‐ decades crimes to the criminals. Therefore, the parliament put behind a tarnished history and disappointed the people. There might be no one in Afghanistan who has not lost close or less close relatives. The people are victims of the war crimes of the criminals, asking the government to bring the criminals to justice. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ AIHRC Reacts to Revision of UN Blacklist
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 902, June 24, 2010, Page 2 Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), reacting to the revision of the United Nations’ Blacklist said nobody had the right to forgive the war criminals and violators of human rights. Nadir Nadiri, spokesman of the Human Rights Commission, said that the UN cannot hinder the providing of justice to the people of Afghanistan. “Offense against humanity and war crimes never can be forgiven because they are a part of international crimes, requiring both the Afghan government and the international community to guarantee justice at any circumstances,” Nadiri said.
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No 14, June 30, 2010 Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups
UN to Review Blacklist
8 Subh Daily, Issue No 358, June 13, 2010, Page 2 Staffan di mistura, UN special envoy to Afghanistan, speaking at a press conference announced that the UN Security Council decided to review the Blacklist. Mistura said the revision of the UN blacklist may take place until the end of the month. He added that by the process, some militants’ names that are in the list will be removed and some others may be included to the list. Meanwhile, the UN envoy to Kabul said the conditions for reconciliation with armed insurgent groups remain unchanged: the insurgents must sever ties with Al‐Qaeda and accept Afghanistan’s constitution. Afghan officials have repeatedly called the Taliban and Hezb‐e‐ Islami insurgents to abandon violence and join the reconciliation process, but the insurgent groups have explicitly rejected the calls. Desperation of the government and stubbornness of Taliban have discredited efforts of the Afghan government and Western allies to convince Taliban and Hizb‐e‐ Islami of (or: to step towards) peace negotiations. Experts believe that the peace process is a unilateral initiative by the Afghan government which will produce no result unless Kabul embarks on negotiations from a strong position. Pakistan intelligence agencies in foiling Karzai’s peace efforts, in ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ UN Also Pays Tributes to Taliban which Pakistan’s ISI saw its role insignificant, was a milestone [ for Kabul ties with its western allies. The commitment of 8 Subh Daily, Issue No 358, June 13, 2010, Page 2 international forces to their obligations give cause for serious The UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan has embarked on secret concerns not only of President Karzai but also of the people of talks with the Taliban insurgents, ignoring the will and desire of Afghanistan, especially of residents of the war‐stricken zones. the afghan people. Covert meetings between Kai Eide, UN Afghan people simply do not know why the international former envoy to Kabul, and Taliban are testimonies to the issue. community condones Pakistan on nurturing terrorism and Expelling its personnel from Kandahar, the UN helped Taliban oppose Afghan‐initiated peace talks. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ morale, reflecting that the situation in the region was critical and the Taliban is more powerful than it is thought. Turkmenistan Provides Political Space More interestingly, the UN special envoy is talking on expediting the implementation of the Peace Jirga recommendations, while for Peace Talks the participants of the Jirga declared the recommendations of Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Issue No 1450, June 13, 2010, Page 1 the Jirga were not obligatory. Turkmenistan's President at a meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Organization invited Afghan rival factions to meet in Ashkhabad ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ International Community for talks to end the decade‐long current conflict, reports said. and the Talks with Taliban “Turkmenistan is ready to offer its political space for UN sponsored inter‐Afghan peace talks,” Turkmen President, Bakhtar Daily, Issue No 254, June 13, 2010, Page 2 Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov said, adding that Turkmenistan Karzai’s efforts to start peace talks with the insurgent groups do supports a peace settlement in Afghanistan. not enjoy support of the international community and this is Meanwhile, Ahmad Zahir Faqiri, spokesman of Afghan foreign sometimes reflected openly in the official positions and affairs ministry, welcomed Turkmenistan’s offer to host Afghan statements of both sides. Collaboration between US and peace talks. 5 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 UN Should not Forget Afghan People’s Side look at the president’s political background: nine years ago, he practically was active in Taliban political structure, making Mandegar Daily, Issue No 344, June 13, 2010, Page 2 strategy for the terrorist group. It is very crucial that the UN decide on issues belonging to ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan based on a thorough and comprehensive policy towards the country. Here in Afghanistan, it is not only Taliban's UN: UN Blacklist to be Reviewed and government’s view but also the people’s view should be considered in political issues. Afghan people and political groups Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1119, June 14, 2010, Page 1 have long resisted against Pakistan’s aggressions and the Staffan di Mistura, UN Secretary General special envoy to Kabul, dominance of Taliban as well, as suffering the most during past speaking at a press conference, said the Blacklist includes 137 decades. The United Nations Organization needs to be Afghans, adding that the list will be reviewed by the UN Security transparent otherwise it will lose its credibility in the eyes of Council and some names may be removed from the list. Afghans. He added, an UN Security Council delegation consisting of If the bids to remove Taliban leader's names from the United resolution No 1267 committee had come to Kabul to work on Nations’s blacklist are not conformed to the people’s will, it can the revision of the Blacklist. consolidate Taliban‐led insurgency and will have no impact on ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ .peace process Zalmay Rasool: Pakistan Should Fulfill its Commitment ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Consequences of Karzai’s Distrusts Bakhtar Daily, Volume No 255, June 14, 2010, Page 2 Mandegar Daily, Issue No 344, June 13, 2010, Page 2 Afghan foreign minister Zalmay Rasool says cooperations of The Peace Jirga proved that Karzai follows secretly his own regional countries and Pakistan’s role are vital for peace political agenda under the pretext of reconciliation talks with efforts in Afghanistan and the implementation of Peace Jirga the Taliban insurgents. A member of the parliament’s Upper decisions. Mr. Rasool added that without Pakistan the peace House who had participated in the Peace Jirga talked about a process would be ineffectual. Pakistan’s foreign ministry dictated agenda in the Jirga, insisting that the final reaffirmed his country’s commitment towards peace efforts in declaration of the assembly was not the issues discussed in Afghanistan. the Jirga’s commissions. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Seemingly, the Peace Jirga is the beginning of a large conspiracy in the country that potentially will harm the Who is the UN with, Al‐Qaeda, national interests of Afghanistan. Taliban or Afghan People?
Subh Daily, Volume No 359, June 14, 2010, Page 4 8 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Government’s Move, A member of Afghan parliament, Fozia Kofi, says those Succumbing to the Taliban whose names are in the Blacklist, are not only accused of crimes against humanity but they are also being pursued on Mandegar Daily, Issue No 344, June 13, 2010, Page 1, By Jamshid Yama charges of terrorist acts and drug trafficking. Kofi believes they must face justice in international courts after being A political analyst Haroon Mir describes the position of Kabul apprehended. government in negotiation with Taliban very weak adding that the government has no political support among the people. According to Fozia Kofi, the latest move by UN Special Envoy to Khalil Rooman another political expert says Karzai’s Afghanistan is a result of the personal ties he has struck with government, aware of losing its credibility among the people, President Karzai, and since big powers have their influence and resorts to the armed insurgent groups to strengthen its position vote in the UN Security Council, it is far unlikely that the top UN among the people. council agrees on delisting the Taliban and Hizb‐e‐Islami leaders. “The government’s approach towards Taliban will not be ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ productive because the ongoing peace efforts are a surrender to the insurgent groups,” he said, adding that “the Taliban will UN Blacklist Revision: not come to negotiation table without considering Islamabad’s demands.” Inclusion, not Removal of Militants’ Names
Sami darrayi, an Afghan journalist, believes that Hamid Karzai Charagh Daily, Volume No 1574, June 12, Page 2 tries to negotiate with the Taliban by ethnic motives and the Seemingly, there is no much chance for removal of the main ethnic ties between Karzai and the Taliban do simply not allow figures of Taliban terrorist group. On one side, there are him to see the Taliban as enemy. many sensitive and public opinions inside Afghanistan and To clarify Karzai’s inclination towards the Taliban, it is better to abroad which are opposing the measure. On the other side, 6 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 the US would not let those militants who are active in war talks, adding that suggestions of the council’s leadership and and insurgency be removed from the Blacklist. In fact, the heads of Peace Jirga committees are to be considered in peace reconciliation talks with insurgent groups are facing huge talks. legal obstacles, making the goal virtually something ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ .impossible Therefore, the removal of some Taliban leaders will not help 20 Insurgents in Herat Province peace in Afghanistan, but conversely it helps Taliban to emerge Join Peace Program bolder and use it for escalating propaganda against the Kabul government and its western allies. Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 387, June 15, 2010, Page 3 Laal Muhammad Omarzai, governor of Shindand district in Herat Province, said overall 22 armed men from the insurgent ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Peace in Kandahar at Any Cost: Karzai groups have joined the (side of the )government, including their two junior commanders Atiqullah and Mullah Khoda Rahm. Afghanistan Daily, volume No 1120, June 14, 2010, Page 1 Mullah Khudai Rahm, one of the commanders, said he had President Hamid Karzai, during a visit to Kandahar province said come to cooperate with the local forces to provide security, in spite of all challenges ahead he would follow peace efforts. expecting the government to help constructing their locality. Karzai added that the peace talks would be led forward by the Meanwhile, Hazrat Muhammad Sharif Mujaddadi, head of top government officials and the governors all across the Peace Consolidation Program in the West Zone, said those who country. As previously, the president urged the Taliban to accept the peace proposal and join the (side of the )government accept the peace proposal and to respect decisions made in the are granted safe‐conduct not to be pursued by security officials. three‐day Peace Assembly in Kabul, adding that the chance Mojaddadi urged the government and foreign NGOs to help with would never be gained for second time. reconstructions in the residential localities of the insurgents who In order to implement the recommendations of the Peace Jirga, join the Peace Consolidation Program. Also four months ago, a commissions will be established in each province consisting of group of 30 armed insurgents in Shindand district handed over tribal elders and religious scholars headed by the governors, their weapons and joined the government's peace process. President Karzai said. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ UN Blacklist and the Blindly Process of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Peace Jirga Declaration Has no Novel Initiatives Insertion and Removal of Individuals
Charagh Daily, Volume No 102, June 14, 2010, Page 3 Mandegar Daily, Volume No 347, June 16, 2010, Page 1 Aarefa Sabeti, a women rights activist in Parwan province, By Najia Noori commenting on output and composition of the Peace Jirga, said Wahid Mojhda, an Afghan political analyst, commenting on the that ethnic balance and presence of social groups in the UN Blacklist, says it is not the case of removing militants' assembly was equal to zero, adding that 1000 out of 1600 leaders from the list but it is a revision of the so‐called Blacklist, delegates in the assembly were men from Pashtun ethnic origin. meaning that the list is outdated and needs to be reviewed. “Such composition is, in a way, a clear oversight to other ethnic “The list is compiled many years ago and some of those in the groups and I believe that dividing the delegates into 28 list have already been killed while some others are in custody categories and the process of appointing heads for them shows plus some others living in Kabul,” Mojhda said, adding that that Pashtun delegates were intentionally massively invited to there are some individuals who mistakenly are inserted into the the Jirga, she said. list. Mojhda added that the term ‘revision’ meant the people in Sabeti pointed that without required preconditions and binding the list will be inspected about and names of the militants who guarantees, the removal of Taliban leaders’ names from the UN are currently active in insurgency will remain blocked. blacklist, which is recommended by the Peace Jirga, is another Mojhda specified that the process does not mean we will mistake advocated by the declaration. definitely witness removal of Taliban leaders’ names from the 'Blacklist but there are pre‐specified conditions for militants ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ leaders to join the peace process. In case they accept the terms, Supreme Peace Council to be Established theirs names will be removed from the Blacklist, Mojhda said.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1452, June 15, 2010, Page 3 At a cabinet meeting headed by President Karzai, the Invention of Supreme Peace Council, Another government decided to establish a Peace High Council Attempt for Releasing Terrorists recommended by the Kabul Peace Jirga to start working on peace negotiations with the insurgent groups. 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 361, June 16, 2010, Page 3 The President reaffirmed that there would be concrete actions By Qudratullah Jawid for organizing the council and practical steps towards peace Abbas Noyan, a member of the parliament, said that 7 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010
establishing the High Peace Commission, as the Peace more details of the peace talks between Karzai and the Haqqani Consolidation Commission led by Sibghatullah Mujaddadi, network, but they suggested that the initial steps for results to the release of thousands of Taliban members who reconciliation were promising and some leaders of Haqqani rejoin the terrorist group, waging horrible attacks against the network have shown their readiness to talk with Karzai’s people. government. Noyan added the Taliban are talking from a strong position ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ while the government is desperately struggling to approach the insurgents from a weak position. Such approach cannot settle a Negotiations between Kabul and Islamabad on just and all‐inclusive peace for the people of Afghanistan, Abbas Reconciliation with Taliban Noyan concluded. Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1456, June 20, 2010, Page 2 Though the Peace Consolidation Commission claimed to revert about ten thousand armed insurgents to civil life, reports from Pakistani and U.S. officials announced that Afghanistan and national and international media indicate that most of the Pakistan have started talks on how to negotiate with the Taliban militants released by the Peace Consolidation Commission have and fight against the terrorist Al‐Qaeda network. rearmed, waging terrorist attacks against foreign forces and Pakistani officials specified that the talks just went underway and government interests. the main issue of the negotiation is considering the ways for reconciliation talks with the insurgent groups that have been ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ fighting against the NATO and Afghan security forces for many 25 Prisoners to Be Freed from Bagram Base years.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Erada Daily, Volume No 804, June 17, 2010, Page 1 US military officials in Afghanistan announced 25 prisoners Pakistan: detained at Bagram Base were set to be freed soon after their a Peace Mediator in Afghanistan cases are reviewed. Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1456, June 20, 2010, Editorial Previously, president Karzai issued an official decree, designating a commission of high‐ranking officials to review the Pakistani officials had insisted long ago that the solution to cases of the Taliban‐linked prisoners who have been detained Afghan conflict is power‐sharing with the Taliban. by inefficient evidences. Former Pakistan’s ISI official Colonel Imam, who considers The measure is mainly considered a confidence‐building move himself as the founder of the Taliban movement but now is in by President Karzai to persuade Taliban to come to the captivity of Pakistani Taliban, had repeatedly assured that the negotiation table and to abandon violence. Quetta Council, the main leadership of the group, is ready to start peace talks with the US. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Japan Supports Afghan Peace Negotiations The evidences indicate that after some rounds of ISI‐mediated talks between US intelligence and the Taliban, ultimately the US Cahragh Daily, Volume No 1578, June 19, 2010, Page 1 agreed that Islamabad can handle the peace talks between Takahiru, speaker of the Japanese parliament, said at a meeting Taliban and Karzai’s administration. with Afghan president Hamid Karzai his country supports peace Pakistan’s readiness for peace mediation, right after the Kabul negotiations to provide security in Afghanistan and to bring Peace Jirga, is signaling that the process is seriously being back the insurgents to civil life. pushed forward. More interestingly Taliban’s measures come Security in Afghanistan is crucial for the security and stability of after the West announced their support on the Final Declaration both the region and the world, Takahiro said, adding that Tokyo of Kabul Peace Jirga. will continue its support for Afghanistan. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Insurgent Group in Herat Joins Peace Process ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ
Pakistan Mediates Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 392, June 21, 2010, Page 1 between Karzai and Haqqani Network An insurgent armed group in Shindand district of Herat province Mandegar Daily, Volume No 349, June 19, 2010, Page 1 accepted government’s call, joining peace process. Pakiastan’s military officials confirmed they had delivered According to the report, the group, consisting of 14 insurgents, Karzai’s peace initiative to the Haqqani group. A high‐ranking was active in insurgency against the government forces in official of Pakistan’s military said there were some initial Shindand. A statement issued by the local government said the contacts with the group in order to pave the way for group was headed by Mullah Taza Gul who said that if the negotiation talks between Karzai and Sirajuddin Haqqaini, the peace process goes on successfully, more insurgents will join head of the terrorist group. Pakistani officials have not disclosed the peace process. 8 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 A Crisis is Looming Peace Jirga and increase in Taliban attacks.
He however admitted that the Taliban struggling for more Mandegar Daily, Volume No 351, June 21, 2010, Page 2 concessions do not hesitate even killing the civilians. Mujaheed Pakistani and Afghan officials are secretly talking with the said that he belived Taliban would come to negotiation table to Taliban. The experts believe the talks with Taliban are pushed talk to Karzai’s administration. He Added the Taliban have ahead with a special agenda aimed to ultimately bring the stepped up their military attacks in order to have the upper Taliban to the power structure of Afghanistan. hand in the talks. It is natural when two antagonastic groups The clandestine talks with the insurgent groups are not based start negotiations, both sides embark on manouvers to obtain on collective will of the people but it is a political agenda of the more concessions, Mujaheed said. monopolist circle in the government, reflecting a new crisis in ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ the country. Russia Concerned Over Talks with Taliban Presently, the would‐be mediation role of Pakistan for talks with the insurgent groups appears to be so weird that it suggests a Mandegar Daily, Volume No 354, June 24, 2010, Page 8 surreptitious deal behind the closed doors. Karzai, in conspiracy The Russian foreign ministry expressed in a statement with his Pakistani friends, intends to alter the peace process Moscow’s concerns regarding the Afghan‐led peace initiative into a non‐Afghanized and personal process, which would be an with the insurgent groups in order to stabilize the country. absolute crisis for Afghanistan. A statement released on June 23 by the Media Department of the Russian foreign ministry says that the Afghan‐led efforts ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Obama Administration not to Support Peace being supported by some western countries to begin talks with the Taliban insurgents and to set a mechanism for the National Talks with Haqqani Network Reconciliation is a grave concern for Russia. Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1126, June 21, 2010, Page 1 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghan and Pakistani officials negotiate on peace talks with the insurgent groups that are fighting against the US‐led NATO Whose Names will be forces in Afghanistan. Removed from the UN Blacklist?
The officials have told Washington Post that the bilateral talks Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1130, June 26, 2010, Page 8 also include Haqqani Network which is considered as the most Thomas Mayr Harting, the head of the UN committee 1267 implacable enemy to NATO forces. responsible for the UN terror Blacklist, speaking at a press Meanwhile, Washington Post writes that US officials are conference on June 24th in Kabul said the cases of the people opposing reconciliation with a specific group of the insurgents: included in the list will be separately considered for revision. Haqqani Network led by Sirsajuddin Haqqani. Harting added that only names of militants who quit insurgency and accept the Afghan constitution will be removed from the .Blacklist ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ 20 Taliban Released, Others to be Freed Soon The head of a UN delegation who recently visited Kabul said the
Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1458, June 22, 2010, Page 1 mission discussed on different issues, including the removal of some Taliban leaders’ names from the list. Zahir Tanin, As part of the reconciliation process, 20 Taliban prisoners are Afghanistan’s envoy to the United Nations who was present at released and some other prisoners will soon be free from the press conference, said so far the Afghan government has detentions. offered no specific list to UN Security Council. Nasrullah Stanikzai, an advisor to the president and a member of Afghanistan’s foreign minister had earlier said that the the commission examining the cases of the Taliban‐linked prisoners government is working on a list for the removal of some Taliban said: “The released prisoners had been detained over accusations leaders from the Blacklist to be presented to the United Nations of having links with the insurgent groups.” Stanikzai added that the Security Council. commission probed every single case of the prisoners, but there ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ .were no clear and credible evidences to prove them guilty United Nations: ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Militants Who Have No Links With Al‐Qaeda Increasing Attacks, Will Be Delisted of the Blacklist Taliban Seek more Concessions 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 367, June 23, 2010, Page 2 Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1128, June 23, 2010, Page 5 A press release from the office of president’s spokesman issued Abdul Hakim Mujaheed, the former Taliban envoy to the United on June 22 stated that a 15‐member committee of the United Nations, recently appeared at a news channel, speaking on Nations Security Council met president Karzai in Kabul. 9 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010
In the meeting, President Karzai asked the UN delegation to remove names of Taliban leaders, who do not have ties with Al‐ Qaeda, from the UN terror Blacklist. In response to his call, the committee expressed agreement on the issue, specifying that the Security Council, gradually and in coordination with the Afghan government, will remove names of Taliban militants, who are unlinked to Al‐Qaeda terror network, from the UN Blacklist. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ People in Zabul Province Support Peace Jirga
Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1124, June 19, 2010, Page 8 People of Zabul province rallied in a gathering at Qalat, the capital city of the province, to express their support to the decisions of the National Consultative Peace Jirga. A member of the Provincial Council Asadullah Nasir said about four hundred people participated in the gathering, supporting unanimously the outcome of the Peace Jirga held in Kabul. Gulab Shah Ali Khil, a deputy to Zabul governor, said the rally for supporting the Peace Jirga was very helpful to the national reconciliation, adding that peace can be obtained only through local elders and tribal leaders. At the end, the participants read a six‐article declaration, stressing on peace negotiations, training national forces of Afghanistan, speeding up the process of reconstruction of the country and setting up the local peace commissions. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ A Jirga With 80 Participants Organized in Helmand
Afghanistan Daily, Volume No 1124, June 19, 2010, Page 8 An 80‐Member Jirga, consisting of members of the provincial and village councils, was organized in southern Helmand Province for implementing the declaration of the National Consultative Peace Jirga. Gulab Mangal, the governor of Helmand province, speaking at a gathering on June 17 in Lashkargah city of the province said the Jirga would work on implementing the decisions of the Kabul Peace Jirga. He added that the participants have gathered in the rally to support Kabul Peace Jirga and to set up another Jirga for the implementation of the Peace Jirga. The eighty representatives of the Jirga, who have come from different parts of Helmand province, will transfer the message of the government to villages as well as problems of the people to the officials, Mangal said. He said that all members of the Jirga would try their best for the reconciliation talks with the opposition groups.
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No 14, June 30, 2010 Elections Transparency
IEC Starts Voter registration
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 358, June 13, 2010, Page 2 The Independent Election Commission (IEC) started the last phase of voter registration yesterday, June 12. The commission’s officials said the new‐coming repatriates and those who migrated from a province to another province as well as those who have lost their voting cards can participate in the process to obtain voting cards. Noor Mohammad Noor, spokesman of Independent Election Commission, speaking at a press conference said the registration program would go on for two months all over the country. The IEC officials said that 17 million people obtained voting cards during the past three elections in the country of which about 12 million people are currently qualified for voting on the day of election. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Insecurity a Serious Challenge to the Forthcoming Election
Bakhtar Daily, volume No 254, June 13, 2010, Page 3 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Regarding the security concerns during the parliamentary election, parliament’s House of Representatives summoned the IEC Announces a Two‐month Voter Independent Election Commission and security officials to Registration Process explain plans on security during election. Referring to the Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1450, June 13, 2010, Page 2 attacks on Consultative Peace Jirga, some of the MPs expressed concerns that security organizations might not be able to The Independent Election Commission, announced in a press provide security of the parliamentary election. release that in order to identify those who are eligible to vote the voters are required to have a unified identity card. Fazl Ahmad Maanawi, head of the IEC, stressing that the most important issue for the election is security, said the commission Meanwhile, Noor Muhammd Noor, the spokesman of the IEC, officials would not open voting centers until they are assured briefed on newly initiated registration and voting centers for the about provision of security. “The voting centers will not be prisoners. “We initiate mobile registration and voting centers in opened until the observers, election personnel, the people who the prisons in which about 100 prisoners are kept, as well as go to the centers, and the commission are assured of security issuing voting cards for the prisoners,” he said. Mr. Noor added situation,” Maanawi said. that the program would be carried out not only in prisons but also in hospitals and in the areas where the people cannot Maanawi added that the election commission shared the obtain voting cards or go to vote centers. election’s action plan with the security officials three months ago and the list of 6835 would‐be voting centers across the According to Noor Muhammd Noor, 188 from more than 200 country were presented to them. “July 1 is the deadline for candidates whose names had been removed from the security officials to inform us how many of the 6835 voting preliminary election list, have been included to the list after centers can be secured,” IEC chief Ahmad Maanawi said. resubmitting their documents. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Maanawi stressed he never would postpone the parliamentary election unless the security organizations express their inability regarding the security of the election. On the other hand, Security Challenges and Its Consequences for General Muhibbullah, deputy defense minister said the ministry the Parliamentary Election of defense alongside other Afghan security agencies and NATO Mandegar Daily, Volume No 344, June 13, 2010, Page 1 forces are designing a comprehensive security plan for the parliamentary election. While the people of Afghanistan are going to parliamentary 11 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 election, significant increase in violence are not welcoming parliamentary election for the second time. Considering the news. security, even if the election goes ahead according to the IEC timetable, it would surely be faulty and impaired by the ongoing There are concerns that the increasing violence may have insurgency, depriving a high percentage of voters of impact on political equations, affecting the transparency and participating in the election. fairness of the parliamentary election. It means that because of war and insurgency in the country, the election process may not Transparency of the election could be boosted by effective go fair and transparent and the ruling monopolist team may plans for an observing process of the election, which is lead the parliamentary election into a way the presidential depending on commitment and liability of the Independent election went. Some political figures and experts have long ago Election Commission and security agencies officials. expressed their concerns on the issue. They believe that the Most likely, effective measures by the officials in mentioned monopolist team seeks to make the ground for establishing a fields will prevent fraud and irregularities, strengthening the government‐leaning parliament. credibility of the election and the confidence of the public on .the process ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Symbolic Process of Issuing Voting Cards
Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, volume No 1451, June 14, 2010, Page 2 Who Benefits from Election Delay?
Having a little information about Afghanistan’s geography, Mandegar daily, Volume No 347, June 16, 2010, Page 6 everyone knows well that by the ongoing process of issuing Undoubtedly, Karzai is the main individual responsible for two voting cards, which opens only one site in every province, most major breaches to the constitution in both presidential and of the qualified voters will not be able to obtain voting cards. parliamentary election, because he is the one who by his full Instead of the the costly process of issuing voting cards, which authority decided to postpone the election. According to the have raised fears of fraud and the distribution of more cards, it constitution, cognizant of the pre‐specified election date, the was better to issue National Identity Cards to be used on government had to take effective measures and be well‐ Election Day. prepared for handling the election in time. A major reason for the postponement of the election could be ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Voter Registration and the political agenda staged by the monopolist dominated circle in the presidential palace, struggling to benefit by all means by Unaccounted Voting Cards monopolizing state power.
8 Subh Daily, volume No 359, June 14, 2010, Page 4, By M. Hashim Qiam ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ While the qualified voters who are eligible to vote are Noor Muhammad Noor: estimated to be twelve million, seventeen million voting cards have been issued during past five years according to statistics Candidates not Permitted given by the Independent Election Commission (IEC). to Use State Facilities
Now the concerns are rising that five million unaccounted Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 388, June 16, 2010, Page 1 voting cards as well as the possibility of using counterfeit color Noor Mohammad Noor, spokesman of Independent Election which is used for marking voter’s fingers on the election day, Commission (IED), speaking at a press conference said there may affect fairness and transparency of the election. would be no restrictions on the expenses of candidates during As there is three months for the registration process, possibly the electoral campaign lasting for nearly three months. the difference between the numbers of voters and the issued Meanwhile, he stressed that there are some exceptions, voting papers reach to more than 50 percent. The reason told requiring the candidates to fully care about. by IEC officials over the difference between ballot papers and “Firstly, the candidates cannot use state facilities for his/her voters is that some of the voters of last year presidential campaign or against other candidates and secondly, they are election who have move to another province or lost their voting not allowed to finance their campaign by illicitly‐made cash ‐ cards, have received new cards. Seemingly, the reasoning is not such as money gained by illegal means like drug trade ‐ or by convincing enough and cannot purge the suspicions. funds donated by foreign parties,” Noor said. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Transparency and Security, Unsecured Election Media Commission Started Work Conditions of the Forthcoming Election Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 388, June 16, 2010, Page 7 Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, volume No 386, June 14, 2010, Page 5 Delawar Nazirzooy, head of Media Commission for the As the security is the utmost need of a successful election, we Directorate of Independent Election Commission, speaking at a must acknowledge that the current undesirable security press conference, said the commission has started work to situation across the country may lead to postponement of the oversee publications of the electoral campaign in order to 12 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 assure a just campaign for the candidates. Nazirzooy added that Azimi added that controlling the public affairs of the cities and the Media Commission would also monitor the complaints developing intelligence to secure the roads are the shared regarding media publications during the election. security measures which the national security forces and foreign troops are going to implement. Overall 6835 electoral According to Nazirzooy, the media which violate electoral zones, comprising 20,000 polling stations, are planned for the regulations or report contrary to the article 10th of the election election which will be secured by the national police and army law or the IEC regulations would be obliged to pay 500 Afghanis forces. as fine after correcting the report. He urged the media to have a ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ just approach towards reporting electoral campaigns and to provide campaign space for all of the candidates. FEFA Not Authorized to Oversee the Election ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1455, June 19, 2010, Page 1 Parliamentary Candidates Finalized, Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission announced Unanswered Questions Remaining that the Free and Fair Election Foundation in Afghanistan (FEFA) would have only the right to witness the election process and 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 363, June 19, 2010, Page 2 enjoys no legal authority to oversee the parliamentary election. Regrettably, the conditions required for candidacy in the A press release issued by the commission reads that FEFA is a parliamentary election are minimal and insufficient in local election watcher which has obtained license from the Afghanistan’s constitution and rest of the laws. Due to this Independent Election Commission to witness the process of the problem, different people with disputed backgrounds would parliamentary election. have the opportunity for candidacy without any legal The FEFA had issued a press release on June 14, expressing restrictions. concerns on the process of parliamentary election in the Until there are no complaints against the candidates, based on country. The foundation mentioned some issues as the main the law the election commission would have no measures to obstacles to a fair and free election and published figures on the find out about their qualifications. As a result, different people registration process of the candidates, contradicting the facts with diverse backgrounds have managed to have their names and figures officially announced by the Independent Election on the preliminary list of parliamentary election, setting Commission. themselves to win the election and hold a seat in the next The Independent Election Commission has added in its press parliament of the country. release that the Free and Fair Election Foundation in Achievements of the Electoral Complaints Commission are Afghanistan (FEFA), based on its permit license is accredited as a highly depending on complaints and information it receives witness of the election process not as an election observer. The from the people. FEFA officials are well aware that witness organizations have little authority and obligations and different regulations of Undoubtedly not enough access for people to the local bureaus conducts than legal observers. of the commission, lack of public awareness over the process of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ examining the electoral complaints and distrust towards the officials, who do not observe justice and equity but have Lots‐Drawing Process of Candidates’ inclinations to political interests, have resulted to a lack of contribution of the people in the process of receiving electoral Names Gets Underway complaints. The Electoral Complaints Commission may have Bakhtar Daily, Volume No 259, June 20, 2010, Page 1 received negligible numbers of complaints and information on In order to organize a fair and free election, the Independent backgrounds of the parliamentary election candidates. Election Commission (IEC) started drawing lots to set the position of candidates’ names on the ballot papers. Fazl Ahmad ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Maanawi, head of the IEC, said since every candidate wants to 300,000 Security Personnel to be Deployed for have his/her name on the first page of the ballot paper, casting Election Security lots was the best way to determine the place of the candidates’
Bakhtar Daily, Volume No 257, June 19, 2010, Page 2 names on the paper. General Zahir Azimi, spokesman of the Defense Ministry, told at “We routinely discuss with our technical group and with the a press conference that 300,000 security personnel are ready to members of the commission to prepare the ground for a fair be stationed across the country for proving security of the and free election and to prevent the likely frauds and forthcoming parliamentary election. The Spokesman of the irregularities,” he said. Defense ministry said police force would be responsible for Meanwhile, Farid Afghanzai, in charge of the foreign relation of security of the polling stations and the responsibility of the IEC said, “According to the election law, each province is an facilitating transportation and travelling of the election officials electoral zone for the parliamentary election,” adding that, “for are up to the Afghan National Army. Kuchis, or nomads, the entire country is one electoral zone.” 13 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 The Final List of the Candidates announced 13 People Deprived of Participating in Parliamentary Election Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 394, June 23, 2010, Page 1
Charagh Daily, Volume No 107, June 20, 2010, Page 1 As the process of examining the candidates’ qualifications by the IEC and the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) ended, The Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) has about 2580 candidates from all over the country succeeded to removed names of thirteen candidates from the final list of go to the finalized list of the candidates. The list is containing candidates for Wolesi Jirga election. more than 2170 men, more than 400 women, including 50 The commission said investigations on the received complaints Kuchis. have proved their links with the armed illegal groups while The head of the Independent Election Commission announcing some of them had failed to resign from their governmental the final list of parliamentary candidates said 48 people posts. voluntarily gave up their candidate‐ship and more than 50 In the meantime, the Electoral Complaints Commission officials others were disqualified by the IEC and ECC and their names said probes are underway on the allegations against other eight were excluded from the final list. candidates who are accused of having ties with armed illegal Regarding the removal of the candidates, the head of the IEC groups. The commission has not disclosed the names yet. Fazl Ahmad Maanawi said those who have ties with armed illegal groups have been barred from running for the post, while ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ some others are disqualified by the Electoral Complaints Qanooni Expresses Doubts on Holding Commission. The head of the IEC also explained that according Parliamentary election to the new regulations for the electoral campaign, the candidates are not allowed to stick their electoral ads without 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 366, June 22, 2010, Page 1 prior permission of the owners of the properties and the Mohammad Younos Qanooni, speaker of the Lower House of officials. Those who violate the new procedures will be dealt the parliament, saidyesterday in an open session that due to according to the law. security concerns he did not count on the fairness and ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ transparency of the election. Qanooni added that while 9 out of 364 districts across the country are labeled as insecure by the How will be the Level of People’s security officials, it is unlikely to hold the parliamentary election Participation in Election? on September 18. The speaker of the parliament stressed that until the officials Mandegar Daily, Volume No 355, June 26, 2010, Page 8 guarantee the security of the forthcoming election, the people The political analyst Jawid Kuhistani said the degree of would not be able to go to polling stations. election participation among the people of Afghanistan is generally very low. He described the lack of security as a ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ main challenge for the election. “If counted precisely, the Zahir Azimi: real percentage will not be over 30 percent,” Kuhistani said, Parliamentary Election to be Secured adding that security is relatively better in some provinces such as Kabul, Herat and Balkh provinces, but due to a lack of Musharekat‐e‐Melli Weekly, Volume No 365, June 23, 2010, Page 8 security in other provinces, the people will not participate General Zahir Azimi, spokesman of the defense ministry, said extensively in the election. about 300,000 security personnel will take part in providing security for the forthcoming parliamentary election. Kuhistani believes that the electoral frauds in Afghanistan are more than what is displayed. “More than 50 percent of the In reaction to the media reports saying only 9 out of 364 votes will be fraudulent. When the frauds are not detected, it districts in the country are secured, Azimi said it does not mean appears that high numbers of people participated in election,” that the areas considered as being under threats of Taliban are Kushistani specified that the forthcoming Wolesi Jirga election necessarily insecure, but they are facing security threats during also will not be legitimate and fair. the parliamentary election. Moeen Marastial, a Wolesi Jirga member, said the degree of Earlier, Munir Mangal, the acting minister of the interior public participation and the likely frauds are related to security. ministry, at a parliamentary hearing session said from the “If there is no security and if the government is unable to districts being threatened, 114 districts are under serious threat provide security during election neither after the day of but other areas are facing average or low‐level security threats. election, the people will participate at a low level which itself According to comments of the security officials and the media prepares the ground for frauds,” Marastial said. reports, it appears that 1657 small insurgent groups consisting He added that in many provinces relatives of the local about 25000 men including 3000 foreigners, are active in influential and powerful figures are nominated for insurgency for disrupting the election. parliamentary election, indicating that some specific power‐ 14 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 linked circles may help them in the election. More importantly, Noor Mohammad Noor, spokesman of the Independent the people are interested in the election process, Marastial said. Election Commission (IEC), said that regarding the election Due to security reasons in some areas, a part of the people campaigns, there are procedures being applied by the IEC, and might not be able to go to polling stations. Since the Afghan whoever goes contrary to the procedures, is breaching the society is consisting of different ethnic groups, obviously election law and will be dealt according to the relevant laws in credibility of the election will face serious questions, if the the country. parliament does not represent all of the ethnic groups, he said. He added that the candidates can paste up their posters only at .the places specified by the municipalities ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Limited Voter Registration Centers Hinder Meanwhile, Ahmad Zia Rafaat, the spokesman and member of the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), said that the People’s Participation in Election election campaigns officially started by 12:00 AM on June 23. Mandegar Daily, Volume No 346, June 15, 2010, Page 8, By Yama Amiri Rafaat added that if the ECC receives any complaints over the preterm start of the campaign by some candidates, they will be Some candidates for parliamentary election told Mandegar dealt by legal means. Daily that the Independent Election Commission (IEC) had to organize more registration centers in Kabul city and other districts of Kabul province to facilitate the process of issuing voting cards for the people. They believe that more than 60 percent of eligible voters in Kabul city do not have voting cards and the IEC would not be able to issue voting cards for the people as it has organized only two registration centers in
Kabul. “The ongoing voter registration is aimed at helping the candidates who are being supported by the government,” one of the candidates said. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Voter Registration Process and the Challenges in Herat Province
Irada Daily, Volume No 1873, June 20, 2010, Page 2 As the campaign for Wolesi Jirga election race is looming, only one voter registration center is opened in Herat province which is called insufficient by the people of the province. Laila Ahrari, head of the local bureau of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) in Herat province, acknowledged the problems, saying that currently one voter registration is launched in the province, with two sections for men and another section for women. She said one week after the beginning of the process, about 1060 voting cards have been issued for the voters in Herat province. “So far the IEC has received many proposals to open voter registration centers in the districts, but due to financial, transportation and security challenges, it might not be possible to consider the proposals,” Ahrari said. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Candidates Begin Campaign Before the IEC Scheduled Date
Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1460, June 24, 2010, Page 1 Electoral campaigns by the parliamentary election candidates officially started on June 23, although some candidates started campaigns the night before, pasting up their ad‐posters on the walls. 15 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 Corruption
Setting Priorities in Fighting Corruption Failed Government and Silence of the
8 Subh Daily, Volume No 358, June 13, 2010, Page 1 Opposition Waiting for Unforeseen Tomorrow
Officials from the Anti‐corruption Directorate, speaking at a Mandegar Daily, Volume No 344, June 13, 2010, Page 1 conference, asked the government agencies to provide their The international community and internal experts believe top three priorities on fighting corruption which could be that Karazai’s administration is the most corrupt and ethno‐ applicable within the next six months and send it to the Anti‐ centered government which Afghanistan is experiencing in corruption directorate. Yasin Usmani, chief of the the twenty first century. While Karzai is widely misusing directorate, said the measure was aimed to crackdown the state’s power, silence of the parliament and the opposition corruption rapidly. group provide the opportunity for him and his team to follow The initiative was proposed in the London Conference but it is his political agenda. yet to be implemented, he said. Usmani added the issue of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ fighting corruption would be discussed seriously in the forthcoming Kabul Conference, stressing that the conference US Intelligence Reveals Corruption was crucial for Afghanistan. Cases in Afghanistan Ahmad Mashahid, head of the Independent Administrative [ Reform and Civil Service Commission, stated that factors Bakhtar Daily, volume No 255, June 14, 2010, Page 4 such as low wages, unaccountability of the officials and US Military Intelligence in Afghanistan has increasingly focused staff, nepotism and lack of official behavior are the main on fighting the rampant corruption in the country, revealing reasons for corruption. He stressed that all factors which corruption cases in government agencies, security organizations result to corruption, will be dealt decisively with by the and the foreign contract firms. relevant agencies. An analysis posted on (posted is for webpages ‐ printed newspaper: published in) New York Times magazine says the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ investigations lead US forces to high‐ranking Afghan officials Without Retribution, such as Karzai’s family members who are accused of being Eliminating Corruption Impossible involved in illegal narcotics trade. US contractors are also
accused of financial infractions in Afghanistan and may pursue Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1450, June 13, 2010, Page 1 by US intelligence new initiative. In a conference discussing the fighting of corruption, Muhammad Yasin Usmani, head of High Office for According an American official, previously US intelligence had Overseeing Implementation of Strategy on Fighting focused on hunt of insurgents, but now it has shifted to the Corruption, said the international community would express Afghan government to curb the prevalent corruption. its commitment on continued assistances to financial, In October 2009 NATO top officials established an office for cultural and social sectors in Afghanistan. He insisted that fighting corruption. Until the present time, the initiative has fighting effectively against corruption is a major condition of gained some victories, suing a number of regional security the international community for the continuance of their officials due to their financial wrongdoings. assistance to Afghanistan. According to US intelligence officials, such operations are yet to “Good governance will be at the top of Kabul Conference be expanded but it is a warning to Afghan top security officials agenda and the first priority in good governance is fighting to heed the issue. An US official said, they would continue their corruption,” Usmani said. He added that fighting corruption efforts against corruption, because in fighting insurgent groups, would be a main condition of international donors for the corrupt police force cannot be tolerated. Afghanistan. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Dr. Ahmad Mashahid, chief of the Independent Administrative Reform and Civil Service Commission, claimed the widespread Two NSD Personnel Indicted for Bribery corruption in Afghanistan was more dangerous than war, insisting the issue needs comprehensive national and Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, volume No 1451, June 14, 2010, Page 1 international partnership. Mashahid said, unless there are Two personnel of Afghan National Security Directorate are rewards and punishments, eliminating corruption would be a sentenced to prison after being charged on associating drug difficult task. trafficking, hindering investigations and taking bribes. 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010
Khalilurrahman Motawakil, head of media office of Judicial Saudi Arabia but the results of the probes are yet to be Center for Fighting Corruption, said the court sentenced each of announced. It is notable that he, as a deputy Kabul mayor, was them to five years in prison after the charges were proven. campaigning for Karzai’s presidential bid, using state facilities. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Karzai: Japan’s Aid to be Used Effectively Peace in Kandahar at Any Cost Bakhtar Daily, Volume No 258, June 19, 2010, Page 1 Afghanistan Daily, volume No 1120, June 14, 2010, Page 1 President Karzai on his trip to Japan will assure Japanese President Hamid Karzai, during a visit to Kandahar province, officials that the country’s aid to Afghanistan will be spent stressed that unless the youth goes to army and wipes out responsible, responding to the concerns of Japanese officials corruption, peace would not be achieved in Afghanistan. about wasting the country’s aid for Afghanistan. “Private security firms, which receive funds from foreign The Afghan government has always insisted that international donors, are the main origin of corruption, building a parallel aid must be spent through Afghanistan’s government channels, state to the government of Afghanistan,” Karzai said. a demand which mostly have been ignored by big international Karzai blasted at contracts worth millions of dollars by foreign donors for Afghanistan. Apparently, it seems that the forces in Bagram and Kandahar, saying the money are used in widespread corruption in government agencies of Afghanistan plundering and illegal activities. President Karzai asked the is a main reason for the reluctance of foreign donors to funnel people of Kandahar not to pile up wealth by trampling the their funds directly through the government. country, law and the people of Afghanistan. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The president insisted he was serious with the international community on the issue and would prevent illegal activities. “To A Committee for Inspecting Corruption in fight corruption, at first this affliction must be ended, because Foreign Organizations the corruption and all illegal activities are fed with their money Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1455, June 19, 2010, Page 1 and assistance,” Karzai said. The officials have announced that a committee will be established under the High Office of Oversight on ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ People Get Informed on Assets of the Implementation of Strategy for Fighting Corruption to oversee Government Officials efforts on fighting corruption in Afghan government agencies and international organizations. It is said that the main job of Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1452, June 15, 2010, Page 1 the commission would be to inspect corruption within foreign In a cabinet meeting, President Hamid Karzai directed the head organizations. of the High Office of Oversight on Strategy for Fighting Yasin Usmani, head of the anti‐corruption High Office, said Corruption to publish the recorded wealth of cabinet ministers corruption and embezzlement is prevalent in non‐governmental and other high ranking officials through mass media. organizations, adding that the main factor of growth of According to article No 154 of the constitution, high ranking corruption is money and secret dealings. Usmani added millions officials of the state are required to register their assets, of dollars are spent by non‐governmental organizations which assuring the people of transparency during their tenure in the are neither accountable to Afghan government nor to the donor government. countries. Regarding the prosecution of foreigners who are involved in ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ embezzlements, the head of the Anti‐corruption High Office Corruption‐Charged Official Rewarded said according to the law, when afghan citizens are accused of
Mandegar Daily, Volume No 347, June 16, 2010, Page 1 corruption, they will be pursued according to national laws, but when the foreigners are facing corruption charges, they will be Wahabuddin Sadat, an ex‐deputy Kabul mayor, who earlier had on trial according to the laws of their own country. been arrested by authority of the attorney general over charges ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ of embezzlement, is appointed as financial and administrative deputy to the ministry of telecommunication and information Bank Accounts of Corruption‐Charged technology. Sadat, who was recommended for the post by the Officials blocked ministry of the telecommunication and IT, is approved by [ president Karzai. Rah‐e‐Najat Daily, Volume No 1455, June 19, 2010, Page 2 Previously, Afghan prosecutors had charged Wahabuddin Sadat The Attorney General’s office and the Afghanistan Bank blocked and former Kabul mayor Abdul Ahad Sahebi of embezzling bank accounts of 18 high‐ranking ex‐officials, including hundreds of thousands Afghanis in a municipal contract. Sadat Muhammad Sadiq Chakari, former minister of Hajj and was arrested at Kabul airport last year when he came back from Devotion. 17 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 Plus to having accounts in banks of Afghanistan, Chakari had where it is taken, Aziz said. some bank accounts in banks of Bahrain and England which Ahmad Jibraeeli, Herat representative in the parliament, presently are blocked, being no longer active in transactions. believes the relevant laws of the country on the exploitation of Fazl Ahmad Faqiryar, a deputy to the Attorney General, said the mines are inefficient. In order to prevent corruption in although Chakari holds British citizenship, Afghanistan expected contracts the laws must be modified, Jibraeeli said. the British government to extradite him to Afghanistan. Faqiryar Mohammad Younus Qanooni, the Afghan parliament speaker, also announced that the cases of three former ministers, which said the parliament would try to oversee the bidding process were filed on their roles in corruption, are completed and soon and giving mining concessions to foreign firms. “We are not will be sent to the Anti‐Corruption High Court. against exploitation of the mineral reserves, but we are against ,misusing the exploitation of the mines.” Qanooni specified ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ adding that the exploitation of the underground wealth is for Collective Determination for Eliminating the people’s advantage and must be extracted. Qanooni said Corruption the mines should be exploited but there must be guarantees to prevent misuse and avoid non‐scientific explorations. Sorosh‐e‐Mellat Daily, Volume No 391, June 20, 2010, Page 3 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ By Maisam Shahryar The coalition forces led by the US (have tasked?? assigned or: Corruption and Intransparent Regulations authorized) a new team to investigate corruption allegations in the private foreign firms which are working in security, supply, more Dangerous than Insurgency construction fields and other services in Afghanistan, being Bakhtar Daily, Volume No 259, June 20, 2010, Page 1 employed by the foreign countries. Domestic and international investors are put out of patience An US military official said the coalition paid 14 million dollars to because of the non‐transparent laws and widespread the companies only during last year, but there was no oversight corruption in the country. Most of the investors who were on the contracts expenses and the process was mostly interested in Afghanistan’s market, after first steps disparately neglected. went back to their countries. US officials who are involved in the team say in addition to Mahmood Karzai, the first deputy of Chamber of Commerce and private security firms, activities of all NATO‐funded contractors Industry of Afghanistan, said foreign investors complained that involved in supplying food and fuel for NATO forces and they do not know whether how much and to whom they should constructing clinics, schools and other projects in the remote pay the taxes. According to Karzai, the foreign firms are even villages will be investigated. An US military official said their asked to pay the Ushr, or one tenth of the assets. He continued most concerns are on the secondary contracts, in other term, the only way for attracting foreign investments is to clarify the the contracts which are turned to many hands. laws and regulations. If such trend continues, there is not much The New York Times reported that the contract firms have hope to prepare the ground for huge investments to extract the strong relations with the warlords and the power‐dealers, enormous underground wealth of the country, Karzai said. causing a situation in which a large portion of the cash, instead In order to receive bribes, the corrupt officers of the border customs of being spent on construction projects, goes to the pockets of keep the containers stalled for many days by false and unfounded the strongmen, subsequently heading to the foreign banks. pretexts until the owner company is compelled to pay bribes. The corrupt officers prefer to gain a petty at the expense of the loss of .tens of thousands of dollars customs taxes for the government ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ MPs Oppose Likely Misuse of Mineral Exploitations Construction of Azizi and Gulbahar Centers to 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 364, June 20, 2010, Page 4 be Suspended Fatima Aziz, deputy chief of the Communication and 8 Subh Daily, Volume No 365, June 21, 2010, Page 4 Telecommunication Commission of the Wolesi Jirga, Lower House of the parliament, in a parliamentary session called on The Central Commission for Inspection and Overseeing the president not to start exploiting the mineral reserves in the Implementation of the Parliament’s Approved Laws said the country. She asked the president to issue a decree, banning construction projects on Azizi and Gulbahar business centers exploitation of mineral reserves until the country is secure and are to be suspended due to shortcomings on the legal process corruptions are eliminated. of municipal regulations of the construction projects. The commission directed a committee under the supervision of the The corruption is widespread; the media and press do not have High Anti‐Corruption Office to complete the documents of the access to the areas where mineral reserves are found. both cases within 15 days and present them to the parliament. Therefore, in case of starting the exploitation, whatever happens during the exploitations, we would not get informed Earlier, the ministry of Information and Culture had officially about and it would be impossible to know what is exploited and lodged complaints that its lands were seized by Azizi and 18 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 Gulbahar Centers. Over the issue, the Central Commission for Inspection and Overseeing Implementation of the Parliament’s Approved Laws summoned owner companies of the projects and some government officials. Abdul Wahid Ahad, a deputy to the Kabul mayor, complained on meddling of some government ministries to the affairs of the municipality, adding that the municipality has not issued construction permits for Azizi and Gulbahar business centers. But the owners of Azizi and Gulbahar centers insist that they have permits from the president and the vice‐presidents for the constructions. Meanwhile, the head of Office for Administrative Affairs Sadeq Modabber, who is responsible for the complaints and petition letters to the president, told the hearing session that the decrees issued by the president and his aides were conditioned to the consent of the ministry of city constructions and the Kabul municipality. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Ministry of Mines Officials Complain against Shahrani
Bakhtar Daily, Volume No 263, June 26, 2010, Page 3 When Wahidullah Shahrani assumed the leadership of the ministry of mines, he has inserted a group of unprofessional and inexperienced individuals into the ministry who dominate all the decision making without having the least concept and capabilities. The group consisting of up to 20 officials, in collusion with the minister, used to illegally enforce measures in the ministries of finance and industries and trade. Mr. Shahrani appoints his favorite men in the ministry illegally and without considering norm such as competency, capability and professions. The ministry of mines announced bidding for oil and gas at Qashqari Block in Sar‐e Pul province. In the bidding, only the International Orient Company offered its proposal and the evaluation commission under the direction of the commission of the relevant ministers, as described in the laws of mining, put the proposal under assessment. Though the proposal of the company was faulty and contrary to the conditions of the bidding, the minister of mines struggled to have the proposal approved. The evaluation commission rejected the proposal, while Mr. Shahrani in a press interview called the company a big and credible international firm. After the rejection of the proposal, the minister of mines perceived that he is not able to implement his agendas in presence of professionals and engineers of the ministry who have admirable profession and experiences. Therefore, contrary to all legal norms and the presidential decrees, Mr. Shahrani went ahead with dismissing the most professional and high‐ skilled cadres of the ministry, a move, as the minister himself said, that will be continued. Embezzlement of 37000 US dollars as the guest‐house rent taken from the income of mining exploitations, ineffectual foreign travels, organizing unnecessary and unjustified subdivisions in the ministry and buying luxury things are some of the cases happening in the ministry of mines. 19 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, JuneJune 30, 2010 Articles & Interviews Sustaining peace by making it just
Dr. Muhammad Amin Ahmadi, Chancellor of Ibn-e Sina Institute of Higher Education and a member of the Supervisory Commission on the Implementation of the Constitution
Defining Peace and Justice are violated and these injustices have certainly affected their According to law and the Sharia, peace is a contract that there lives. For instance, depriving girls from getting education by a are parties as well as a dispute. In the meantime, the dispute is political regime is a sample of severe, cruel and unjust acts. to be over a right which the parties claim for themselves or for a Similarly, depriving certain individual or groups of individuals of third party. As the law defines, if the claim of one side is not opportunities to participate in power, gain employment, jobs, provable based on reasonable evidences, or even it is, but both education, and travel and acquire residence based on their parties of the dispute see their interests in abandoning the case racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds, are unjust acts which and agreeing on outcomes which satisfy both sides, the two profoundly affect individual and collective lives. Moreover, if parties abandon the dispute or hostility. This sort of agreement any regime, a real or legal person takes opportunity of life from and decision to end dispute and enmity is called solh or others, commits torture, physical violence against an individual mosaleha meaning peace. If we generalize such concept of or a group of individuals, they commit not only as unjust acts peace, axiomatically, all disputes and hostilities have involved but also crime. two sides or more in a dispute in which each party have entered the contention with a claim. The dispute might be ideological in Transitional justice emerged as a nature or about claims on rights. However, when the response to these atrocities that Justice requires contenders of a dispute, instead of obtaining their claims fully, usually occur under the aegis of give up continuing struggle and content themselves with the regimes of terror and fear or compensation for the least of their demands, the outcome can be called settlement, racist, sectarian, totalitarian and rights violated. When regimes or at times of crisis such compromise or peace. In these situations, there are always there is inequality in a middle grounds that can satisfy the contending parties. If this as civil war. It aims to compensate exists and is agreed upon, it is called peace. for the rights of victims of society and some have atrocities, heal their sufferings and There are different definitions for justice. But justice as a basis punish the perpetrators. In fact, lost opportunities of a of democratic systems can be defined as equal treatment of all the transitional justice is better life and their life humane individuals as fundamentally equal individuals. This is compensatory justice. Usually, an equalitarian definition of justice. According to this, implementation of such type of and possessions are individuals are assumed to be equals and based on their justice is considered when new encroached on, justice intrinsic equality they are entitled to equal treatment. Based on political and legal systems are requires that measures the definition, if individuals do not enjoy their fundamental established in the society. Under rights and freedoms as well as equal opportunities, their rights these circumstances, these to compensate for their are violated and they are subjected to injustices and questions arise: what should be lost opportunities and discriminations. done for the sufferings of the Why Transitional Justice? victims and how to redress the harms they have violated rights? Should the rights Keeping this definition of justice in mind, conducts that breach suffered. violated be compensated or not? the principles of justice are those that violate the basic rights and freedoms of individuals that are entitled to equal and non‐ Justice requires compensation for the rights violated. When discriminatory treatments. As such when opportunities for the there is inequality in a society and some have lost opportunities individuals such as opportunities for development, good life, of a better life and their life and possessions are encroached on, utilizing one’s potentials and talents and pursuit of good virtues justice requires that measures to compensate for their lost and skill that are essential for good humane life are taken by opportunities and harms they have suffered. Transitional and persons, groups, governments and organizations, their rights reparatory justice is applied at a time when there is a transition 20 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.orghttp://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14,13, JuneJune 30,15, 2010 from crisis, conflict, atrocities and oppression to a new era in justice is mainly focused on how to return rights of the suffered which justice is to be administered and oppressions and ones and compensate for material and psychological harms aggressions are to be ended. The critical question at the inflicted on the victims. Thus the process of trials and moments of transition is how to deal with those who suffered in punishments for the offenders is a part of implementation of the past? Should their sufferings and deprivations be justice and an essential obligation for justice. compensated? The principle of justice and our interpretation of Compensation and Prosecution justice oblige us to redress the violated rights of the victims. In order to administer justice for those victims whose rights are Injustice and oppression have always been conducted in violated, at first there should be attention to compensate their different forms. Seizing opportunities from a generation or a lost rights. Through compensation, a major part of justice would group of people is a kind of injustice. Based on the norms of be administered and dignity of the victims shall be restored and justice, the deprivation and violation must be amended. The the conscience of those who have been harmed during the war responsibility for the compensation first lies with the shall be healed. Judicial prosecution of the most serious crimes perpetrators and second with the government and other is also central to implementation of justice. Regardless of relevant state institutions. whether we achieve sustainable peace or not, we are obliged to prosecute the perpetrator of the most serious crimes. Of course, the judicial process must be entirely non‐political and In order to administer justice for those victims whose purely legal. rights are violated, at first there should be attention to It is important to highlight that during the war in Afghanistan, compensate their lost rights. Through compensation, a crimes have been committed and that many of these crimes major part of justice would be administered and were purposefully and deliberately planned and perpetrated by certain individuals and groups. Notably, the atrocities dignity of the victims shall be restored and the committed by Taliban and Soviet‐backed regimes are the most conscience of those who have been harmed during the evident. The period, after the collapse of Dr Najibullah’s war shall be healed. government, Afghanistan witnessed atrocities such as the mass massacre in Afshar of Kabul and other war crimes took place by the belligerent Mujahedin factions throughout the years of civil Let’s expand it a bit further. The Taliban regime banned girls war. from going to school. It was a violation of rights of a group. Depriving a group of people from getting education based on Justice as a moral principle requires prosecution of those who their gender is an act of injustice, which naturally have affected have committed crimes. But will prosecution of perpetrators their lives and wasted their opportunity for a better life. When and transitional justice contribute toward consolidation of there is no special court for redressing such losses, the peace? Will this sustain peace? To answer these questions we government and the state agencies are responsible to must look at the present situation of the country. Of course, compensate such deprivations. It means that the compensatory administering justice would contribute toward sustainability of justice is also applicable to such individuals or groups. peace by warning active and potential criminals and terminating Most of the deprivations which the individuals and ethnic, a culture of impunity. Implementation of justice would prove religious or racial groups face are results of past injustices and that the government and the judicial system have gained the violation of justice. Some consequences of past injustices can be capabilities of administering justice and can protect peace and compensated and it is the obligation of the government and the security of the country. This goal would be achievable only national institutions to compensate. when the state can enforce the rule of law and the accusation Other aspects of transitional justice are judicial and related to of crimes are probed by a fair and capable judicial system. punishment of the perpetrators. For instance, an individual or a Otherwise, given the multiple centers of power and ethnic group of them have been subjected to violence. Whether to composition of the country, it is highly unlike that even victims punish the violators or not, is different from compensatory of violence would support the process and the process be justice. In compensatory justice, the focus is on how to deal implemented successfully. with sufferings and the losses which a person or a group of Regretfully, during past thirty years of war violence and them have sustained. The losses may material or non‐material. commission of crimes have predominated and have become In both cases the violated rights of the people must redressed. If part of dominant and general culture of the country. During a person commits violence, according to the principles of their rule, the Soviet‐backed government blatantly resorted to justice, the violator must be tried. But the trial of the offender is violence. The Taliban, as a political regime with its own a part of justice and only a small portion of justice, because the interpretation of religion and ethnic identity, committed trial of the violators of human rights does not remedy the horrible crimes and the victims of Taliban violence were sufferings which the victims sustain. The court may try different from the atrocities of the communists. Some of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity and may sentence past violence were motivated by ideological, others by ethnic or them to life prison, but it is rather different than redressing the sectarian reasons or a combination of them. So far, the harms and losses which the victims suffered. A compensatory sentiments of the victims as a group have not tied together to 21 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.orghttp://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14,13, JuneJune 30,15, 2010 overcome their ethnic, religious and ideological diversities. To perpetrators of the war crimes. The reason for this sympathy is the contrary, some of victims instead of rallying for a common the collapse of central authority during the war that created a national cause of justice have thrown their support behind situation in which the warring factions could protect some those who are accused of committing war crimes in the country. populations and victimize others. These factions offered This is making the task of differentiating the perpetrator from security to those who pledged loyalty and support. Under these the victims extraordinarily complicated. This is a major circumstances if individuals and communities were to survive, challenge for administrating justice and complicates the they had to join one faction or the other. This situation will relationship between peace and justice. change if a representative state that enforces the rule of law is Those who are accused of violence, see themselves as the established, a legitimate state that protects all citizens of protector of some groups of victims. In order to protect Afghanistan. A representative system is not the one in which all themselves during the years of war and violence, the people ethnic groups are represented but one in which ethnicity, race sought the protection of those who committed violence and and language have no place in the legal bureaucracies of the crimes and had created their own realm of power and control country. For instance, a good example of such bureaucracy and across the country. In other words, during past thirty years, the administration is a bank. A bank is an institution where clients country had no legitimate and capable central state that could are not asked about their ethnicity or social status, because the exercise a monopoly on lawful use of violence. Under these bank has nothing to do with ethnicity of the clients. It only asks circumstances, the society fragmented into different parts each about their money and according to its rules and regulations controlled by those who used violence to gain power and where create accounts for them. Until such national institutions are in ordinary civilians could gain some level of security if they place in the country, the corporations that offer security and pledged their allegiance to the dominant individuals and groups. protect people’s alleged rights and interest will continue to Thus in absence of legitimate and inclusive national survive and command the loyalty of certain sections of the government, multiple centers of power emerged and within population. these centers security would be granted in return for support and allegiance.
Now the main issue is that to what extent we have the capability to bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice and what are the main obstacles to administer justice for the victims of the war crimes. In my opinion, four main challenges can be listed: First, the victims were subjected to violence as separate and unrelated groups in different periods and by different groups and regimes. Some of the victims have emotional ties to some of perpetrators. As a result, the victims lack a common voice and remain fragmented. The second challenge, as mentioned before, delinking transitional justice from political groups and rivalries in the country. The third challenge is weak remit of the rule of law and authority of law enforcement agencies. And the fourth challenge is lack of capacity in our judicial system to conduct such large scale and complicated prosecutions. Three years ago, a relatively large number of people were mobilized by former mujahedin organizations to protest against Action Plan for transitional justice and defend groups that are responsible for atrocities like the Afshar massacre of 1993. How can this be explained? This results from particular stratification of the society as well as the structure of power in Afghanistan. It does not take a lot of efforts to detect that those who dominate the centers of power, both in and outside the government have been involved in past war crimes. Therefore, if the transitional justice is to be administered, all of centers of power must be called into question. Can a government that derives its legitimacy from the votes of the people together with judicial system and the civil society organizations prosecute these crimes? In theory yes and this is how many societies have succeeded. The problem is that due to the social stratifications and the ethnic composition of Afghan society, the some groups of victims sympathizes with some 22 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.orghttp://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010
New publications
Rebuilding Afghanistan’s Political Immunity United States Institute of Peace(USIP) / By Miakhel, Shahmahmood / June 18, 2010 The national conflict between the Afghan government and its allies and the Taliban‐led insurgency is fed by a myriad of smaller con"icts on a provincial and local level. In the insurgency‐affected parts of the country, such con"icts traditionally have been managed by councils of tribal elders known as jirgas or shuras. Thirty years of violence and upheaval have disrupted and weakened the jirga system. USIP’s Dispute Resolution Project is establishing dispute resolution commissions, comprised of respected elders, to try to resolve inter‐group disputes with the potential to contribute to the broader conflict. Through continuous interaction and discussion with commission members and other stakeholders in their respective provinces, the project is identifying challenges and opportunities to reinvigorate and improve the system. These pilot projects will yield a set of concrete, experience‐based recommendations for interventions on a larger scale. Link: http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/USIP_RebuildingAfghanistansPoliticalImmunity.pdf ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Pakistan, Afghanistan begin talks about dealing with insurgents Washingtonpost / By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung / June 19, 2010 Afghanistan and Pakistan are talking about how to make peace with insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan, including one faction considered the coalition forces' most lethal foe, according to Pakistani and U.S. officials. Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/article/2010/06/18/AR2010061805638.html?wprss=rss_world/asia ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan United States House of Representatives / June 21, 2010 In Afghanistan, the U.S. military faces one of the most complicated and difficult supply chains in the history of warfare. The task of feeding, fueling, and arming American troops at over 200 forward operating bases and combat outposts sprinkled across a difficult and hostile terrain with only minimal road infrastructure is nothing short of herculean. In order to accomplish this mission, the Department of Defense employs a hitherto unprecedented logistics model: responsibility for the supply chain is almost entirely outsourced to local truckers and Afghan private security providers. The private security companies that protect the convoys are frequently involved in armed conflict with alleged insurgents, rival security providers, and other criminal elements. The security providers report having lost hundreds of men over the course of the last year alone, though the veracity of these reports is difficult to judge. Many of the firefights purportedly last for hours and involve significant firepower and frequent civilian casualties. Indeed, in an interview with the Subcommittee staff, the leading convoy security commander in Afghanistan said that he spent $1.5 million on ammunition per month. From one perspective, the HNT contract works quite well: the HNT providers supply almost all U.S. forward operating bases and combat outposts across a difficult and hostile terrain while only rarely needing the assistance of U.S. troops. Nearly all of the risk on the supply chain is borne by contractors, their local Afghan truck drivers, and the private security companies that defend them. But outsourcing the supply chain in Afghanistan to contractors has also had significant unintended consequences. The HNT contract fuels warlordism, extortion, and corruption, and it may be a significant source of funding for insurgents. In other words, the logistics contract has an outsized strategic impact on U.S. objectives in Afghanistan. Link: http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/USGOV_WarlordInc.pdf ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Negotiating with the Taliban: Issues and Prospects The Century Foundation / By Giustozzi, Antonio / June 21, 2010 This report will discuss different aspects of the organization of Taliban in succession. One particular concern is how united (or disunited) the Taliban are; this, in a sense, is the crux of the problem. Is the control exercised by the leadership of the Taliban sufficiently strong to deliver on any negotiated settlement? Or is the control weak enough to allow for easily co‐opting or buying off individual commanders, avoiding the pursuit of a settlement with the political leadership? Link: http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/TCF‐Negotiating‐with‐the‐Taliban‐Issues‐Prospects.pdf ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan United States House of Representatives / By Tierney, John F. / June 21, 2010‐07‐10 In Afghanistan, the U.S. military faces one of the most complicated and difficult supply chains in the history of warfare. The task of feeding, fueling, and arming American troops at over 200 forward operating bases and combat outposts sprinkled across a difficult 23 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org
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No 14, June 30, 2010 and hostile terrain with only minimal road infrastructure is nothing short of herculean. In order to accomplish this mission, the Department of Defense employs a hitherto unprecedented logistics model: responsibility for the supply chain is almost entirely outsourced to local truckers and Afghan private security providers. The private security companies that protect the convoys are frequently involved in armed conflict with alleged insurgents, rival security providers, and other criminal elements. The security providers report having lost hundreds of men over the course of the last year alone, though the veracity of these reports is difficult to judge. Many of the firefights purportedly last for hours and involve significant firepower and frequent civilian casualties. Indeed, in an interview with the Subcommittee staff, the leading convoy security commander in Afghanistan said that he spent $1.5 million on ammunition per month. From one perspective, the HNT contract works quite well: the HNT providers supply almost all U.S. forward operating bases and combat outposts across a difficult and hostile terrain while only rarely needing the assistance of U.S. troops. Nearly all of the risk on the supply chain is borne by contractors, their local Afghan truck drivers, and the private security companies that defend them. But outsourcing the supply chain in Afghanistan to contractors has also had significant unintended consequences. The HNT contract fuels warlordism, extortion, and corruption, and it may be a significant source of funding for insurgents. In other words, the logistics contract has an outsized strategic impact on U.S. objectives in Afghanistan. Link: http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/USGOV_WarlordInc.pdf ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Corruption Suspected in Airlift of Billions in Cash from Kabul The Wall Street Journal / By Matthew Rosenberg / June 25, 2010 More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad. Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704638504575318850772872776.html?mod=googlenews_wsj ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The Irreconcilables: The Haqqani Network Institute For The Study of War /By Jeffrey Dressler / June 28, 2010 As the Karzai administration continues to press ahead with preliminary outreach to insurgents, Pakistan has quietly stepped in to offer their assistance. The Pakistanis have reportedly offered to help reach out to the murderous Haqqani organization in the hopes of bringing the movement’s leader, Siraj Haqqani, to the negotiating table; however, any proposed deal with the Haqqanis is directly at odds with President Obama’s reaffirmed commitment to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Haqqanis rely on Al Qaeda for mass appeal, funding, resources and training, and in return provide Al Qaeda with shelter, protection and a means to strike foreign forces in Afghanistan and beyond. Any negotiated settlement with the Haqqanis threatens to undermine the raison d’etre for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan over the past decade. Link: Link: http://www.understandingwar.org/files/BackgrounderHaqqaniNetwork.pdf ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Reconciliation efforts with Afghan militants face major obstacle Los Angeles Times / By Alex Rodriguez and Laura King / June 29, 2010 Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Kabul, — Prospects for an effort by Pakistan to broker a reconciliation between the government of neighboring Afghanistan and a violent wing of the Afghan Taliban depend on overcoming a major obstacle: severing long‐standing relations between the militant group and Al Qaeda. Link: Link: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jun/29/world/la‐fg‐pakistan‐haqqani‐20100630
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No 14, June 30, 2010
Media Analyst: Ahmad Zia Mohammadi is only responsible for what it writes Translated by: Abdul Ahad Bahrami like notes, analysis and comments. Haqiqat is Edited by: Mechthild Exo not responsible for news, reports and articles Designed by: Ahmad Zia Mohammadi selected from media sources, the responsibility is returned to the publisher. Reporter: Razia Azimi
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