Number 2, July 31, 2009 A publication of watch

Introduction

You are reading the second biweekly edition of Haqiqat/The Truth. Like the first edition, it includes excerpts from news, article and reports in the Afghan media related to four main issues: transitional justice, reconciliation and negotiation with the anti‐government forces, corruption and elections transparency. During the last two weeks, negotiations with the anti‐government forces attracted a lot of attention followed by transitional justice, or broadly speaking the question of how to deal with past crimes.

The following key developments are included in this edition: Transitional Justice: As in the previous edition, most of the discussion related to past crimes and

transitional justice focused on the killing of prisoners in Dasht‐e Laili in late 2001. In a press conference, Dr. , Chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and Kei Eide the UN Special Representative to Afghanistan expressed concerns that alleged war criminals are on the final list of presidential and provincial councils elections. Another interesting development took place at an elections gathering in Helmand in which a participant started throwing his shoes at Shahnawaz Tanai, a presidential candidate and former minister of defense in the 1980s and accused him of committed crimes in the past. Reconciliation and Negotiation with the Anti‐Government Forces:

This section covers news and articles related to plans of presidential candidates and international calls to negotiate with the Taliban and other anti‐government forces. It appears there is a shared agreement amongst the candidates on the need for negotiation and political settlement. Karzai has promised to call a national jirga to initiate the process. Elections Transparency: Concerns related to lack of transparency in the electoral process and exploitation of public resources in campaigning for have consistently appeared in the Afghan electronic and print media over the past two weeks. Political commentators and journalists have talked about potential chances for fraud and irregularities.

Corruption: Most candidates have highlighted corruption in the Afghan state agencies as a major national issue. Most of them present it as a major failure of President Karzai over the past eight years. Dr. consistently describes the government as the fifth most corrupt in the world. News and articles related to a new government strategy to fight corruption are also included. Some authors have pointed fingers at foreigners accusing them of being more corrupt than the Afghan government.

The Truth is a bi‐weekly publication of the Afghanistan Watch supported by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). It is intended to provide a snapshot of how the Afghan media and candidates for Presidential and Provincial Councils Elections debate and approach these key issues facing the country: transitional justice, corruption, elections transparency and negotiationsPURL: with the https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/2cdb36/ armed insurgents. If you wish to subscribe please send an email to [email protected] or visit our website: www.watchafghanistan.org Inside This Issue

Transitional Justice Lack of a Clear Strategy towards the Taliban… 10 Some Afghanistan Elections Candidates Have … 3 Whoever Cooperates With Taliban His House… 11 Ceasefire an Opportunity for Taliban American Forces were Involved in Killing Taliban 3 11 Pressures Mounting on Karzai 3 Negotiation with Taliban, Repetition of Failed … 11 A Legal View on Obama’s Order on Investigation… 3 The Taliban War Rules Book by Mullah Omar 11 International Community Concerned that… 4 Elections Transparency A Late Return by on … 4 Government Resources Used in Campaigning… 12 Transitional Justice 4 Karzai Receives Financial Support from Iran 12 Human Rights, a Forgotten Cause 4 Thousands of Eligible Voters Not Registered 12 Election Nominees Accused Of… 5 Analysis of Problems Facing Elections 12 What If Criminals Are Introduced To You? 5 Karzai, Buying Votes with Money 12 The Human Rights Commission Must Provide … 5 The Integrity of Election Is In Doubt 13 Human Rights and Citizenship Values Forgotten… 5 Eight Presidential Candidates Are … 13 Does the Human Rights Book have One Page? 6 Some Candidates Protest against … 13 Selective Approach towards Human Rights 6 Government Officials Campaigning for… 13 Election and a New Chapter of … 6 Twenty Polling Stations under… 13 There will be Frauds in the Elections A Troubled Future without Human Rights 6 14 Shoes Thrown at Thanai for Criticizing Karzai 7 Corruption Failure to Prosecute War Criminals 7 Ashraf Ghani Requested Public Support in the… 15 The Role of Warlords in Electoral Campaigns … 7 Administrative Corruption Causes Political … 15 Negotiation with armed Opposition Protest against Misappropriation of Aids 15 United Nations Called on Taliban to Participate… 8 Foreigners are Indulged in Misappropriation… 15 Taliban Supports Karzai 8 Mayor Sentenced to Five Years in Prison 16 Negotiation Should Be Part of the Strategy of … 8 10 million dollars still missing in Ministry of … 16 Negotiation with the Taliban Requires ’s … 8 Extensive Program Launched to Fight … 16 I Will Bring Taliban behind Negotiation Table 9 Agreement Inked for Implementation of … 16 What Are The Objectives Behind… 9 Foreigners More Corrupt than Afghan … 16 A Stronger Emphasis on Negotiation with the… 9 Why Karzai Declined to Participate in the Debate 17 Pervez Musharaf: Senior Taliban Figures Ready to… 10 Government Officials Should Not Leave the … 17 A National Loya Jirga for Talks with the Taliban … 10 Why Karzai Did Not Participate in the Debate? 17 We Want Peace and Nothing More 10 Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai Called the Current … 17 Regional Peace Jirga to be Held Again 10 Establishing a Special Court after Eight Years? 17 After the Elections We Will Talk with the Taliban 10 Karzai the Symbol of Corruption and Ghani its … 18

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No 2, July 31, 2009

Transitional Justice

to collect evidences about the Dostum case and it is probable that he orders a thorough investigation of the issue.

However, the US pursues its own objective by opening only one case of war crimes in the country on the eve of elections in Afghanistan. Probably, their intention is to weaken a particular candidate or send a green signal to the Taliban

This investigation has created more fears than hope among the people of Afghanistan and has raised the question about the intentions of US officials in the country. It appears that US is not interested in implementation of transitional justice and prosecution of all past war criminals in the country.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ A Legal View on Obama’s Order on Investigation of Some Afghanistan Elections Candidates Have the Killings of Taliban in the North Backgrounds in War

8am Daily, No 634, Sunday, July 19, 2009 BBC Persian website, Saturday, May 26, 2009 When Barrak Obama ordered the investigation into the killing of The Election Commission of Afghanistan has announced that Taliban fighters in the north in 2001, the attentions focused on the current laws allow individuals with past involvement in the Dostum who is a former member of the National Front and has war to stand for the elections. recently entered into an alliance with Mr. Karzai. Dostum was The Head of Election Commission said: in order to impose more commander of anti‐Taliban forces in the north in 2001. restrictions we requested the National Assembly and the Does the order by Obama carry any legal responsibility for the Ministry of Justice determine new conditions for presidential Afghans that were involved in the war in the north at that time? elections candidates. But the Ministry of Justice replied and said that currently laws do not permit new conditions. However, Let us answer this question according to both internal and according to him, the issue is still being debated in legislative international laws. According to the national laws, the National committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives. He Amnesty Charter passed by the National Assembly and signed said: In our communication with the National Assembly we have into effect by the President rules out any kind of responsibility asked for introduction of eight new conditions. This included related to internal conflicts during past several years. that a presidential candidate must hold, at least, a bachelors Hence we can conclude that Afghan citizens according to this degree and that he/she must not have committed crimes and law are free of any responsibility for their involvement of what acts of treason against the nation. occurred in north.

However, the issue is different if seen according to the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ American Forces were Involved in Killing Taliban international law. Many experts of international law believe that perpetrators of internationally recognized crimes are Nukhost Daily, No 106, Wednesday July 15, 2009 subject to international prosecution. These crimes include Following the order of the President of the United States for airplane hijacking, piracy, violation of the laws of war, genocide, investigation into the killing of thousands of Taliban fighters in and etc. According to experts of international law, perpetrators the north of country in 2001, the government authorities in of these crimes are indictable in all countries and that they can Afghanistan say the killing took place during joint operations by not hide their personal responsibilities in commission of these Afghan and US forces. Siamak Hirawi, a Deputy of the crimes as political officials at the national level. President’s Spokesman said: “any investigation into this and Mohamamd Mohaqiq both long‐time particular case must start in the US and involve the US forces.” allies have entered into an alliance with Karzai. They are both campaigning for Karzai narrowing the range of decisions the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ President can make about Dostum. Pressures Mounting on Karzai On the one hand Karzai does not want to confront the United Payam Mujahid Weekly, No 641, Saturday July 18, 2009 States of America and on the other hand he can not afford to Barrack Obama has said that he has ordered the US authorities lose the votes of Dostums’s supporters. 3 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 International Community Concerned that war crimes and has pursued mostly political and expedient Karzai Supports Warlords approach. This approach has meant that elements accused of committing war crimes have today become powerful and 8am Daily, No 635, Monday July 20, 2009 respectable figures both inside and outside the political system. Some authorities in the international community have ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ expressed their concerns about the alliance of Karzai with Karzai Transitional Justice from some of the warlords like Qasim Fahim and General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Both of these two figures were supported by Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1220, Tuesday, July 21, 2009 Americans in toppling down the Taliban. Neilab Mubarez, a spokeswoman for UNAMA in However, Dostum is an Uzbek commander who is famous for welcomed the American decision to investigate the massacre of tearing down his enemies into two pieces by tying them to Taliban fighters in their last days in power. tanks and then pulling them in the opposite direction. Karzai This statement by Neilab Mubarez was made a week after emphasizes that he will be the winner in a free and fair Nazifullah Salarzai another spokesman for UNAMA had said that elections. These statements seem to be strange from a man investigation into the killings of Taliban prisoners was an who has access to all government sources. American decision and had nothing to do with the UNAMA. It is not the first time that they talk of transitional justice and ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ A Late Return by United Nations on Implementing trial of war criminals, but this time the issue is proposed at a Justice in Afghanistan very critical time when elections is at its very important phase. (UNAMA welcomes Obama’s Decision to Investigate War Crimes) The timing has raised the suspicions that this legal investigation is part of a bigger political machination. The reason is that Nukhost Daily, No 111, Tuesday, July 21, 2009 Obama speaks of killing of those whom he has vowed to The authorities at the United Nations have welcomed the eliminate. recent decision by Obama to investigate the killings of A sudden statement by Obama to investigate the killings of thousands of Taliban prisoners by General Abdul Rashid Dostum many Taliban in a particular point of time and pointing towards in 2001 and have called for extension of the investigation to a particular person leads the transitional justice towards a include all war crimes in Afghanistan. gloomy future, and other martyred Afghans who are buried in Doctor Neilab Mubariz, spokeswoman for UNAMA says in this mass graves in different parts of the country are being regard: “Investigating the war crimes is a part of government’s forgotten. Action Plan for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation that should ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ have been implemented.” Kai Eide, the United Nation’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan has also asserted that failure to Human Rights, a Forgotten Cause investigate war crimes in Afghanistan now can create big Nukhost Daily, No 112, Wednesday, July 22, 2009 difficulties for future of the country. Doctor Sima Samar, Chairperson of the Afghanistan According to a report released by Newsweek in 2002, the Independent Human Rights Commission in the seminar of Taliban prisoners were suffocated inside containers while being Theoretical Foundations and Approaches to Human held at the transferred from Kundoz to prisons of Dostum forces in Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Those who are accused of Shibirghan. Describing it as a political game, Mr. Dostum has committing war crimes and violating human rights have rejected any involvement of his forces and himself in the killing occupied high positions and have nominated themselves as of Taliban prisoners in 2001 and has asked for inquiries into candidates or deputies for the presidential elections.” many other war crimes committed by the Taliban. She also pointed out to many hurdles in the way of Meanwhile, elements who perpetrated the massacres in west strengthening human rights in Afghanistan including the and north of Kabul, Herat, Qaisar, Maimana, Shibirghan, Takhar, existence of a culture of impunity, appointment of many war Samangan, Baghlan, Kundoz, Sar‐e‐Pul, Badghis, Ghor, Mazar e criminals in the high governmental posts and disbelief of high Sharif, Bamyan, Urozgan, Ghazni, Kabul and other areas are not state officials in the values of human rights. She asserted that investigated. These cases are in clear in need of investigation. there are many high level officials who do not believe in human Many believe that neither the government nor the human rights rights and see the values as western and contradictory to the groups have shown any serious attention to the massacres and traditions and religious values of the country. genocides perpetrated by the Taliban in Shamali, Mazar‐e Mrs Samar also added that in many cases the government Sharif, Shibirghan and other northern areas of the country. The agencies violate human rights, prisoners are still subject to United Nations role has been very passive since Loya Jirga was torture and perpetrators are never brought to justice. called after the collapse of Taliban. They add that Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative at that time, asserted Many of the Afghan human rights activists doubt the that justice had to be sacrificed for peace in Afghanistan. Since commitment of the Afghan state official in implementing then, the UN has been passive in ensuring justice for victims of transitional justice and institutionalizing human rights in the 4 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 country. They believe that if the government of Afghanistan had documentation about war criminals. According to the Action fulfilled its international obligation by implementing transitional Plan for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation, the Afghan legal and justice and refrained from making deals with the alleged war judicial system should be reformed in a way that allows fair and criminals, today we would not see the names of war criminals in just trial of war criminals independent of political pressure and the list of presidential candidates and their deputies. influences.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Election Nominees Accused Of The Human Rights Commission Must Provide Proofs Human Rights Violations to Support its Claims

Nukhost Daily, No 113, Thursday July 23, 2009 Be Soy Farda Daily, No 41, Saturday, July 25, 2009 Head of the Human Rights Commission has accused some of the Mrs. Sima Samar, Head of the Afghanistan Human Rights candidates and their deputies of violating human rights. Sima Commission expressed her concerns that violators of human Samar has said that some of the violators of human rights are rights hold high state positions and are among the candidates for taking advantage of the current volatile situation to nominate presidential elections. She said: Unfortunately we still observe themselves for the elections. They are now candidates for that the culture of impunity is still going on in our country presidential election. and those who are accused of war She added that we still experience a crimes and crimes against humanity culture of impunity and the names of are still working in the high positions those who are accused of crimes of government. Some of the against humanity and war crimes are presidential candidates are good seen in high positions and in the list of examples for this. presidential and provincial Reacting to these claims, the candidates. Independent Election Commission has According to the Afghan legal system, said: this is the issue of Independent those who have connection with Human Rights Commission and they illegal armed forces or are accused of should provide documents for their human rights violations are not claims. In a news conference with allowed to take part in the elections. reporters, on Thursday, 22nd July2009 However the presence of some of the faces in this election as Daoud Najafi Head of Secretariat of the IEC said: after the initial candidates has raised objections of some human rights activists. announcement of the names of candidates, the people were These candidates are accused of having committed crimes given a two weeks period to submit their complaints against the against humanity in the past. These accusations are not yet candidates. But no such complaints were lodged. Najafi stressed reviewed by any authorized court. the people of Afghanistan can make the ultimate decision who to vote for. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ?What If Criminals Are Introduced To You Human Rights and Citizenship Values Forgotten by Nukhost Daily, No 113/ Thursday July 23, 2009 Prominent Candidates The Attorney‐General of Afghanistan has asked the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission to introduce those Nokhust Daily, No 114, Saturday July 25, 2009 presidential and provincial council’s candidates who have The debate between two presidential candidates aired on Tolo committed war crimes so that they can initiate legal actions TV was the most controversial and hottest developments against them. related to election campaign in the last weeks. The Attorney‐General has requested the names of war criminals Asharaf Ghani Ahmadzai and Dr. Abdullah, the two prominent days after the Head of Independent Human Rights Commission rivals of Mr. Karzai had participated in this debate. In this reported that some of the war criminals are still present in high debate Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai a technocrat with modern governmental positions and many of them has nominated thoughts had a clear position about the crimes against humanity themselves for the presidential elections. during past three decades in the country. In this way he Meanwhile, the Head of Elections Complaints Commission of separated his line from other returnees from the West that the IEC says that they have received accusations of war crimes have sacrificed human rights values for the sake of their against nearly half of presidential candidates. Since these personal and ethnic interests. complaints are only objections and accusations, they are sent to However Dr. Abdullah was also expected to change his views, at the judiciary for further inquiries. least on issues related to the events of the past two decades. By While the ECC refers these accusations to the judicial and legal doing this he could distance himself from individuals and groups offices, it appears that they are totally unaware of and have no that support him currently but whose past backgrounds limits 5 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 and reduces public support for his candidacy. However, the Obma’s rival party. Therefore the White House wants to ensure cautious approach adopted by both candidates show none of Karzai does not hold the presidential seat again. Reopening of them look at dealing with past crimes against humanity and the case against Dosutm is the first measure to discredit Karzai. institutionalizing a culture of citizenship through respect for According to the reports published the government of United individual human rights as building blocks of a future based on States wants to initiate negotiations with the Taliban. The US justice. officials have repeatedly stated that the problem of Afghanistan Hence we can predict that none of these two candidates will can not be solved through military means only. In order to send bring fundamental changes to the current situation. The culture signals to the Taliban, they are now pressuring their opponents. of impunity for war criminals that is going on since Karzai took In the past, Dostum and his forces have inflicted heavy power will continue. casualties on the Taliban. In reality, the Taliban and the leaders of the People’s Democratic Party (PDPA) of Afghanistan are the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ real perpetrators of human rights. The investigation against Does the Human Rights Book have One Page? Dostum must be expanded to cover the crimes committed by

Payam Mujahid Weekly, No 642, Saturday, July 25, 2009 the Taliban and the PDPA officials. ______The notion of transitional justice was raised by human rights Summary of Article by Muzzaffar Dare Sufi. group during the first days of elected government in ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan. At that time, it was hoped the process would result into trial of warlords. Unfortunately, after a few months the Election and a New Chapter of process was stopped. Recently, discussions related to Transitional Justice Cases investigation and prosecutions of war criminals have been revived Mandegar Daily, No 94, Sunday July 26, 2009 Barrack Obama has ordered an investigation into the death of The President had previously prepared cases of human rights Taliban prisoners in 2001. violations and warlordism against his powerful allies like Marshal Fahim, General Dostum Marshal Fahim is appointed as The target of investigation is Mr. Dostum who was fighting his Vice‐president. General Dostum who was exiled to Turkey beside American forces against Taliban and many believe that has been reconfirmed as his Chief of Staff for all military and without his support the defeat of Taliban was not possible. security forces. The experts put forward different reasons behind the opening How the foreign forces justify their killings as war on terror and of this case. First, an investigation into Dostum’s human rights that of commanders of the United Front as human rights background is nothing more than a political game by White violation? Is this the basis of justice and human rights that US House authorities against their rival Republicans. Second, there officials speak of? is a big gap between Karzai and the authorities in White House. Therefore they want to weaken the position of Mr. Karzai by pressuring and discrediting his allies. However, human rights It is believed that this propaganda is meant to persuade the activists have raised their voices from all corners and have Taliban to return behind a negotiation table. The initiation of demanded the removal of human rights violators from high investigation into Dostum’s case is accompanied a deteriorating state positions. These are signs that Karzai’s chances of security situation in the north. retaining is declining. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Thirdly, targeting Dosum is a green light to the Taliban. It was A Troubled Future without Human Rights initiated at a time when negotiation with the Taliban has gained new urgency. Initiation of investigation against Dostum might Afghanistan Daily, No 857, Tuesday July 28, 2009 / Writer: Ajmal Shakir be seen as a move to please the Taliban. Asharaf Ghani defended a just system in Afghanistan. What is Ghani’s definition of justice? Which interpretation of justice? Is ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Selective Approach towards Human Rights this Platonic, Marxist or Taliban‐like justice? What is painful is that none of the candidates have paid attention on human Nukhost Daily, No 115, Sunday July 26, 2009 / Writer: Mr. Muzaffar Dare Sufi rights as global human values, democracy and persecution of Obama’s order to investigate the killing of Taliban in north of human rights violators in Afghanistan. country by Dostum’s forces is actually a policy of Obama to In today’s world human rights have been accepted in a way that show the American people that it was the rival party the Rrepublicans who have committed crimes against humanity and defines and sets limits for social relations and other aspects of it was this party that cooperated with perpetrators of human human life. rights. The end result is to show the democrats were not In a country where non‐democratic and anti‐human rights involved. forces are threatening the lives of human beings and humanity, Mr. Obama has two problems with Karzai: one is the political the suffering people have the right to hold their candidates background of Mr. Karzai and second is that Karzai is a friend of accountable against human rights standards. 6 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 Shoes Thrown at Thanai for Criticizing Karzai Sayed Ahmad Gelani, Sheikh Asif Mohsini, Haji Din Muhammad, Qazi Muhammad Amin Weqad, Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal, 8am Daily, No 642, Page 3, Tuesday 28 July 2009 Muhammad , Sayed Mansoor and Jafar Naderi had Shoes were thrown at Shahnawaz Thanai in an election obtained their support for his reelection. campaign organized in his support in Lashkarga city of Helmand Similarly, Dr. Abdullah in his election campaign has used on province. This happened at a time when he was criticizing the money and deal‐making to obtain the support of people like government of Hamid Karzai during the gathering. The attacker Rabbani, Sayed Hussain Anwari, Ata Muhammad Noor, some shouted: Why do you criticize Karzai and what did you do when members of National Front and some of the pro‐Ahmad Shah you were in power? Masood Commanders disgruntled with Fahim and the Logar branch of Jameiat Islami led by Dr. Fazlulah Mujaddadi. Among ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ A Challenge of Elections Today: these personalities only Muhammad Muhaqiq and Junbish faction have confessed that their support for Mr. Karzai is based Failure to Prosecute War Criminals on deals reached between them. Source : www.ariaye.org It is believed that declaration of support by other personalities The Elections Complaints Commission has said: if the for particular candidates are also results of personal deals government of Afghanistan had chosen to prosecute war crimes rather than genuine sympathy with the plans and platforms of in the country, we would not have alleged war criminals the candidates. standing for presidential elections. At the same time the ECC Some of other politicians like Younus Qanooni and Mr. Ismael says it is investigating 48 claims against presidential and Khan have not yet declared their support for a particular provincial council candidates. According to the body, two candidate and some of them have doubts regarding provincial council candidates from Nangarhar and Kunar have transparency of the elections. been excluded after it was confirmed they had violated the laws.

The commission confirms that the names of those who are accused of war crimes are still in the list of presidential candidates and says: it was essential for the government to fulfill its obligation of prosecuting war crimes over the past years. According to elections officials, 20 cases of complaints that were beyond the mandate of the body have been referred to the Supreme Court of Afghanistan. Grant Kippen, Head of the Electoral Complaints Commission has said: the complaints which are being reviewed are related to criminal record, misuse of official authorities and government officials’ support of particular candidates. The commission has said it has started looking into 80 fresh complaints against the candidates. According to its reports, the body has received a total of 46 cases against presidential and 102 against provincial council candidates.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Role of Warlords in Electoral Campaigns Disappointing

http://afelection.com/news/170 According to political analysts, the alliance of Karzai and Abdullah with warlords and leaders of political factions, and their attempts to obtain the support of former factional commanders for their election campaign has disappointed people. The process of election campaign during the past several months has shown that Hamid Karzai by making promises to Haji , Abdur Rashid Dostum, Marshal Fahim, Abdur Rab Rasul Sayyaf, Sibghatullah Mujaddadi, Pir 7 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009

Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups

United Nations Called on Taliban to Participate in the Elections

BBC Persian Website/ May 3, 2009 The United Nations has called on the anti‐government forces to stop fighting and participate in the presidential elections of the country. In the meantime the anti‐government forces led by Taliban have threatened to disturb the process of elections. Kai Eide, United Nations Special Representative to Afghanistan emphasized on the participation of anti‐government forces in the elections. He stated the elections can instigate a new political process that will result into peace in Afghanistan. Dr. Sima Samar Head of the Independent Human Rights Commission said that voting in the elections is right of all Afghan citizens including the insurgents. Currently security threats are the biggest challenges facing the elections in Afghanistan. These concerns are shared by the people of Afghanistan as well as the international community. The Afghan government and the UN officials have previously tried to ensure the security of the elections by encouraging the Muzhdah said: Ludin Head of IEC has said that the Tliban did not opposition groups to cooperate and participate in the process. create problems for the voters’ registration process and even cooperated with the IEC. Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan has even said that he will ensure the security of Mullah Omar if he was ready to This means the Taliban and all other anti‐American forces negotiate. Speaking to the BBC, a spokesman for the Taliban support one candidate in the Afghan elections and that is Mr. said they have no decision to take part in the polling. Karzai. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ He said: the Taliban believe the decisions about election and the next president are all made in Washington and the people of Negotiation Should Be Part of the Strategy of Afghanistan have no role in them. The spokesman for the Combating Terrorism Taliban also said they will not allow the elections to be held in (Hamid Karzai in the meeting of Non‐aligned Movement) areas under their control.

The Independent Election Commission has admitted they have Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1217, Saturday July 18, 2009 not been able to distribute voting cards in a number of unstable During the 15th Summit of the Non‐Aligned Movement which districts. The residents of these districts that are mostly in the was organized with the slogan of ‘international solidarity for east and south of the country will not be able to participate in peace and development’ Karzai said: we believe reconciliation the process. and negotiation must be an important part of any successful Because of the security concerns the elections that were war against terrorism. This would help us differentiate between supposed to take place in spring were postponed to summer those who are ideologically committed to terrorism and this year. extremism and those have joined their ranks out of ignorance and other reasons. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Taliban Supports Karzai Negotiation with the Taliban Requires Mandegar Daily, No 85/ Wednesday, July 15 2009 Pakistan’s Support Wahid Muzhda a political expert says: “with the deterioration of situation in Swatt valley of Pakistan, the Taliban are trying to Nukhost Daily, No 109/ Sunday July 19 2009 increase their insurgency activities inside Pakistan and they Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of States has confirmed the earlier have not stated their intention to prevent people from statements by high officials of US government to negotiate with participating the elections or disrupt the process. those Taliban elements that are not linked to Al‐Qaedah. In response to the question whether Taliban support a Alam Ezadyar, Chairperson of the of International Affairs particular candidate or just want to take part in the elections, Commission of the Senate House said: “Negotiation with those 8 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 Taliban that do not have no roles on current affairs of the candidates. On several occasions Karzai has attempted to country will have no impact on the security situation of negotiate with the Taliban and share power with them. But all Afghanistan.” these efforts, according to Mahdi, have failed to produce concrete results and have faced outright rejection by the He believes Pakistan is the breeding ground for the Taliban and Taliban. unless the US obtains the support of Pakistani officials the elimination of Taliban is not possible. Mr. Mehdi says: Those Taliban fighters who are currently fighting against the government are not ready to negotiate with the President or other candidates. He said: Taliban are against ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ I Will Bring Taliban behind Negotiation Table the current system. They are against elections and all those who (A part of Karzai’s Speech) have nominated themselves for election including Abdul Salam

Raketi.” 8am Daily, No 635, Monday July 20, 2009 Hamid Karzai in his speech said: “Military operations are not Some of the candidates have promised to amend the enough, we must rethink what we have been doing so far. constitution to make it more acceptable to all parties including There would be no improvement without this.” Stressing on the those currently unsatisfied with the system. The Taliban do not need to negotiate with the Taliban Karzai added: even Mullah accept the current constitution and see it as inspired by non‐ Omar, the Taliban leader, must be persuaded to sit behind a Islamic values. negotiation table. Mr. Hashimi, a lecturer at Law Faculty of Kabul University Karzai expressed his doubts about the increase of foreign troops believe the Taliban have very clear demands. They want the in the country and said: “I do not think that increasing the foreign troops to leave the country, the government collapse forces will solve the problems.” He added: “we must focus on and Karzai be brought to an Islamic court. He adds: If the other options to defeat terrorism and reach a peace process. Taliban were to accept talks and join the government today, the We must enter in dialogue with Taliban. Those Taliban who Pakistanis will arm and organize another group to fight and fight us because of fear, compulsion and the mistakes we have overthrow the government of Afghanistan. So would we committed, should return to a peaceful life.. They are a part of negotiate and share power with this new group too?”. this country and must be brought back.” Karzai welcomed the The idea of negotiating and sharing power with the Taliban is latest statement of Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of States in proposed at a time, when they are attempting to disrupt the which she encouraged reconciliation with those Taliban that lay electoral process. The government of Afghanistan has decided down their arms and wish to join the peace process. to deploy thousands of national and foreign troops to secure

Karzai added: “For years we have been talking about this issue polling centre in insecure provinces. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ but there was no good understanding amongst our allies. I see greater tendency for peace in the new American Administration.” He concluded: “I would welcome Mullah A Stronger Emphasis on Negotiation with the Taliban Following Rahman Mailik’s Visit Omar, if he wishes to negotiate and make peace. This is our hope and we ought to struggle for it. Without an honest peace Nukhost Daily, No 111, Tuesday July 21, 2009 process involving all parties, the situation will continue to During past several years the failures and hopelessness of deteriorate. “ negotiations with the Taliban militants is an issue hurting the .government of Afghanistan everyday ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ What Are The Objectives Behind The Negotiation Having faced rejection by the Taliban on several occasions, With The Taliban? Karzai has once again called on them to join the peace process. While addressing a gathering of elders from Kandahar, Zabul, 8am Daily, No 635/ Monday 20 July 2009 Helmand and Farah Karzai said if they cast their vote in his favor Some of the presidential candidates have repeatedly stressed in he will negotiate with the Taliban.. their speeches and slogans that if they win the elections they Many of the experts believe that there is a close relationship stabilize Afghanistan through sharing power with the Taliban. between the latest trip of Rahman Malik, the Interior Minister Even some of the candidates have crossed the limit and have of Pakistan to Afghanistan and the process of negotiation with described the Taliban a liberation movement of Afghanistan. the Taliban. They see this apparent good will and kindness of Others have promised to expel foreign troops from the country. Pakistan as crocodile tears Dr. Mahyudin Mahdi, a political analyst believes the Taliban are Dr. Mahyuddin Mahdi a regional expert believes the President affiliated to an international network that does not see does not have the power and ability to end war in Afghanistan. elections as legitimate process. According to him, the Taliban According to him, he has always spoken of negotiations with the prioritize the interest of their global allies over that of Taliban but has failed to take a single practical step in this

Afghanistan. direction. During the past three years, the Peace Commission Mr.Mehdi says it is not the first time that the process of has wasted huge resources without any achievement. He negotiation with the Taliban is proposed by the presidential added: if we believe the figures of Taliban fighters joining the 9 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 peace process as reported by the Peace Commission, by now fighters many of them will take part in the elections and cast there must be no single Taliban against the government. their votes in his favor. But to what extend this trend can

However Ahmad Saeedi, Regional expert said Karzai has no guarantee the overall security of the country? ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ authority to negotiate with Taliban. He adds: “Some of the Taliban leaders are on the black list of United Nations Security Council and Karzai has no authority to remove these Regional Peace Jirga to be Held Again names. He added: So far on 74 occasions Karzai has (Part of Karzai’s Speech in a Campaign Gathering in Kabul) expressed his willingness to negotiate with the Taliban with Nukhost Daily, No 114/ Tuesday July 25, 2009 no success. In a campaign event organized in Kabul Karzai stressed that after winning the elections his top priority will be to ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Pervez Musharaf: establish peace in the country. He insisted on negotiation Senior Taliban Figures Ready to Talk With Karzai with the Taliban militants and renewal of the Regional Peace Jirga composed of representatives of Pakistan and Mandegar Daily, No 90, Tuesday July 21, 2009 Afghanistan. General Pervez Musharaf, the former President of Pakistan has Political observers believe each time Karzai has proposed claimed that senior Taliban officials are ready to talk with the negotiation he has faced rejection by the Taliban. It is worth current president of Afghanistan. Speaking during an interview mentioning that the Regional Peace Jirga that brought together with the Sky News Television of the UK he asserted that any representatives from both sides of the Durand Line in 2007 in political development in Afghanistan depends on the Kabul had no practical outcome. negotiation with the Taliban. He said: The government of ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan must negotiate with the Taliban and political development in this country can only be achieved through non‐ After the Elections We Will Talk with the Taliban military means. (Richard Holbrooke, U.S Special Envoy) He suggested that the statesman and political figures in Afghanistan must have a long‐term strategy in contrast to what 8am Daily, No 640, Sunday July 26, 2009 he described a short‐term strategy pursued currently in the During a meeting with the Ulema Council of Afghanistan, country. Musharraf said: “Military means is not the only Richard Holbrook, the U.S Special Envoy to Afghanistan and solution, force can save the time but diplomacy is ultimately the Pakistan said: “we will initiate the negotiation with the only solution.” opponents of the government of Afghanistan after the elections. He added: We want that negotiation to take place ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ through Afghans and the international community will have the A National Loya Jirga for Talks role of supporters.” with the Taliban and Hizb‐e Islami He accused the Taliban of misinterpreting the war in Aryana Television, Monday July 24, 2009 Afghanistan and presenting it as an American war against the Addressing an election gathering in Kabul on Friday 24 July, . He said the Americans have no reasons to fight the Hamid Karzai vowed to call a national loya jirga to discuss Pashuns and are in the country to help them stand on their own reconciliation with the Taliban and Hizb‐e Islami. It is worth feet. noting that it is not the first time Karzai speaks of the need to The Daily describes the process of negotiation as complicated. negotiate with the opponents. But this is the first time he According to the author, the Afghan government has stressed includes it as part of his electoral platform and offers the loya the acceptance of the constitution as the precondition for a jirga as a mechanism to achieve this goal reconciliation process and the Taliban have fundamentally expressed their opposition to the entire system. The Pakistan ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ factor is also vital for the process. The author concludes that We Want Peace and Nothing More unless the west and the Afghan state do not adopt a rational

Nukhost Daily, No 114/ Tuesday July 25, 2009 approach to this factor, all efforts to negotiate with the Taliban will be in vain Hamid Karzai entered the presidential campaign for the second ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ round with the slogan of “we want peace”. He speaks of his plan to negotiate with Taliban wherever he avails an opportunity. Lack of a Clear Strategy In a recent development in this regard one of the presidential towards the Taliban and Pakistan candidates resigned from the race in favour of Karzai just two days after he defended the Taliban in a televised debate. Karzai 8am Daily, No 641, Monday July 27, 2009, page 1 / Writer: Zia Zeerak has promised to convene a Loya Jirga including the Taliban During the debate on Tolo, Dr. tried to discuss the presence of foreign troops in the country. repeat his policies, general principles and electoral promises. In the meantime if Karzai arouse ethnic feelings of the Taliban However, Mr. Ahmadzai tried to move beyond general 10 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 statements by presenting parts of his detailed plans for future Pajhwok News Agency quoting a Taliban commander in Badghis of the country. province has reported that the according to the agreement Afghan and foreign forces can not enter the evacuated areas There is a major and the Taliban will ensure security of the polling stations. perplexity among the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ statesmen of Afghanistan regarding negotiation with the Negotiation with Taliban, Repetition of Failed Policies terrorist group of Taliban. The debate Afghanistan Daily, Editorial, No 857, Tuesday July 28, 2009 between the two When Afghanistan and the international community realized prominent candidates they do not achieve any thing by pointing fingers at one showed this confused another, they decided to seriously propose negotiating with will remain as a feature Taliban. However for the past two years, the government of of the new government after the elections. Both candidates Afghanistan has repeatedly proposed negotiation with the emphasized on transparency and confidence building in the Taliban and has called on their leaders to lay down arms, accept process of dialogue with the Taliban. They even emphasized on the constitution and join the Afghan government. national unity and reconciliation. However there is no fundamental difference between their policies and that of the But the Taliban have consistently rejected negotiation with current government. Like these candidates, the government Afghan government and have called for withdrawal of foreign also believes in negotiations with the Taliban terrorist group. troops before negotiations can take place. At the same, Americans and ethno‐nationalist circles in the The recent statement of the UK Foreign Minister calling for presidential palaces and their media outlets, have raised the change in the strategy of Afghan government and negotiation killing of Taliban prisoners by forces of General Dostum. This is with the moderate Taliban shows that Afghanistan is yet to intended to be a good‐will gesture to the Taliban. develop a coherent military and reconstruction strategy. The government has vividly asked Taliban to put aside their .weapons and join the peace process in the country ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Whoever Cooperates ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ With Taliban His House Will Be Burnt The Taliban War Rules Book by Mullah Omar (Shinwar Tribal Elders Decision) Nukhust Daily, No 117, Tuesday July 28, 2009, Page 1 8am Daily, No 642, Tuesday July 28, 2009, Page 4 The new book “Rules of War for Taliban” is published in 13 The tribal elders of Shinwar tribe in Nangarhar province have Chapters and 67 pages. The book includes new war strategies, decided to deny the armed Taliban entry in their territories. new methods in suicide attacks, and rules for behavior with According to their decision, whoever collaborate with them his war prisoners and approaches to win the support of civilian house will be burnt and be subject to payment of 500,000 populations. It is said that the book is written by Mullah Omar, Afghanis in cash as fine. It is said that the tribal elders in Achin the leader of Taliban. The writer in some parts of this book has district have mobilized three thousand armed men from among ordered Taliban not to conduct suicide bombing in unnecessary the local youth to ensure security in their district. situations and try to avoid civilian casualties during such attacks. Meanwhile, local elders in have forced the The foreign and local prisoners should not be mistreated. In local Taliban to declare a ceasefire with security forces. some parts of the book it is written that killing and releasing the According to this agreement, the local Taliban will allow the foreign prisoners can only take place at the order of Mullah Independent Elections Commission to establish voting centers Omar or his deputies and others have no right to take decisions in the province. in this regard. These are similar with the rules proposed by General Mc. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Chrystal, the NATO Chief Commander. Barrack Obama also had Ceasefire an Opportunity for Taliban some indication to this issue in his new strategy. 8am Daily, No 642, Tuesday July 28, 2009, Page 6 / Writer: Payeez The other similarity between Mullah Omar’s decree and The Taliban and security forces have agreed on a three point Americans war policy is the emphasis on the need to take care agreement in Badghis province. The deal includes opening local of local people and be close to them or in simple words win offices of the Independent Elections Commission construction their hearts and minds. of Badghis‐Faryab highway and formation of development councils to implement public projects. The deal was brokered as a result of mediation by local elders in the province. It seems there is little consistency and coordination in the process of negotiation with the Taliban. 11 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 Elections Transparency

Independent Election Commission and have asked them to send mobile registration teams to their areas. The Independent Election Commission has also confirmed the receipt of 70 requests from these districts. Mr. Noor Muhammad Noor, the spokesman for IEC says that the process of distributing voting cards is not compulsory and the IEC can not force people out of their homes to register. On the other hand the governor of Paghman has said to Pajhwok News Agency that his district includes a population of 200,000 populations in 117 villages. He has added that the IEC has opened only three registration centers (Khajah Musafi, Duwazdah Imam and the District Centre). He has claimed: I can certainly claim that more than one hundred thousand men and women were deprived of voter registration cards in Paghman district. At the same time, Muhammad Zahir, the governor of Bagrami, Government Resources Used in claims that IEC has failed to register voters in 26 villages in the Campaigning for Karzai district depriving thousands of people to receive voting cards. (Dr. Abdullah in interview with Hushdar Weekly) The governor of Dehsabz has also complained that voter registrations officers would visit the district for a limited No 3, Wednesday, July 8, 2009 number of days and work only between 10am and 2pm. He has Dr. Abdullah a key rival of Hamid Karzai in the upcoming also claimed hundreds of people have not been able to register elections has accused him of misusing his government power in the district. and resources. He added: “there is no doubt that the ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ government resources, authorities and its prominent officials are at the disposal of the President. For example, we have Analysis of Problems Facing Elections received reports that show police officials are instructed to Fraud Already Apparent prevent distribution of our posters in some parts of the country. This is a key a problem. Despite all these, we hope the vote of Mandegar Daily, No 90/ Tuesday 21 July 2009 the people determines the outcome and the public opinion Political analysts believe that the upcoming elections face wants change.” numerous political, security and executive problems which can leave negative impacts on the outcomes of the votes. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Karzai Receives Financial Support from Iran Dr. Mahyuddin Mahdi, a political expert believes that insecurity is the biggest challenge for the elections. He adds that according Tolo Television, Saturday 18 July 2009 to a new report there would be only one policeman for each of During a roundtable on Tolo TV, Mr. Abidi a member of Ashraf the 29 thousand ballot boxes across the country. For him, the Ghani Ahmadzai’s Campaign Office asked: “Is Karzai not limited number of security forces on the polling day will be receiving financial support from Iran for his electoral problematic particularly in more unstable areas. campaign?” The spokesman for Independent Election He also added: “The Independent Election Commission is Commission Mr. Noor and Mr. Musa Arifi a member of the appointed by Mr. Karzai and the body has so far been unable to Karzai’s Campaign Office were also present on the occasion. act transparently. He alleged the body has distributed many fake voting cards which have been shown to the journalists. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Therefore in insecure areas the possibility of fraud is high.” Thousands of Eligible Voters Not Registered ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Mandegar Daily, No 90/ Tuesday 21 July 2001  Karzai, Buying Votes with Money The residents of four districts in Kabul province have objected on the registration process claiming thousands of eligible voters Mandegar Daily, No 91/ Wednesday July 22, 2009 are not registered and the process of registration is not The electoral spending of Mr. Karzai during past one month has implemented fully. The representatives of these districts claim, reached 85 million Afghanis. This level of spending is shocking they have sent more than 100 request letters to the 12 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 and a major source of concern. The Afghan democracy is Eight Presidential Candidates Are To Be Disqualified experiencing interesting developments including the Nukhost Daily, No 114/ Saturday July 25, 2009 extravagant and high spending by the nominees in their attempt The Independent Election Commission has reported eight to attract the support of the people. Presidential Candidates to Electoral Complaints Commission for This level of spending in a country where 80% of its people are failing to report on their campaign spending. According to the living in extreme poverty is a strong indication of how neglectful electoral law, these candidates risk being disqualified if they do the leaders are regarding their responsibilities towards their not provide satisfactory answers on their campaign finances. people. In contrast, Dr. Abdullah another leading presidential According to the law, the presidential candidates should report candidate was the first by spending 10 million Afghanis in the their electoral campaign expenditure to the IEC every 15 days. first two weeks of the electoral campaign. But Karzai overtook him and the rest of candidates in the second biweekly Doctor Dawood Najafi, Chief Officer of the IEC Secretariat said: reporting. “during the past one month of campaigning, eight candidates have failed to report to us on their campaign finances. After two On the other hand, Dr. is at the bottom of days, they will be given another 72 hours to defend themselves the list with 10,000 Afghanis during the first two weeks. against the complaints. If they fail to do that, the Electoral Complaints Commission will consider the removal of their .names from the list of candidates ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Integrity of Election Is In Doubt These nominees include, Bashir Ahmad Bizhan, Doctor Nasir Anis, Mandegar Daily, No 92 / Thursday, July 23, 2009 Hasib Aryan, Gul Ahmad Yama, Abdul Ghafoor Zory, Nasrullah Hamid Karzai and his governing team are trying to win the Arsalayee, Ghulam Muhammad Reigi and Abdul Majid Samim. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ coming election; yet they have no new plan and the people have no idea what this team can do to compensate their past mistakes and failures. Some Candidates Protest against Unequal Opportunities Dr. Sharif Fayez, President and Founder of The American University of Afghanistan in an interview with Mandegar Daily Afghanistan daily, No 855, Sunday July 26, 2009 said: “the presidential election in Afghanistan is taking place at a During its 15th meeting on Saturday 25 July, the Joint time when we observe insurgency activities and security Cooperation Council of Presidential candidates that include 24 incidents in different parts of the country particularly in the candidates expressed concerns regarding extensive misconducts south and east and even most of the times in Kabul. In some and offences during election campaigns. The candidates issued areas Taliban have threatened to death those who participate in an eight‐point statement in which they protested against the the election.” He added: “therefore the integrity of elections is use of force and money by a number of other candidates. in doubt and we might not see participation of the people in They claimed that some of the candidates are organizing big great number”. He added: “having experienced years of war banquets and parties in their guest houses and offices and give and only one round of elections, we must try to get mature and gifts and money for those who attend these parties. develop democracy in our country”. He believes that without any doubt there are foreign and internal hands trying to According to their statement, governors, mayors and other interrupt the process of elections and democratization in the government authorities who are working for a particular country. candidate must be dismissed from their posts. They added, except for a few candidates, other hopefuls find it difficult or even impossible to compete under the present circumstances.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Government Officials Campaigning for Hamid Karzai

Mandegar Daily, No 94, Sunday July 26, 2009 On Saturday, 25 July 2009, hundreds of workers of Baghlan textile factory and provincial officials of the Ministry of Education participated in a campaign event organized in support of Karzai. As a result of participation of workers in the gathering, the factory was closed during the day.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Twenty Polling Stations under Threat: Herat Governor

Mandegar Daily, No 94, Sunday July 26, 2009 The governor of Herat said: according to our information, 20 13 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 polling stations are seriously threatened by anti‐government forces causing concern for all authorities and people.” These polling centers are situated in the districts of Gozara, Pashtoon Zarghoon, Karokh and Ghoriyan of Herat province.”

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ There will be Frauds in the Elections

Mandegar Daily, No 96 Tuesday July 28, 2009 Political officials of the UNAMA in Kabul have not ruled out fraud in the elections and have called on the Independent Elections Commission to take necessary measures against it. They have said it is likely that polling centre will not be open in some parts of the country.

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No 2, July 31, 2009 Corruption

Ashraf Ghani Requested Public Support in the Fight against Corruption

BBCPersian Website, June 24, 2009 Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai*, a nominee for the presidential elections has accused the government of weaknesses in punishing some people and said: “the government is indulged in corruption immensely.” He added: “according to figures control and prevention of corruption in spending of the national provided by United Nations, Afghanistan is the fifth most budgets are parts of fundamental duties of the Afghan state. corrupt in the world.” ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai criticized the system of government in Protest against Misappropriation of Aids Afghanistan and said that this system has not been able to fulfill the demands of people to fight corruption and improve security Nukhost Daily, No 107, Thursday July 16, 2009 situation in the country. The office of US State‐run Special Inspector General for Therefore, according Ahmadzai, to end the crisis in Afghanistan Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has reported of unthinkable it is essential to find a solution that is acceptable to all. misappropriation in the aids to this country. Arnold Fields, *Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai has held important government Special US Inspector said that no exact figure of positions following the collapse of the Taliban in 2001. He was misappropriation of the funding is available. However the Minister of Finance from 2002 to 2004 and the Chancellor of auditors have 26 cases of misappropriation of the funding under Kabul University from 2005 to 2006 their inspection in Afghanistan. Corruption is pervasive in Afghanistan. You can see this at all levels from smaller cases in government offices to decisions ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Administrative Corruption taken at the courts, lack of implementation of laws by Afghan Causes Political Corruption governmental authorities and in many cases release of the criminals or terrorists who are caught and imprisoned while Afghanistan Daily, Wednesday July 15, 2009 committing crimes. These are the issues that prove the The warning of Japanese officials in the fifth meeting of Janpan‐ existence of corruption and misappropriation of aids in the Afghanistan development policies to their Afghan counterparts country. is indicative of the painful and years old history of corruption ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ .and embezzlement in the country Whatever Mr. Masato Kethra has said makes it clear that there Foreigners are Indulged in have been many misappropriations in the aids provided by Misappropriation of Aid to Afghanistan international community to Afghanistan. Therefore irrespective Nukhost Daily, No 107, Thursday July 16, 2009 of diplomatic considerations, the government of Japan warns they will stop aid to Afghanistan if misappropriation continues. Mr. Masato Kethra, an official for Japan’s International aid has The spokesman of Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also confirmed said: “ Japan’ s aids to Afghanistan will be stopped on the spot if the existence of corruption in governmental offices. However we find corruption at any time after this.” he has said the government is going to take some serious The office of US State‐run Special Inspector General for measures to reduce and eliminate corruption. Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) has also reported that The issue of corruption is an important problem facing the misappropriation and corruption in their aid to Afghanistan is government of Afghanistan. Other donor countries have also more than what they had estimated. expressed concerns. Japan has been clearer on this than other Mr. Taj Muhammad Akbar, a lecturer at Kabul University, countries. The recent statement of Japanese officials Faculty of Economics believes many high authorities in the underscores the depth of crisis and corruption in the current government and foreign NGOs who holds the responsibility of government of Afghanistan. reconstruction projects have wasted a major part of money for However the statesmen of Afghanistan must try to take some the interest of their companies, unjustified and extravagant serious measures for the reconstruction process of this country expenses. According to him, some of the foreign aid have been so that Afghanistan preserves its integrity in the eyes of transferred to foreign banks. international community. This requires consistent attention by Meanwhile General Arnold Fields, a US Special Inspector has the Afghan officials and we should note that administrative said their auditors are currently investigating 26 cases of corruption results into political corruption. Administrative misappropriation. He has not given an exact figure of the total 15 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 amount of embezzlement and misappropriation in Afghanistan. special department for dealing heavy crimes are all part of this plan. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The Ministry of Interior said in order to execute these plans 13 Herat Mayor Sentenced to Five Years in Prison new departments will be established within the ministry of 8am Daily, No 633, Saturday ,July 18, 2009 interior. Some of these departments have already been The Attorney General of Afghanistan has announced that Rafiq established. He added: “The departments for combating major Mujaddadi the Mayor of Herat province has been sentenced to crimes related to bribery and combating corruption are five years of imprisonment and payment of $90,000 as fine. He established at the higher levels of the government. This was convicted for misuse of his authorities as mayor as well as department is established in close cooperation with the US FBI.” involvement in embezzlement. The authorities in Afghan government confirm the existence of corruption in the government departments. However, they ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  have several times said that they have plans to reduce 10 million dollars still missing corruption. During past several years some special departments in Ministry of Transportation were also established to combat corruption in Afghanistan, but

they have not been able to perform an effective work. Nukhost Daily, No 111, Tuesday July 21, 2009 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ A prepaid amount of 10 million and 600 thousand dollars to two foreign airline companies remains a puzzle to be solved by Agreement Inked for Implementation of Ministry of Transportation. One of these two companies does Anti‐Corruption Strategy not exist in reality and the other one possesses license for air services but does not have a single airplane. Afghanistan Daily, No 852, Wednesday July 22, 2009 Last year, the Council of Ministers established the Monitoring An agreement was signed between the Minister of Interior, a Committee for Hajj Affairs headed by the minister of transport, representative of the European Union and an official of the US to ensure a smooth transfer of the pilgrims. The Ministry of Administration to implement the anti‐corruption strategy. Transportation had signed an agreement worth 25 million The Interior Minister of Afghanistan said: “The plan is supported dollars with two Saudi Arabian airline companies named Global by Ministry of Defense of United States of America, European and Nas for the transportation of Hajjis. Union Police, United Nations development and anti‐narcotics On the other hand this Ministry had paid a sum of 10 million agencies. dollars to these companies in advance to avoid any possible He added the first part of the plan includes measures to difficulties in the process of transportation of the pilgrims. This strengthen police against corruption, develop laws, regulations money is still with the mentioned companies and is yet to be and training curriculum, develop financial and logistical system, returned to the government of Afghanistan. create a new system for appointments of professional cadres The repeated delays in transportation of the pilgrims forced the through a fair competition on the basis of capabilities and government to initiate an investigation. The investigation create procedure for registration and processing of complaints showed that Global was not a transport company and that Nas from the public and employees of the Ministry of Interior. has obtained permissions to fly to Saudi Arabia but does not According to him the second program of the plan includes possess a single passenger air plane. measures to prevent corruption and train and educate police in the country. The third program of the plan relates to ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  implementation of the laws about corruption which includes Extensive Program Launched to Fight Corruption managing the organizations, cooperation between Ministry of in Afghanistan Interior and Attorney General, establishing a sound organization

to combat major crimes related to bribery and corruption by BBC Persian website, July 21, 2009 high ranking officials and an investigation agency to legally Hanif Atmar, the Interior Minister of Afghanistan said: “a major pursue the criminals. plan is launched to combat corruption in security departments ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ .of the country The plan includes combating different kinds of corruption like, Foreigners More Corrupt than Afghan Government bribery and other illegal activities. The plan is supported (Related to spending of foreign aids to Afghanistan by foreign donors) financially and technically by Ministry of Defense of United Rah e Nejat Daily, Thursday, July 23, 2009 States of America, European Police, United Nations Masato Kethra, a Japanese international aid official in the fifth Development and Counter‐narcotics agencies. session of talks on development policies of Afghanistan in Kabul Mr. Atmar added: educating the police, registering the emphasized on cooperation of Afghan government to eradicate properties of high ranking police officers and high officials of the the corruption from Afghanistan and warned: “if corruption Ministry of Interior, creating a procedure for registration of continues unchecked, Japan can consider cancellation of its aid complaints against police by people and establishment of a to Afghanistan.” 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009

Kethra described Afghanistan as an important country in the region and said: “provision of welfare, security and development in Afghanistan will have good impacts on the region.” However, Mr. Masood, a lecturer at Kabul University Faculty of Economics points to the fact that foreigners always accuse the Afghan government of corruption. He adds: “we must understand that foreigners are also involved in corruption and corruption in projects implemented by foreign organizations is much larger in scale than those implemented by Afghan state agencies. He also added: until now Afghanistan has received $58 billion $38.2 billion of which have been spent from which only $6 billion went through the Afghan government. According to ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ some reports 80% of the aids provided to Afghanistan are returned back to donor countries in various ways. He also said Why Karzai Did Not Participate in the Debate? that if we compare and observe, the projects implemented by Afghan Government are more effective and durable than those Irada Daily, No 552/ Saturday July 25, 2009 implemented by foreign NGOs. Karzai’s era can be described as the most inefficient for the people of Afghanistan and the international community. During ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ its several centuries of history Afghanistan was not called the Why Karzai Declined to Participate in the Debate most corrupt country in the world and was not known as the Ahmed Omran, Mandegar Daily, No 93, Saturday July 25, 2009 centre of opium production. Today, most credible media report elections take place in the land of narcotics. For the first time, What new plans and ideas could Karzai present in this debate? under the leadership of Karzai and despite huge flow of foreign Which one of his achievements during the past years he could aid, the people of this land are forced to sell their kids in return cite to defend his record against his powerful elections rivals? for a morsel of food. Could he honestly acknowledge that during the past eight years ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ he has been busy squandering opportunities and striking deals with drug smugglers? Could he admit the fact that he has Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai Called the Current Government expanded hunger all over the country? Could he say he has Fifth Most Corrupt Government of the World failed in fighting corruption and the culture of impunity? Could he accept he has wasted billions of international aid on 8am Daily, No 641/ Page 1/ Monday, July 27, 2009 irrational projects and embezzlement by friends and circles Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, a candidate for presidential election close to him? Could he say he has failed to do any thing to called the government of Karzai, fifth most corrupt government

ensure security? of the world. He said that corruption is a governmental ______phenomenon. He added if he wins the presidential election, he *This refers to a debate which was aired by Tolo TV in which will register and publish the properties of three thousand high Karzai declined to participate in the last minutes. Dr. Abdullah authorities of governmental officials and every six months, he Abdullah and Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmedzaid two leading rival will review their properties. candidates participated ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  Establishing a Special Court after Eight Years? Government Officials Should Not Leave the Country Nukhost Daily, Editorial, No 117, Tuesday July 28, 2009 Two Weeks before the Elections (Sarwar Ahmadzai, Presidential Candidate) The Deputy of Afghanistan’s Attorney General said: the

corruption cases of some of the ministers and high authorities Afghanistan Daily, No 854, Saturday July 25, 2009 of government who are still in government or removed from On the 23rd of July, Sarwar Ahmadzai, a candidate for their posts are in the final stages. According to the constitution, presidential elections said that the high authorities in the he said, a special court must be established to deal with these Afghan government and some members of the parliament are cases. This request of Attorney‐General is made at a time indulged in corruption. He said these individuals are planning to when high authorities in government offices are indulged in sell their properties and escape from the country. He did not corruption which is a major reason why the government’s name any particular person and said 50% of aids provided by struggles have failed to eliminate corruption. the international community are embezzled by these Due to extensive corruption in the police department, major individuals. police posts including the provincial and district commanders 17 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 2, July 31, 2009 are being sold out to the highest bidders. Joint attempts by high authorities of the Ministry of Commerce and the importers of oil in the winter of last year to monopolies the market and keep the prices of these materials high at a time of extreme need, the unknown fate of $10 million through the corrupt bureaucracy of the ministries of transportation and Hajj, continued protests by citizens of different parts of the country against land‐grabbing by members of the parliament, allegations that Zabihullah Esmati the former President of the Airlines was killed by high officials who were trying to privatize the company and the apparent transformation of state officials into wealthiest men in the country are clear signs that corruption is widespread at the highest levels of all state agencies in Afghanistan.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Karzai the Symbol of Corruption and Ghani its Enemy

Ahmad Darwish, Ariananet website The government of Dr. Najibullah was not corrupt. There were limited cases of corruption at the lower levels and of very small scale. Following the collapse of the Islamic , the new government has institutionalized corruption in the country. It can be called an achievement of Karzai’s government during past six years. The people of Kabul remember the eight years of corrupt and mafia rule under Karzai, destruction caused by several years of war where bullet marks are still seen on the walls around the city and the loss of their young people. Abdullah and Karzai are not choices for future leadership of this country. Instead, they both must be brought to a court. Dr. Ashraf Ghazni Ahmadzai is the only person who can be a capable manager as well as an acknowledged leader in the national and international level. In view of his good career and specific plans and solutions, he can drive the country out of the present crisis. He has presented acceptable and logical plans for fighting and eliminating corruption from Afghanistan. Afghanistan Watch: this is a summary of an article written by Ahmad Darwish published in Arianet website. Source: http://afelection.com/news/181

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No 2, July 31, 2009

ABOUT AFGHANISTAN WATCH

The Afghanistan Watch is an independent, non‐governmental and non‐political organization registered with the Ministry of National Economy of the Islamic . It envisions a democratic, peaceful, tolerant and just society in which all citizens have equal opportunities to realize their human potentials. Its mission is to undertake activities that will promote peace, justice, and a culture of mutual tolerance and respect for human rights in Afghanistan. As its core values the organization is strongly committed to democracy, justice, human rights, sustainable and balanced social and economic development of the country and impartiality, independence and professionalism as guiding principles of its activities.

For more information and to order publications, contact Afghanistan Watch at: First house on the left hand, Omer Jan Kandahri Masque Street, Char Rahi Poli Sorkh, Kabul, Afghanistan.

Tel: +93 (0)799 21 55 77, 799 30 14 34 Website: www.watchafghanistan.org E‐mail: [email protected]

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