A publication of watch Number 7, October 16, 2009

Seventh Note electoral complaints by the ECC. news in Afghan Media but three short Besides, some public gatherings in analyses about corruption in the This issue contains more than 70 news items selected from Afghan media. support of the preliminary results and government offices. some protests against it are reflected in Almost sixty of the news items are At the end of Truth magazine, as about transparency of elections and the the Afghan media. usual we have included an interview remaining are about other three issues. with Dr , Head of Eight of them are discussing negotiation Negotiation with the Opposition Groups: Independent Human Rights and reconciliation with Taliban, three Regarding this issue few news items Commission of Afghanistan. Miss are about corruption and only one of were published. The important point in Sima Samar has talked about the them is about transitional justice that this section was the hope by governors process of transitional justice in relates to two mass graves recently of Logar and Wardak provinces Afghanistan. She has talked about the found in Bamyan province. regarding Taliban who would join the failures and achievements of this government. process in the country. Besides, Elections Transparency: national reconciliation and In this section most of the reports are Corruption: compromise are the important parts concerned with investigation of the In this section there was no particular of the interview.

Security is not about the end of war only

 I think it might be true. However the implementation of transitional justice does not mean that we imprison people or hang them, but they should confess that they committed the crimes or mistakes, apologize from from the people and secede from power. It is not necessary that they are appointed as governors. The perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity need not be police chiefs. As we can not build trust between people and state and if there be no trust between government and people our government can never have the public support. And when any government lacks public support the condition of

people will not get better and at that time there will be injustices. Page 15

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/a6f49c/ 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 American Embassy: We are waiting for the final Two mass graves found in Bamyan province 3 elections results 9

Negotiation with armed position Groups Karzai alone in the competition 9 : A coalition government has no meaning 9 Taliban Precondition for the negotiation 4 The preliminary result of Afghanistan presidential Dialogue, is a human approach 4 election 10 Peace, an option that should be taken seriously 4 Najafi: Only the ECC can demand recount of the votes 10 Talks with Taliban should not contradict the The first meeting of IEC for a run‐off 10 previous resolutions of the Security Council 4 Karzai and the authorities in IEC should be legally Hamid zadah: The doors of negotiation with the prosecuted 10 Taliban are open 4 1.5 million Votes are suspicious 10 Non‐governmental Organizations: Talk with the Second round of elections is not according to the Afghan Insurgents 5 demand of people 10 Mc. Chrystal: For success in Afghanistan we need Galbreith to come back 11 greater understanding of Afghanistan 5 Elections; a single step to second round 11 The hopeful statement of the Governor of Logar 5 We will not be silent if

Elections Transparency we are not satisfied with the elections results 11 Provincial Candidates protest in Herat and Parwan Concerns about elections results hit the UN 11 province 6 Bashardost, accused UNAMA of intervention in the Will Fraud Win? 6 Afghanistan Elections 11 Hundreds of residents supported the A ponder on the presidential elections primary elections results 6 of August 20 elections 11 The final results of Afghan Presidential Elections A number of provincial council elections will be announced next week 6 candidates report fraud in the elections 11 Political excitements and the declaration of New pretext by the IEC to support fraud 11 elections results 6 Rabbani: People have taken decision for change 11 Recount of more than three hundred voting center, Head of IEC Secretariat: "the suspicious votes will another step towards transparency in the elections 7 not be declared invalid.” 12 After several months delay IEC declared the The Enigma of Elections Results 12 primary results for provincial council elections 7 International appreciation for the participation of Let the ECC investigate the complaints 7 Afghans in the elections 12 People, waiting for the elections results 7 1.5 million votes of prominent candidates endangered Invalidation of some polling stations or a Run‐Off? 7 with the declaration of complete partial results 12 India welcomed the successful Afghan Elections 7 Election frauds and arguments in UNAMA 12 IEC:Recounting will begin soon 7 Claims of fraud in the provincial council elections 12 Contradictory positions regarding election results 7 In first or second round, Karzai is the winner 12 Ten days to election fate 8 The Deputy of UN Envoy in Afghanistan Dismissed 13 Ambiguity in outcomes of the elections: Growing concerns about insecurity and fraud 13 Is Hamid Karzai the winner at any case? 8 Frauds in the provincial council’s elections should Zalmai Khalilzad: Afghanistan cannot reach victory be addressed 13 without USA 8 Partial tecount of votes on the basis of A two‐week deadline for Afghan Election new recount procedures 13 Commissions to announce final elections results 8 Why the opponents of Karzai are angry with Kai Eide? 13 Holbrooke has undermined the political The final results of Afghanistan's presidential independence of Afghanistan 8 elections to be announced next week 13 Abdullah rejected coalition government 8 Hundreds of Kabul residents supported the Afghan elections reviewed 9 primary elections results 13 The future of a government based on fraud 9 Corruption Daoud Ali Najafi: The suspicious votes will not be What is your alternative if increasing foreign called invalid but investigated 9 troops is rejected? 14 Delay in election results and its effect on the Ahmad and Mahmood are leading Afghanistan people’s lives 9 backward 14

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No 7, October 16, 2009

Transitional Justice

Two mass graves found in Bamyan province

Nukhost Daily, No 169, Page 8, Oct 10, 2009 After the local authorities discovered two mass graves in Bmayan province, one of the representatives of this province in the Parliament related the mass graves to the Taliban and Communist regime era. Muhammad Sarwar Jawadi, a member of parliament, said: “The mass graves discovered in the vicinity of Bamyan airport is related to Taliban era however the second mass grave found in the Khawal area of Yakawlang district probably belongs to Communist era.” He claims that in the early days of Jihad many were taken from Khawal area of Yakawlang district, likewise at the time of Taliban they tried to carry out genocide.” In the meantime, Muhammad Ewaz Naziri, the Police Chief of Bamyan province has said that the mass graves were discovered almost one month before but their news went on air recently. He says that the cloths and boots found from the graves show that the buried bodies belonged to non‐military civilians. Bamyan was severally attacked in the late 90s and it is said that the graves belongs to those years.

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No 7, October 16, 2009

Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups

Taliban Precondition for the negotiation much close with the realities in the ground in Afghanistan and if

the President has asked them to actively participate in bringing Afghanistan Daily, No 904, Page 4, Sep 29, 2009 peace in Afghanistan, it is a good choice because Saudi Arabia The precondition set by Taliban group for negotiation is the exit has an important position in the Muslim world besides other schedule of foreign troops from Afghanistan. It is something issues. always rejected by higher authorities in the government. However what concerns most is the reaction of international ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ community particularly western countries that have an Dialogue, is a human approach

important role in politics, war and economic situation of Afghanistan Daily, No 904, Page 4, Sep 29, 2009 Afghanistan. There are rumors that the government of Afghanistan wants to There are agreements amongst the westerners about the need negotiate with the armed opposition group. The rumors for peace talk; however they have different approaches and strengthened when the country's president Hamid Karzai have different views on other issues. The important point is that declared explicitly that if he knew the address of Mullah Omar peace should be regarded as the main and top priority of all. and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar he would personally meet them. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ There is no doubt in the intention of President to negotiate to Talks with Taliban should not contradict the bring peace in Afghanistan. This is the reason for the formation previous resolutions of the Security Council

of the Commission for Strengthening Peace led by Sibghatullah Mujaddadi has been to free Taliban prisoners. However the Mandegar Daily, No 141, Page 1, Oct 3, 2009 problem faced by both sides is lack of transparency and unclear Russia's permanent representative in the United Nations says that position of the government regarding the issue that on what the fight against "Taliban" movement and "Al Qaeda” is not limited criteria and under which law the government negotiates with to Afghanistan only and it is a regional and international issue. the Taliban that believe in strict Islamic Sharia with no relevance with the current phenomenon of the country. Therefore the Vitaly Churkin Russia’s Permanent Representative to UN talked voices raised by governemtn regarding negotiation are always about the current situation of Afghanistan and said: "The suspended in the air and Taliban always rejected the process of national reconciliation should not contradict the propositions by the government of Afghanistan. It is said that resolutions of UN Security Council including sanctions on Taliban have proposed a list to the government of Afghanistan Taliban and Al Qaeda”. with 11 items in which they have demanded for the withdrawal The Russian diplomat says that he support the process of of foreign troops and the key ministries to be given to them. national reconciliation in Afghanistan but the Russian Federation is opposed to plans for removing the Taliban from ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ the UN sanctions and blacklists. Peace, an option that should be taken seriously He added: “Who guarantees that Taliban will not return to their Afghanistan Daily, No 906, Page 5, Oct 1, 2009 past? If the Afghanistan’s leadership thinks reasonable the The plan of negotiation with the Taliban has been on the air for contacts with the former Taliban fighters talks must take place long time but since past several weeks the discussion has between those Taliban who put down their arms, recognize the become hotter. Recently Hamid Karzai in an interview with the constitution of Afghanistan and breaks their contacts with the Geo TV of Pakistan said that Mullah Omar is his brother, and he Al Qaeda.” wants peace with the Taliban. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Considering the recent incidents it is the best opportunity for talks and reconciliation. Hamid zadah: The doors of negotiation with the Taliban are open One of the important issues in bringing peace is the role of neighboring countries in the country’s affairs. Saudi Arabia Sorosh Millat, No. 182, Page 2, Sep 30 2009 played an important role to support jihad and the people of The authorities at the President’s Office in Afghanistan once Afghanistan at the time of Soviet invasion. This country is very again declared that the doors for negotiations with those armed 4 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009 opposition groups, who wish to end war in the country and of Muhammad Agha district of this province and has been the establish peace, are open. governor of the province for more than one year says: “since I Humayoon Hamidzadah, Hamid Karzai's spokesman yesterday in have become the governor of the province the insecurity has a press conference said that one of the basic goals of Afghan decreased because I have close relations with the Taliban.” He government is to establish peace and stability in the country added that more that 3 thousand Taliban fighters have joined and on these bases they invite armed opposition groups to join the peace process and during past eight months 233 bombs and the peace process. 69 ammunition depots are discovered in the province and more than 23 Taliban commanders are killed or imprisoned. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ

Non‐governmental Organizations: Talk with the Afghan Insurgents

Sorosh Millat Daily, No 187, Page 2, Oct 6, 2009 A number of NGOs have called for talks with anti‐government forces of Afghanistan to approach those who are in need of their humanitarian aids. These organizations in a meeting in Kabul claimed that insecurity and attack on their members and offices are the biggest challenges faced by their humanitarian aids and activities. Hashim Mayar, Deputy Head of Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) said that during this year there have been direct attacks on the NGOs. Mr. Mayar said: “Since January to August of this year there have been 23 armed attacks on the NGOs that left 15 persons killed.” “Insecurity is the main reason that we cannot reach those Afghans who are in need even in some areas we are compelled to suspend our humanitarian aid, therefore we call the government of Afghanistan to start negotiation with the opponents.” said Ishikawa an official of OXFAM, a British Organization.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Mc. Chrystal: For success in Afghanistan we need greater understanding of Afghanistan

Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1279, Page 4, 7 Oct, 2009 General Mc. Chrystal pointed out three insurgent forces: the Quetta Council or Taliban leadership, Hikmatyar group and some other anti‐government groups and said: “the most dangerous amongst them is the Quetta Council that has the ambition to re‐take power in Afghanistan.” However he emphasized that if we are to reconciliate with the Taliban leadership it is the job of Afghan government. Our proposition for Taliban is that we will provide the living conditions for their fighters and commanders to return home and continue their lives.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The hopeful statement of the Governor of Logar

Nukhost Daily, No 168, Page 6, Oct 8, 2009 Ratib Bathoor Atiqullah Lodin the governor of Logar province who is a resident 5 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009 Elections Transparency

Provincial Candidates protest in Herat and Parwan province

Iqtidar Milli, No 331, Page 8, Oct 3, 2009 More than 20 provincial council nominees who failed to reach the provincial council from Parwan province claimed that there is difference in the number of votes declared and the figure they had recorded when the votes were counted in polling stations. They think the Independent election commission (IEC) is involved in the electoral fraud. In the meantime some of the provincial council candidates in Herat province also asked for the review of the votes.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Will Fraud Win? Mandegar Daily, No 141, Page 2, Sep 31, 2009 If the results of the elections go against the will of the people by fraud, what is threatening the country is the crisis of legitimacy ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ .and distance between people and government The security crisis that has intensely mounted since last year The final results of Afghan Presidential Elections will be announced next week indicates the fact that people are no more interested in this government and do not share the interests. This condition if Cheragh Daily, No 1400, Page 1, Oct 1, 2009 goes on can deteriorate the security situation. Ban Ki Moon, the United Nations Secretary General If so, we can name the next five years as years of disaster, predicted that the final elections results will be announced bloodshed, destruction and increase in the poverty in the next week. Amid electoral frauds in the favor of incumbent country. president Hamid Karzai, Ban Ki Moon stressed that they will not officially recognize any one as the president of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Hundreds of Kabul residents supported the primary Afghanistan unless the final results are announced and the observers review them. elections results ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan Daily, No 907, Page 8, Oct 3, 2009  Hundreds of Kabul residents supported the primary election Political excitements and the declaration of elections results results in a ceremony and threatened that if the election goes to second round they will not participate in it. 8am Daily, No 866, Page 6, Oct 1, 2009 At the end of the ceremony the participant issued a resolution Nearly forty days have passed since the presidential and and demanded the people and the international community to provincial council elections, but the results are still not accept the election results. They also demanded the announced. Delay in the final elections result, has caused the international community and international observers to support financial, political, social and security situation to be the result of elections and do not interfere in the affairs of the transformed. The prices of some of the items have increased Elections Commission. and the reason is told to be lack of security confidence in the Hilary Clinton, the US Secretary of State says extensive frauds in importers. the presidential elections must be investigated. She expressed From the political point of view two poles are formed with her view during a meeting with Dr. Spanta the Minister of unsound competitions and this situation has created a sort of Foreign Affairs. She added that in addition the future confusion in the political scenario of the country that has government investigations of the frauds are important for provided an opportunity for the Taliban to increase their legitimacy of the political system in the country. insurgency. 6 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009 Recount of more than three hundred voting center, experts called it an intervention in the internal affairs of the another step towards transparency in the elections country. Meanwhile the United Nation’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan also went in conflict with his deputy and increased Sorosh Millat Daily, No 182, Page 2, Sep 30, 2009 the complexity of situation. Lately the ECC has announced that votes from more than 300 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ polling stations will be recounted where widespread frauds  have taken place. They say the recounting will be carried out as Invalidation of some polling stations or a Run‐Off?

a sample to guarantee the transparency of elections. Because Afghanistan Daily, No 889, Page 8, Sep 23, 2009 the Electoral Complaints Commission in one hand is independent and will not act in the favor of any candidate and What have confronted the final results of elections are the secondly the logical process of pursuing the complaints should difficulties in decision making process and how the second round of election should be organized. Should election be pass through this commission. organized in those stations whose votes are declared invalid? If recounting of votes affects the final result of elections that no ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ After several months delay IEC declared the primary one could win 50 plus one vote, the election will go to second results for provincial council elections round.

Musharikat e Milli Weekly, No 330, Page 2, Sep 30, 2009 With all these efforts and protests, many experts believe that the final winner of the elections is Hamid Karzai; whether the The Independent Election Commission (IEC) controversially election goes to second round or it is decided in the first round. refrained from step by step declaration of provincial council The suspicious polling stations are in the favor of Mr. Karzai and elections results which some of the candidates for provincial the first round showed that the votes of Karzai are far more a elections believe have paved the way for manipulating the lot than Abdullah’s. results. Mass media and the local and international observers also did not pay some particular attentions to the results of However, what appears important is that the officials in IEC and provincial council’s elections however it was fundamentally their international experts should decide to announce the results of election soon. overshadowed by the presidential elections. It seems that the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ results of provincial council’s elections will draw the attention of News agencies and political forums or it may raise another India welcomed the successful Afghan Elections debate. Afghanistan daily, No 900, Page 1, Sep 24, 2009 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Indian Foreign Ministry released a statement expressing their Let the ECC investigate the complaints support for the presidential elections of Afghanistan and Afghanistan Daily, No 889, Page 8, Sep 23, 2009 appreciated Afghans for their participation amid security threats and once again strengthened their commitments for The Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) announced that their strategic cooperation with Afghanistan and their there has been fraud in ten percent of the overall votes and partnership to develop democracy and reconstruction of President Hamid Karzai urged the international community to Afghanistan. let ECC assess the complaints with calm and without any ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ .interventions In the meanwhile hundreds of people gathered in Kapisa IEC: province and declared their support for the early results of Recounting will begin soon election declared by IEC. In another gathering held at Parwan province the participants declared their support for the results Afghanistan Daily, No 900, Page 8, Sep 24, 2009 announced. Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) says that the process of recounting votes in hundreds of polling stations will soon begin. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  According to Head of the ECC, suspicious ballot‐boxes in three People, waiting for the elections results thousand polling stations will be recounted.

Afghanistan Daily, No 889, Page 8, Sep 23, 2009 The United Nations also asked the Independent Election People are fed up with the prolonging of the vote‐counting Commission and the IEC to carefully carry out their activities. process and the later controversies related to possible frauds. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The necessary and meaningful precautions by the IEC in Contradictory positions regarding election results announcing the results of elections and the assessments of the ECC also took longer period than expected. Afghanistan Daily, No 900, Page 8, Sep 24, 2009 The delay in the elections results announcement went beyond With the announcement of primary elections results some of its usual expectation in a way that the European Union’s the Asian countries, including Russia, Pakistan, Iran, India and observers started criticizing the IEC and some of the political China have expressed their support for the results and some of 7 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009 them even have sent congratulation messages for Mr. Karzai A two‐week deadline for Afghan Election about his victory. Commissions to announce final elections results

However some Western countries believe that there have been Cheragh Daily, No 1389, Page 4, Sep 26, 2009 widespread frauds in recent elections in Afghanistan and demanded for a serious assessment in this regard. An IEC official declared that the Commission had only two weeks to announce the final results of elections. He added that Meanwhile, United Nations Assistance Mission Office in as the winter season is ahead so IEC must finalize all the results Afghanistan demanded free, fair and transparent elections. in two weeks and also makes it clear whether the election goes It is expected that final results of the election will be announced to second round or not. after all the complaints are reviewed by IEC. The experts warn that prolonging the process of elections or taking it to the second round in spring season will weaken the ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Ten days to election fate central government and will strengthen the insurgent forces. Therefore the best time for organizing the second round of Sorosh Millat, No 178, Page 1, Sep 26, 2009 elections will be prior to the winter season. The election outcome will be determined in the coming ten ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ .days whether there will be a run‐off or not Dawood Ali Najafi, Head of the Election Commission’s Holbrooke has undermined the political independence of Afghanistan Secretariat said in an interview with the BBC that they have reached an agreement with the authorities in ECC to make Bakhtar Daily, No 82, Page 7, Sep 26, 2009 samples of suspected votes to assess the frauds and the Since the beginning of the second presidential elections process elections results will be announced in the coming ten days. in Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke, the US Special Envoy to the region disregarded the standards and the principles of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Ambiguity in outcomes of the elections: diplomacy and non‐intervention in elections by encouraging Mr. to participate in the elections and compete Is Hamid Karzai the winner at any case? with Hamid Karzai. Nukhost Daily, No 157, Page 2, Sep 26, 2009 To reach his objectives Mr. Holbrooke allegedly accused the The Electoral Commissions despite their demagogical claims national personalities of the country Mr. Dostum and Mr. Fahim of being independent in their activities have not been able who are allies of Mr. Karzai. to even propose a convincing answer to the minor ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ complaints. Since the beginning of the declaring elections results they have been saying that they will pursue the Abdullah rejected coalition government complaints in the best possible means. However it seems Afghanistan Daily, No 898, Page 1, Sep 19, 2009 that if foreigners did not intervene, despite extensive frauds, they would have announced the results in favor of their Just like Hamid Karzai, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah his rival in the benefactor, Mr. Karzai. presidential elections rejected forming coalition government and called it no solution to the interest of the country. He On the other hand if election goes to second round, they might remarked that he had become candidate to bring positive use technical excuses and insecurity or unfavorable climate to changes and a coalition government is not the way to reach postpone the election to the summer of next year. In this way those objectives. Hamid Karzai gets sufficient time to call a national jirga and ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ approve himself as the lifetime president and impose himself on the people of Afghanistan. Afghan elections reviewed

Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1269, Page 1, Sep 28, 2009 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Zalmai Khalilzad: Dr. Spanta in his trip to New York discussed the recent elections Afghanistan cannot reach victory without USA in Afghanistan with a group called "Friends of Afghanistan" which consists of Foreign Ministers from America and Western 8am Daily, No 683, Sep 26, 2009 countries. Zalmay Khalilzad says: “There is no doubt left about the Dr Spanta said: “The participation of people in the presidential frauds in the elections of Afghanistan.” He emphasize that elections is an important step towards institutionalization of the best way to move forth is to pursue the widespread democratic values and deciding the destiny by the people complaints and electoral irregularities, in accordance to themselves.” procedures and Afghan laws. He adds: "In the end, if the IEC declares Karzai as the winner I think he will win from a He added:" the declaration of final presidential elections results legitimate way. If it did not happen then the election might in Afghanistan requires the cooperation of both ECC and IEC to go to second round. " finish the process soon.” 8 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009 The future of a government based on fraud of public lives.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Nukhost Daily, No 158, Page 1, 28 Sep 09 It seems that there are serious concerns about the aftermath of American Embassy: elections after the results are announced. The first concern is We are waiting for the final elections results that the people will react to the government that is established as a result of fraud. The law says that votes should be cast by 8am Daily, No 148, Page 2, Sep 19, 2009 the people not collectively by few individuals in favor of specific The embassy of United States of America in Kabul said in a candidates. communiqué released that they are waiting for the final and On the other hand reports suggest that the government instead approved elections result. The American Embassy has expressed of a legal response has distributed arms and weapons according its hope that the complaints received about the electoral to Balkh governor to some local people in some districts to commission are processed seriously and in complete silence the disturbances that might occur after the election coordination between the two responsible organizations the IEC results are announced. and the ECC. The communiqué released by American embassy adds that as we are waiting for the final result we demand the This method can ignite ethnic conflicts in the region. In a nominees and their supporters to be patient during the country like Afghanistan, where in one hand is indulged in war process.” against terrorism and on other hand if these conflicts are ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ignited the future will be more gloomy and dangerous that we can imagine. Karzai alone in the competition

8am Daily, No 148, Page 4, Sep 19, 2009 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Daoud Ali Najafi: The electoral observers of the European Union believe that one The suspicious votes third of Karzai’s votes are suspicious. If it is confirmed by the will not be called invalid but investigated Electoral Complaints Commission, Karzai should no longer dream of victory in the first round. Afghanistan Daily, No 902, Page 1, September 28, 2009 Since early days of gradual declaration of results the Krazai Head of the IEC Secretariat, Daoud Ali Najafi in a telephonic team assumed to be the winner. However now, this viewpoint contact with Bakhtar News Agency said: “In contrast to what is has put the legitimacy of election in doubt and serious discussed in the media the suspicious votes will not be called questions are raised in this regard. Although the Karzai team invalid but will be investigated.” has regarded the remarks and statements by European Head of the IEC Secretariat rejected the rumors that if a ballot Observers as an interference in the internal affairs of the box contained 95 percent of the votes in the favor of one country and against the constitution of the country; however, candidate will be declared invalid and said it cannot be the international observers are required to guarantee the standard for calling the votes invalid. transparency in the elections of the countries like Afghanistan. There are no organizations or institutions inside or outside the The re‐assessment of the votes from 313 polling stations will country that support Karzai in the first round and our “King of start when the ballot‐boxes reach Kabul. The IEC has the Knights” is alone in the ground. authority to assess the boxes and ECC will play the role of observer. In this condition the enigma of Afghan elections requires the involved parties to show eagerness, however and whatever efforts are put into practice they can not restore the credibility ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Delay in election results of a fraudulent elections. However people demand for a and its effect on the people’s lives peaceful solution for the problems of Afghanistan.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan Daily, No 902, Page 1, Sep 28, 2009 Some of the residents of Kabul say that the several weeks delay Hamid Karzai: in the announcement of presidential elections results, has A coalition government has no meaning slowed down the activities in state institutions and especially Afghanistan Daily, No 898, Page 1, Sep 19, 2009 trade. President Hamid Karzai rejected any kind of coalition They believe that one of the factors behind rise in the prices government however he emphasized on national participation. and disappointment of government employees and traders on the eve of winter season is the delay in the elections Hamid Karzai said coalition government has no meaning. results. According to him if a coalition was supposed to be formed what Matiullah Kharuti a political expert confirms the concerns of was the need of election and all these expenses. However people and says that traders do their work considering the Karzai said national participation is in the favor of all and he will conditions and this issue has a direct effect on the uncertainty put it into practice. 9 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/a6f49c/

No 7, October 16, 2009 The preliminary result election has committed widespread fraud in the elections that of Afghanistan presidential election has put in doubt the integrity of elections and therefore must be brought to a court. Cheragh Daily, Number 1394, Page 1, 19 Sep 2009 Noorul Haq Ullomi, an MP from Kandahar province says that The Independent Election Commission has announced the Mr. Karzai has two responsibilities: one, as a candidate he partial results of 100 percent counted votes of the nominees for should not have given the opportunity of fraud to take place in second round of Afghanistan presidential election. his favor and secondly as the president of the country that the Head of the IEC Secretariat, Daoud Ali Najafi in eighth press authorities in IEC, governors, district mayors appointed by him conference announced that the total number of qualified voters carried out widespread fraud in his favor. was 15 million 295 thousands and 16 persons. According to him Muhammad Alam Ezidyar says that if ECC finds out who and only 38% of the eligible voters participated in the elections. under whose authority carried out the frauds the issue should 85.42% of the voters were men, 38.75% were women and be referred to judicial authorities and with no doubt Karzai will 2.83% were nomads. According to authorities in IEC, 5 million be brought into court. 663 thousand and 758 votes are valid and the rest are invalid. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ According to Najafi the final result will be announced after the  complaints are assessed by the ECC. 1.5 million Votes are suspicious

8am Daily, No 681, Page 1, Sep 17, 2009 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Najafi: The European Union election observers that had observed presidential and provincial council elections based on their Only the ECC can demand recount of the votes findings believe that widespread fraud took place in the Nukhost Daily, No 156, Page 3, Sep 17, 2009 polling stations and the IEC without paying any attention to On Wednesday Radio Liberty quoted Daoud Najafi Head of IEC it have counted the votes in the favor of particular Secretariat as saying: "According to election law the only candidates. institution that has the authority to order a recount is the ECC.” Demetri Alwana, deputy head of the EU election observers says Although the UNAMA did not officially ask for the recount of that one and half million votes out of 92% preliminary results votes however it is said that Kai Eide had demanded for the that are announced so far are suspicious. votes of one thousand polling stations to be recounted and On the other hand widespread fraud and low turnout by Peter Golbrith his deputy had asked for recount of five people on August 20 elections besides bad security situations thousand polling stations. are the major challenges the second round of election is faced Nazifullah Salarzai a UNAMA Spokesperson in Kabul said: "For with. In the meantime the Head of European Union election UNAMA the recounting of votes makes no difference however observers emphasized that serious cases of fraud have we want the enforcement of law and the deputy of the happened in the Afghanistan elections. He added: “the organization demanded for the results that should be accepted legitimacy of elections is not guaranteed by foreigners, by all Afghans.” however Afghans themselves must say that whether the election has been legitimate or not.” ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ The first meeting of IEC for a run‐off  Second round of elections is not according to the Mandegar Daily, No 135, Page 6, Sep 17, 2009 demand of people The first meeting of Independent Election Commission (IEC) regarding run‐off was held in the IEC headquarters. A reliable Bakhtar Daily, No 85, Page 3, Sep 28, 2009 source told Mandegar Daily that the discussion in the meeting Based on the reports by United Nations, the August of this year was focused on the primary stages of second round of is said to be the deadliest month because of the elections held elections. According to source, the quality of ink, the ballot‐ in this month. The reports add that from January of this year papers and the measures to stop fraud were included in the until August 1500 civilians were killed. However last year in the agenda of meeting. In the second round of election Dr. first eight months 1145 civilians were killed. Abdullah and Hamid Karzai the two leading candidates are The reports suggest that the number of casualties have a direct going to compete. link with the elections as the insurgents were determined to .prevent people from participating in the elections ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Karzai and the authorities in IEC should be legally A number of members of local council from Tagab village have prosecuted said to Bakhtar daily that they have suffered most and are no more ready to undergo any more sufferings with the second Mandegar Daily, No 135, Page 1, Sep 17, 2009 round of elections. They warned if the election results are not MPs in parliament say that the government nominee in the accepted they will protest. 10 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009 Galbreith to come back have agreed that from 3600 suspicious ballot‐boxes 313 of them will be recounted.” He criticized the process of recounting and Payam Mujaheed Weekly, No 651, Page 1, Sep 26, 2009 demanded Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General to call back Kai The tensions between the UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Eide the UN Special Envoy to Afghanistan and direct other his American deputy Peter Galbreith regarding the results of members of this organization in Kabul not to interfere in the Afghanistan elections resulted into expulsion of the Galbreith Afghan elections. from Afghanistan. According to some reports Mr. Golbrieth will ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ .return back in near future with greater power from the USA A ponder on the presidential elections ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  of August 20 elections Elections; a single step to second round Irada Daily, No 1667, Page 3, Sep 29, 2009 Payam Mujaheed Weekly, No 651, Page 1, Sep 26, 2009 Ahmad Panah Ayub A reliable source in the IEC has told to the Ria Nowasti News The people of this country call on the western authorities and Agency that the print of new ballot papers for the second round internal political circles to let the IEC pursue its activities and of elections has started. Also it is said that Kabul International reach final decisions. They also ask the candidates to respect Airport is making preparations for the second round of elections the final results and do not let the country go towards crises and there are rumors that planes carrying ballot boxes and and tensions so that the enemies of Afghanistan use the other equipments for the second round of elections are arriving opportunity in their favor. in Kabul. It is planned that preparations for the second round ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ elections will soon be completed by the donor countries.  A number of provincial council elections candidates report fraud in the elections ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ We will not be silent if 8am Daily, No 686, Page 2, Sep 29, 2009 we are not satisfied with the elections results On the basis of provincial council elections results the total 8am Daily, No 685, Page 1, Sep 28, 2009 number of elected candidates from 30 province reaches to 357 Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, a rival of Mr. Karzai has expressed his and 25 percent of them are women. The total number of satisfaction with the process of sampling suspicious votes and candidates in the provincial candidates in 34 provinces reaches said that he will not sit silent unless he is satisfied with the to three thousand. In the meantime a number of nominees in elections results. the provincial council elections have reported frauds in the elections. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah said: “we are observing the every moment of the process and our decision would be based on the Noor Muhammad Noor said if these claims are proved true, it is point that whether the invalid votes are separated from the possible that the results alter in those areas where the claims valid votes or not?” are made. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Concerns about elections results hit the UN New pretext by the IEC to support fraud Dawood Ali Najafi: 8am Daily, No 685, Page 1, Sep 28, 2009 “Suspicious votes will not be declared invalid” The elections that was supposed to open a new phase of hope and prosperity has now become a matter of concern for the Mandegar Daily, NO 137, Page 1, Sep 27, 2009 people of Afghanistan and the countries involved here. The IEC Secretariat Head said that he had guided the IEC UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon warned in his three weekly members to use more than 600 votes in one ballet‐box if reports that the presidential elections results in Afghanistan needed. However the experts believe that the recent comments might ignite more violence. The outbreak of violence has of IEC Secretariat Head are another attempt to cover fraud in reached to the north of the country and some state authorities the elections. are accused of expanding these insecurity crises. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ :Rabbani ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Bashardost, accused UNAMA of intervention in the People have taken decision for change

Afghanistan Elections Mandegar Daily, No 138, Page 1, Sep 28, 2009

Afghanistan Daily, No 904, Page 4, Sep 29, 2009 Rabbani, the leader of Jibha Milli (National Front) said that the Ramazan Bashardost, one of the candidates of second people have decided for change and they are moving forth to presidential elections of Afghanistan said: “The representatives achieve this goal. of Hamid Karzai and Dr. Abdullah in a meeting held at UNAMA He expressed that no careful measures were considered while 11 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009 forming the elections commissions and added that this issue apparently expressed their "satisfaction" on the “continuity of caused fraud and harming our prestige in the elections. Karzai’s second term as President”.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Deliriums of the IEC 1.5 million votes of prominent candidates Head of IEC Secretariat: endangered with the declaration of complete partial "the suspicious votes will not be declared invalid.” results

Election Commission spokesman: Nukhost Daily, No 156, Page 2, Sep 17, 2009 "In a single ballot‐box 999 votes can be placed." While the Election Commission informs of last phases of votes Mandegar Daily,No 138, Page 1, Sep 28, 2009 counting of August 20 elections the elections observers of European Union have claimed there are 1.5 votes suspicious Finally, the drama of supporting Hamid Karzai with widespread from amongst the 5 million 918 thousand votes cast in the fraud in the country’s elections under new pretexts by IEC has ballot‐boxes. reached its extreme with new tactics and modern expertise. Mr. Noor Muhammad Noor, Spokesperson for IEC says: “There is no On the basis of findings of European observers about one problem according to our procedure in casting up to 999 votes million and 100 thousand of these suspicious ballot‐papers are in one ballot box.” in favor of Hamid Karzai, 300 thousand are in the favor of Dr. Abdullah and more than 92 thousand are in the favor of a people’s representative in the House of Ramazan Bashardost. This issue is to be pondered about as the Representatives called the intervention of the Election two later candidates always charged Karzai for the frauds. Commissions in reviewing electoral complaints as a sign of ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ confusion in the body. He added: “The IEC fears of widespread fraud and manipulations in the elections.” Election frauds and arguments in UNAMA

Nukhost Daily, No 156, Page 4, Sep 17, 2009 ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The Enigma of Elections Results Afghanistan is passing through a crucial period these days as Irada Daily, No 1667, Page 2, Sep 29, 2009 widespread fraud cases in the elections are identified. Lately there have been comments and discussions about the approach Impartial and elections monitoring organizations have approved towards the electoral frauds that caused conflicts between Kai the existence of fraud in the elections. During past two months Eide and his deputy Peter Galbreith. Peter Galbreith had the Asian election commissions and European Union observers demanded for complete investigation of frauds. However Kai both confirmed that there have been widespread fraud and Eide had demanded more softer approach towards the issue. manipulations in the August 20, Afghan elections. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Therefore if the issue of fraud in the elections is not thoroughly and carefully reviewed by the ECC and other relevant bodies Claims of fraud in the provincial council elections and the results are not presented to the nation, the elections Afghanistan Daily, No 903, Page 1, Sep 28, 2009 will present a weak and gloomy picture of democracy in Afghanistan and the foundations of legitimacy of future After the preliminary elections results were announced from 30 government resulting from this elections will be fragile.. This provinces, some of the candidates made claims of fraud in the problem can lead the country towards new political and security elections. The IEC on Saturday September 26 announced early crisis. results of provincial council’s elections. Election Commission has said that those who have any ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ complaints about the elections results can file their complaints International appreciation for the participation of during 72 hours after the announcement of results. Afghans in the elections ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ 8am Daily, No 686, Page 1, Sep 29, 2009 In first or second round, Karzai is the winner The United States of America and NATO have expressed their Bakhtar Weekly, No 86, Page 4, Sep 30, 2009 expectation that Karzai will be We can surely say that Karzai’s chances to win in second round the president of the country for are more than any other candidate. If in the run‐off, Mr. the second term. Hilary Clinton, Abdullah again fails to win with complete transparency and US Secretary of States and the accuracy in the elections, will he accept the results silently? ministers of NATO member Surely, not. Because his aim is not a just, transparent and fair countries on Friday in a meeting elections but to achieve his interests. In most of the countries of with their Afghan counterpart the world when candidates fail or understand that their votes Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta, are not enough they accept the defeat for the sake of national 12 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/a6f49c/

No 7, October 16, 2009 solidarity and to pay attribute to the votes of the people. the election observers supported by United Nations believe that However in Afghanistan it is opposite. The votes cast in the all the candidates of presidential election are indulged in the favor of Abdullah are half the votes of Mr. Karzai, but still he is electoral frauds. not willing to accept Karzai’s victory. On Monday the recounting procedure was published by IEC. ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ  The Deputy of UN Envoy in Afghanistan Dismissed Why the opponents of Karzai are angry with Kai Mandegar Daily, No 141, Page 1, Oct 3, 2009 Eide?

An anonymous UN official has announced that Deputy of UN Bakhtar Daily, No. 88, Page 2, Oct 6, 2009 Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Peter Woodard Galbraith is dismissed Kai Eide, has tried to be impartial in his activities regarding from his position. The UN official added that Galbraith was Afghan elections unlike most of the foreign and local responsible to deal with claims of fraud in the Afghan elections. institutions and some western media. Even if UN’s Special Envoy is found non‐responsive to the issue His efforts must be appreciated at a time when many others try of fraud in the elections he will be found accountable and will to manipulate the process of elections. be punished. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ It seems that the international community is taking serious notice of fraud in the Afghanistan elections and if the discussion The final results of Afghanistan's presidential of Kai Eide’s support for Mr. Karzai is confirmed, his position will elections to be announced next week also be jeopardized in Afghanistan. Cheragh Daily, No. 1400, Page 1, Oct 1, 2009 ـــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــ  UN Secretary‐General Ban Ki Moon predicted that the final Growing concerns about insecurity and fraud elections results of Afghanistan's presidential elections will be

Iqtidar Milli Weekly, No 331, Page 1, Oct3, 2009 announced next week. Based on to the incidents and events of political and security In the midst of all fraud allegations in the elections in favor of situations in the country, every day the security situations are Hamid Karzai the incumbent president, Ban Ki Moon deteriorating. In the political sphere of the country turmoil, emphasized that he will not officially recognize any one as the fragmentation, irresponsibility and seeking personal or group president unless the final results are announced and the interests are vividly apparent. The administration of the country observers approve it. for years has been drowned in corruption and inefficiency. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ However after the presidential elections this situation became more intensified. Hundreds of Kabul residents supported the primary elections results ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan Daily, No 907, Page 8, Oct 3, 2009 Frauds in the provincial council’s elections should be addressed In a gathering in Kabul, hundreds of Kabul residents declared their support for the primary elections results in which Hamid Rah e Nejat Daily, No. 1277, Page 2, Oct 6, 2009 Karzi is said to be the winner and they warned that if the Some of the tribal elders and provincial council candidates from election goes to the second round they will not participate. At Kabul and provinces met with President of House of the end of the gathering a resolution with 14 articles was also Representatives Younus Qanooni and demanded called for declared in which they asked all the people and the investigation of electoral complaints. international community to accept the elections results. In this resolution they asked the international community and the In , not fraud, but manipulations took place and international observers not to interfere in the affairs of the in 13 insecure districts the ballot‐boxes were filled at homes by primary elections results. choice.

Provincial candidates in Kabul province also claimed that the people who really received the large number of votes are not declared the winners. However those who went on with fraud and manipulations are officially declared as the winners.

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Partial tecount of votes on the basis of new recount procedures

Rah e Nejat Daily, No 1277, Page 7, Oct 6, 2009 On the basis of a new procedures that was issued on Monday, 13 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/a6f49c/

No 7, October 16, 2009

Corruption

What is your alternative if increasing foreign troops is rejected?

Nukhost Daily, No 159, Page 2, Sep 28, 2009 In a country where police is fully drowned in corruption, the national army does not have a single confidence and ability on their operations, law is ignored by law enforcement agencies, the government officials are drowned fully in corruption, people have no trust on the political system and the government and the insecurity is increasing everyday it does not seem logical to hope that additional foreign troops will address all these disorders.

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Mandagar Daily, No 142, Page 7, Oct 3, 2009 The observers and critics in Afghanistan say that Ahmad and Mahmood are the serious political obstacles ahead of democracy and the claim of Hamid Karzai that his government is combating systematic corruption in the country.

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PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/a6f49c/ No 7, October 16, 2009 Security is not about the end of war only

Interview with Dr. Sima Samar Head of Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) Date : Sep 31, 2009 – Place: Kabul By Ali Payam

Q. The official schedule of the action plan of transitional of transitional justice or passed their own amnesty law. justice has ended and this process was not implemented. Q. Some people I have interviewed believe it is inappropriate What is your opinion? to try Afghans. They believe foreigners should be tried. For A. Thank you. The schedule for implementation of transitional example, they supported us and provided us with weapons to justice action plan was precisely planned for years 2006, 2007 kill people. It is right that we fired but the strategy of war was and 2008. I think, it must have been put into effect during this defined by them. How much do you think these statements period. As it has not been implemented, so it does not mean the are true? How fundamental and practical are these? This type process is over. The work plan for transitional justice must be of approach is something impossible for us. put into practice and should not be limited to timetable. We A. Those who make these statements, I believe, want to justify were most interested in having a clear description of themselves in order to find a loophole. There is no doubt that transitional justice with specific timetable. the neighboring countries were involved in the affairs of If some one lacks a clear and strong action plan or strategy for Afghanistan; however if Russians came to Afghanistan, their continuing his work, he/she will fail. Or he does not have an guide was Afghans. If Pakistanis interfered in our internal issues action plan that should be completed in two to three months. the guide was Afghans. If Iranian were involved here, we paved Unfortunately, the State has been doing little to implement the the way for them, likewise the Arabs and Americans. I think action plan. I say that the State not only has been doing little to they want to run away from their responsibility. implement not only its action plan but also in many other I believe transitional justice is not about courts only. It requires works. For example, none of their development plan has been the confession of those who committed crimes. Even if they say practical. The transitional justice action plan was included in that they committed mistakes in the past, killed some people those programs. Let me highlight the reasons. I think the first with ignorance or misunderstanding and they did not know the reason is lack of political commitment. That means that there rockets they fired would hit a residential area instead of military was no necessary political commitment for the leadership of bases. They only have to ask people for forgiveness. They state institutions. Third, a series of opposition that are due to should confess that these were the mistakes they committed misunderstanding and the action plan was confronted with and ask people for mercy and forgiveness. Instead of searching resistance by some MPs in parliament. for loophole like saying Americans should be tried. It is They passed a law and declared amnesty for all the people so that impossible. However it is natural that some were under the no one is brought into justice. In the meanwhile there is no strong command and have been under the order of a commander. In emphasis on trial in the action plan of transitional justice, but it this country, every one should answer for their own deeds. aims are to build the foundations for the implementation of justice However, where you can find Breznev to try? I believe that in the country. It has been stressed that traditional or Islamic criminal trial is not absolutely essential. Trial is a way to bring methods regarding forgiveness can be used. Those who felt justice and revive peace. insecure or did not understand or did not want to understand the Q. Some of the interviewees believe that the current concept of transitional justice action plan stood against the process government lacks the ability and power to implement the 15|Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/a6f49c/ No 7, October 16, 2009 process of transitional justice. You will have to wait for several Whoever they be, MPs or Head of Parliament, can they feel the decades so that a democratic government comes into effect sufferings of a mother who is still waiting for his lost child or a that feels the responsibility towards the victims of violence. child who has never known who is his mother or father? Who The civil society also cannot do anything. What is your opinion shares the love of their lost ones? Q. Some have said in their ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ?as Head of AIHRC A. I think the State of Afghanistan  I think it might be true. However the interviews that the three decades of had the capabilities to implement implementation of transitional justice does war in Afghanistan is like firing in the transitional justice because one of not mean that we imprison people or hang air. This means that neither the killer the propositions for the action them, but they should confess that they nor the victim is known. Obviously plan of transitional justice was that committed the crimes or mistakes, apologize there are no clear criminal the perpetrators of crimes against from from the people and secede from power. punishments as a result. Who against humanity should not be given part It is not necessary that they are appointed as whom? In particular one of them in the government. They took governors. The perpetrators of war crimes and said in the interview that when you some steps in the beginning but crimes against humanity need not be police capture a jihadi leader and he claims later on again brought the chiefs. As we can not build trust between that he did not make a single shot. powerful figures in the people and state and if there be no trust What is your opinion? between government and people our government. They can remove government can never have the public A. I think the powers and wars were them from the post of governor. support. And when any government lacks clear. For example the fighting that Then what can they do? They can public support the condition of people will not took place in Jaghori are clear be arrested if they create troubles. get better and at that time there will be including the wars against Khalqis, as Q. General Shehnawaz Tanai injustices. they were thrown out of Jaghori and the conflicts that followed. Every one ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ expressed his concerns that the process of transitional justice may result into injustices once knows that who are the fighters and at least who ordered? Or again. What is your opinion? the bombardments during Khalq. For example everything is A. I think it might be true. However the implementation of clear about the bomb that was dropped in our village in Jaghuri at that time; the victims and those who ordered. The defense transitional justice does not mean that we imprison people or hang minister of that time ordered it. All know this and now if the them, but they should confess that they committed the crimes or defense minister is not alive it is another issue. mistakes, apologize from from the people and secede from power. It is not necessary that they are appointed as governors. The Q. It seems that the process of transitional justice is not perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity need not applicable in near future. What are the hurdles and be police chiefs. As we can not build trust between people and challenges? state and if there be no trust between government and people our A. There exist challenges ahead of transitional justice. When we government can never have the public support. And when any were conducting the national consultation crimes had occurred government lacks public support the condition of people will not during last years. As the wounds were fresh, most concentrated get better and at that time there will be injustices. on the crimes of the last years in relations to crimes committed Q. Some people I have interviewed believe there should be a during the Khalqis. For example, my child who never saw his collective work to implement justice. For example, one of father can not say that who was at that time. But I can identify them suggested that since the killer and the killed are not clear who the real criminal was. As time passes the witnesses also there should be big gatherings organized and we should pass away. apologize collectively from the people. What is your comment Q. I pointed out with some of the interviewees the national in this regard? consultation and according to this consultation about six A. There is no doubt that it is effective. At lease they confess thousand people demanded for the implementation of that they committed these mistakes and we will no more repeat transitional justice process. Answering my question, they said it. We will no longer kidnap your child or marry any ones girl or that if six thousand demand for trial, the violators of human child by force. What is wrong if this gathering is organized in the rights can gather several times more people to defend and center of Afghanistan and all should participate from every prove their innocence. What is your opinion about this? corner of the country? It will amend the wounds of the victims. A. I think this is a justification to avoid responsibility. The 16 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009

Commission not only throughout Afghanistan, but also asked them with economic means. What do you think and how this the opinion of Afghan refugees residing in Iran and Pakistan. We method can be helpful to implement the process of have not consulted our supporters. We conducted the opinion transitional justice? poll using social science methods and our colleagues have gone A. It is one of the activities. But before everything the victims to Pul e Surkh and have asked the opinion of one out of ten. It should be identified. was not in this way that we invite our fans. I believe if we are to We cannot process it unknowingly. Because I say the victims of make fronts with them we could gather more than three April coup have grown old or maybe they are killed and their hundred thousand people. If you ask people passing by the small children are alive. I say, why should we run away from road, out of ten, nine of them will demand for the responsibility? Why should we be afraid and lack the courage to implementation of the process. confess that we committed those mistakes? Or maybe these Q. How do you evaluate the gathering by jihadi leaders against mistakes were committed by us as we were ignorant or did not the Human Rights Watch? understand because we were young at that time, now we A. They did not say to the people prior to gathering them in the understand and you should forgive us. Whoever is sacrificed is stadium that they are going to talk against justice. They had unknown, neither him nor his children. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ only said to the people that they are going to celebrate a day. Q. Some say the National Imagine! They brought people to the stadium by cars. They had Amnesty Bill passed by the  But before everything the planned to bring together around two hundred thousand Parliament is not an amnesty victims should be identified. people but in the stadium there were hardly about ten to bill as private rights of twelve thousand people. You can see in the election campaigns individuals are still We cannot process it that when you give the rent and food for the people why would preserved and the Bill is unknowingly. Because I say the they not come? However, if we want to organize a convention looking into the future. Do victims of April coup have in the name of justice and without giving anything to the people you believe it is only a grown old or maybe they are much higher number of people will be gathered. justification? killed and their small children Q. I have seen some of the criminal cases of murder that took A. In my opinion, they want are alive. I say, why should we place before the Transitional Administration. Due to lack of to justify more than anyone run away from responsibility? evidences the cases were not pursued. How can we solve the else. When you look into Why should we be afraid and cases of those who were killed during armed conflicts and future what is the need of lack the courage to confess that there are no evidences to prove them How do you evaluate it amnesty bill? The bill was we committed those mistakes? from the perspective of crimes against humanity? approved to stop transitional Or maybe these mistakes were justice for sometimes and A. I think all the witnesses have not disappeared. It is clear committed by us as we were where the conflicts took place. People still remember that who escape the liability. Or at ignorant or did not understand were indulged in wars and who killed whom? Wherever the war least they silence the mouth because we were young at that happened it caused many casualties either in Kunar between of advocates of transitional the government and jihadi forces or the conflicts between jihadi justice and burry justice. time, now we understand and forces or the two Arab forces. The time and victims of these There was no point that they you should forgive us. Whoever wars are clear. Still the witnesses are alive and if for example really thought for is sacrificed is unknown, neither they are dead their families are alive. In Ghazni we knew and Afghanistan. I believe it is him nor his children. ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ they knew that how many of them went for fighting. In Jaghori, good to act as soon as I was the witness of one incident that who was killed by whom possible. However, in my and who went on house search operation and under the pretext view, I believe it is transitional justice when somebody like of searching hand grenade they touched the breasts of women. Pinochet dies and people come out and dance in the streets. It Those women are still alive with the difference that at that time is a kind of justice. they were bride and now they are old and they still remember. When people found the grave of Taraki they burnt his bones, it Q. During my interviews with people, they suggest that is also a type of justice. They could not try him when he was instead of implementing the process of transitional justice we alive. If we are to fully ignore justice, then people will not sit should provide the children of victims the opportunities to go silent and will turn to revenge. It is not important that in to school and universities or give them scholarships. Help revenge one uses gun or suicide attacks. 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PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/a6f49c/

No 7, October 16, 2009 commanders cannot move without a bodyguard. Why is that are part of the public offices. As I have interviewed with some so? If they are loved by people or they are saviors, why they people they say that these people are elected with the vote of keep bodyguards? Which one of them can move without ten or people and they have public support. They believe the process twelve soldiers? of transitional justice cannot be implemented. What is your Q. I need your opinion regarding Commission for opinion? Strengthening Peace? How the CSP has been successful in A. I believe there is no doubt that people have voted but the establishing peace? Or it is only a show? Some of the vote of people is only from that village where no one else could interviewees believe that it is useless. What is your opinion? be candidate. If we say that they have public support then A. I believe whatever one performs should have a clear and Golabzoy is also supported by the people and the mujahid who transparent mechanism. There should be a type of transparency calls himself the savior also has won votes. Then what is the for the person who joins the peace process and the people. difference? Why did they fight each other? When the CSP claims that they have brought eight thousand Q. As final question what is the shortest way to achieve both insurgents to peace and they have laid down their weapons and justice and peace in the country? In a situation when we lack accepted the constitution of Afghanistan why the ratio of a powerful government? insurgency does not decrease? Eight thousand is a great figure A. I believe it is not the solution to forget all the issues. Talking for the insurgency to decrease and the Taliban who are of justice, symbolic measures or even commemorations of the indulged in war. Why the ratio of violence does not drop instead Victims Day, honoring the day of victims are what that can of mounting every day? amend the wounds. Others also should not show any reactions; Q. How would you compare the Commission for Strengthening those who are charged and accused. Those who are in high Peace and the National Reconciliation Policy of the Hizb‐e political positions and still use their powers should be stopped. Democratik‐e Khalq? Clearance and good governance is the only way that can treat A. I believe that the National Front of Fatherland during Najib the wounds of people. Trust is the fundamental base for the allowed everyone to join them. Since I remember a number of implementation of transitional justice. boys were sent by embassies in Iran and Pakistan to encourage people join the government. They were working amongst the mujahedin too. There were many mujaheding commanders who took money and were engaging in most of the civil wars and spread of disunity. At that time they used some mujahedin commanders to weaken the mujahedin and spread disunity in their ranks. Some of the commanders were fighting in both sides of the mjahedin and the government. There are evidences that show planes landing and providing money for them. All the people could see. Now they are only given an exemption card and are not told to preach to attract others also to join the process or create divisions in the ranks of Taliban. In the meantime, the mechanisms of both National Reconciliation of that time and CSP of this time are not transparent. Q. Related to CSP, what is your definition of peace? A. I believe, whenever people feel that they can live with complete security. Security for me does not mean to end the war. As humans, we should have the security of, for example, facilities for health. Peace is related to individual and human security. We should have security for our child that goes to school, returns back and is not kidnapped. Q. Let us return to the violators of human rights, those who 18 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org 18 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org

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No 7, October 16, 2009

Media Analyst: Faezeh Ibrahimi is only responsible for what it writes Translator: Murtaza Sharifi like notes, analysis and comments. Haqiqat is Editor: Temorbig not responsible for news, reports and articles Designer: Ahmad Zia Mohammadi selected from media sources, the responsibility Typist: Frishta Barakzay is returned to the publisher. Interviewer: Ali Payam

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