Number 5, September 17, 2009 A publication of Afghanistan watch Fifth Note You are reading the fifth edition of the Haqiqat/Truth biweekly newsletter. Like previous editions, it includes news from Afghan Media on four issues of transitional justice, reconciliation and negotiation with anti‐ Justice Is the government forces, elections transparency and corruption. At the end of magazine two interviews with Foundation of a Fair presidential candidates are also included. The important contents of fifth edition are as follows: and Lasting Peace Transitional Justice: In transitional justice section the news about discovery of mass grave in Bamyan and the statement of spokesman for Mr. Karzai’s Electoral Campaign Office are included in this edition as reflected in the media. No Peace Negotiation with anti‐government forces: Similar to transitional justice there were few news about without negotiation with anti‐government forces in the Afghan Media during past two weeks. There have been no significant developments in this regard. The emphasis of Social Trust some authorities in the government about negotiation with anti‐government forces and International Peace day are the news published in Afghan media. Election Transparency: Election Transparency has once again been the burning issue of Afghan Media during past two weeks. There have been concerns regarding the process of counting votes, announcement of resutls, evidences and complaints collected about fraud in election, statements by presidential candidates and assessment of electoral observers. Corruption: The essential topics published in Afghan Media during past two weeks about corruption were different and scattered. All the criticism about corruption has been subject to state institutions and existence of corruption in Herat and Sarepul municipalities and approval of Counter Corruption Charter are the most important news of this section. The Truth is a bi‐weekly publication of the Afghanistan Watch supported by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). It is intended to provide a snapshot of how the Afghan media and candidates for Presidential and Provincial Councils Elections debate and approach these key issues facing the country: transitional justice, corruption, elections transparency and negotiationsPURL: with the https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/be39b0/ armed insurgents. If you wish to subscribe please send an email to [email protected] or visit our website: www.watchafghanistan.org Inside This Issue Transitional Justice Warning: All Kinds of Violence Prohibited 8 The process of transitional justice is to be… 3 The Election Fraud and the Responsibility of… 8 Mass Grave Discovered In Bamiyan Province 3 Election Commission: 90 Percent of Frauds Can… 8 Negotiation with armed position Groups Six Presidential Candidates Demanded… 8 Hamid Elmi: Peace Negotiation Is the Top Priority 4 10 Percent of Results Announced The Probability… 8 Mujaddadi: More Than 8 Thousand… 4 ECC Demands Cooperation of Media Regarding… 8 Fourty Days Campaign for “One Day Peace” 4 Partial Results of Elections Doubts in the… 9 The Increasing Power of the Taliban and… 4 Dirty Games Behind the Curtain of August 20… 9 Weak Response of the AIHRC and Religious … 4 To the Independent Elections Commission… 9 Britain Feels More Comfortable with the Taliban 5 Announcement of Election Results will be… 9 America: Change in military strategy in… 5 IEC: Karzai’s Vicory is false 9 New war approach in Afghanistan 5 Corruption Elections Transparency Harsh Criticism of the Ministry of Rural 10 Election and Challenges Ahead 6 US Efforts to Bring Economic and Social 10 Dr. Abdullah: Elections Transparency Questionable 6 Widespread Corruption in Herat Municipality 10 Three Prominent Candidate Went On Televised… 6 Does the Afghan Economy under Mafia Control 10 Voters Registration Started in Nowzad District of… 6 Poor Learning from Free Market the Basic Reason 10 The Refugees: Deprived of Election? 7 Crisis of Confidence the Greatest Challenge in 11 Concerns About Inadequate Stations 7 The Need to Reflect on Widespread Corruption 11 Electoral Observers: Unable to Observe all… 7 Mike Mullen warned: the result of American 11 The Second Vice‐President of Karzai Is Fined 7 The ECC is the Last Hope for Integrity of the 11 Hoping For Tolerance from the “Enemy”: A Sign of… 7 The Saripul Residents Complain against Mayor 11 Fraud and Delinquency But within a Limit 7 Minister of transport and civil aviation in 12 The Russian and French Authorities Called… 7 Amateurish trade has caused poverty and 12 National Interest Must Not Be Bargained At Any… 8 Power Struggle in the IEC a threat to Afghan 12 Nuristan Votes Drowned In Water 8 Continuation of International Conferences on 12 Exclusive Topics Justice Is the Foundation of a Fair and Lasting Peace 13 No Peace without Social Trust 16 PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/be39b0/ No 5, September 17, 2009 Transitional Justice Karzai Electoral Campaign Team Spokesperson: The process of transitional justice is to be implemented and individuals other than Dostum will also be included Mandegar Daily, No 120, Page 1, August 31, 2009 Karzai electoral campaign team Spokesperson, Wahid Omar said that the re‐exile of Dostum is a case of transitional justice. He added that it is not a political issue rather a legal one. While talking in the ‘Election Program” of the Tolo private TV channel, Wahid Omar said: we are very keen to implement transitional justice process.” He said the process is not about Dosum only and other individuals will also be included. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Mass Grave Discovered In Bamiyan Province Afghanistan Daily, Page 8, Wednesday, Sep 2, 2009 A mass grave has been discovered in Afghanistan’s central province of Bamiyan. According to local residents the mass grave belongs to Taliban period. Sayed Asghar a worker who was digging the basement OF his house faced with mass graves. He said to Pazhwok news agency said after he found seven bodies while digging the basement of his house he reported the issue to the provincial police headquarters. To preserve the bodies they have buried them; but a number of skulls, bones, shoes and clothes are still seen and the clothes show that all of them were men. Amir Mohammad another worker in the area said: the accumulation of soil in this place shows that there might be more bodies buried in grave. Bamyan Governor Dr Habibeh Sarabi said to Pazhwok News Agency that a delegation is appointed to take necessary measures regarding this mass grave. 3 |Page http://www.watchafghanistan.org PURL: https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/be39b0/ No 5, September 17, 2009 Negotiation with armed Opposition Groups Hamid Elmi: Peace Negotiation Is the Top Priority Afghanistan Daily, No 880, Page 1, August 26, 2009 Hamid Elmi, deputy spokesperson of President Hamid Karzai says that after winning the election, Karzai will immediately contact with president Zardari to start the process of negotiation with Taliban. Fauzia Wahab, spokesperson for the ruling Pakistan People’s Party welcomed the proposition by president and said: “cooperation between the two countries is in the interest of both countries so that they can combat the threats of terrorism.” ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Mujaddadi: More Than 8 Thousand Anti‐Government Forces Have Joined the Peace Process ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Afghanistan Daily, No 880, Page 1, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 The Increasing Power of the Taliban and Opposition Professor Sibghatullah Mujaddadi, the Chairperson of the Mishrano Jirga met with Dr. Gorgen Todon a former member of Hushdar Weekly, No 10, Page 6, Wednesday August 26, 2009 Germany’s Parliament and the writer of the book ‘Introducing The citizens of the country criticize the government because of Islam to West’. its focus on issues inferior to the national interests. The According to reports by press office of the National Assembly to optimism about the presence of international community and Bakhtar News Agency, Gorgeon inquired about the operations particularly the United States has also decreased. It is actually a of foreign forces, elections, getting Afghanistan out of the natural phenomenon. During past seven years the government current situation and negotiation with anti‐government forces. of Afghanistan has had no particular program or plans to fight Taliban. Sometimes they are the so‐called brothers of The head of Mishranno Jirga said that the election process was government, some times the Taliban are called enemies and successful for the people of Afghanistan to elect their some times the government has proposed them the process of president. negotiation from a weak position. The attention of government He also added that 8 thousand anti‐government forces have is focused on issues which are inferior to the national interest joined peace process and are living normal lives in and this has caused many other groups to join the rank of Afghanistan. Taliban and strengthen them. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Fourty Days Campaign for “One Day Peace” Weak Response of the AIHRC and Religious Scholars against to Taliban Atrocities Nukhost Daily, No 139, Page 1, Wednesday, August 26, 2009 The objectives to be achieved through one day peace are to Bakhtar Weekly, No 82, Page 1, Sep 6, 2009 promote peace and demonstrate how a single day of life is in a Unfortunately some of the religious scholars due to fears and