Afghans go to polls in historic vote
Millions expected despite violence
KABUL, Afghanistan -- One man ran his campaign from jail, where he was thrown after his bodyguards shot three police officers. Two others campaigned without shame in neighborhoods that still bear the scars of their marauding militias.
As polls opened today, an unprecedented election season drew to an end in Afghanistan. Millions were expected to vote for the lower house of the National Assembly, a 249-seat body roughly equivalent to the US House of Representatives, and a host of provincial councils.
The election brings much to celebrate less than four years after US forces and their allies launched a war that drove the fundamentalist Taliban regime from power and routed Al Qaeda from its terror training camps in the Afghan countryside. Sixty-eight seats are reserved for women and 10 for the nomadic Kuchi tribe, groups long denied a say here; and the assembly will provide a democratic check on the authority of President Hamid Karzai.
The vote is a logistical triumph, with specialized pictorial ballots for the largely illiterate population delivered by helicopter and donkey to the most remote areas.
Still, the election occurs amid an upsurge of violence, much of it at the hands of Taliban fighters trying to prevent a legitimate government from taking office. Gunmen Friday killed a Helmand Province candidate -- the seventh slain during the campaign.
Gunmen ambushed a police patrol in eastern Afghanistan today, killing two officers and wounding two hours before the polls opened, police said. Three of the gunmen were killed in the attack in Khost Province, said the provincial police chief Mohammad Ayub.
The election will almost certainly give unprecedented legitimacy and political power to a cadre of former militia commanders accused of mass killings, rapes, and forced disappearances during Afghanistan's civil war in the 1990s, according to human rights groups and voters.
Of nearly 6,000 candidates, 217 were given orders by the election commission to disarm their fighters. In the capital city of Kabul, where more than 400 candidates are vying for 33 parliamentary seats, four of the five front-runners are accused of having connections to warring militias. Many popular candidates are also accused of ongoing crimes, including corruption and involvement in the narcotics trade, Afghanistan's largest industry.
''There is a danger we are, in fact, legitimizing these people," said Humayun Hamidzada, an Afghan specialist at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. ''If they do get elected and become members of parliament, this is an unfortunate moment."
As voters choose among democratic activists, former Taliban officials, tribal elders, and local celebrities, election specialists say the electoral commission made only a symbolic effort to vet candidates and left the worst suspected criminals on the ballot.
''This is mind-boggling," said Roxanna Shapour, communications and advocacy manager for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a private Kabul-based think tank. ''You're not disqualifying the big bad boys with the drugs and the guns."
Instead, the commission cast aside only 45 candidates out of about 500 who had prompted complaints. And those disqualified were cited mostly on technicalities or for relatively small offenses, Shapour said, prompting voters to call the process arbitrary at best and deliberately corrupt at worst. For instance, Samia Azizi Sadaat, a former minister of education who is expected to get 40 percent of the vote in her area, was disqualified Monday for allegedly using Ministry of Education letterhead, and possibly a ministry car, during her campaign, according to the Joint Electoral Management Body, the commission of UN staff and appointed Afghan officials that is running the election.
But the commission disqualified these candidates so late that their faces will still appear on ballots. It is unclear what will happen if Sadaat wins the lion's share of the votes, only to tell her constituency that she is not allowed to take the post. Sadaat has threatened to set herself on fire if they do not reinstate her, according to Jean MacKenzie of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Kabul.
Another major controversy has been the electoral system itself, which specialists say was designed to frustrate the emergence of political parties. Each candidate has an individual logo, and no party affiliation is publicized on the ballot. Voters are allowed to vote for only one person, although provinces are represented by multiple seats.
''No mature democracy functions without political parties," said Joanna Nathan of the International Crisis Group, which has written extensively on Afghanistan's electoral system. ''What this system has stopped is the formation of new democratic forces, parties that force people to appeal to a wide base."
Karzai, who won an election last year, says he chose the ''single nontransferable" voting system because Afghans are tired of the political parties that contributed to the country's destruction.
Most voters interviewed said their major frustration was that warlords who committed crimes remain on the ballot. In one neighborhood in western Kabul, residents of the ethnic Hazara minority cringe at the sight of the posters for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the commander they say destroyed their homes and murdered their families during the civil war. Sayyaf's militia is tied to mass rapes and the disappearances of hundreds of people, according to the Afghanistan Justice Project, a US-based research group.
The ethnic divisions in Kabul still dictate political choices.
A few miles away, past a bombed-out cinema, a vegetable-seller hands out postcards with Sayyaf's face. Qand Aqa, 23, is a member of the ethnic Pashtun majority, many of whom consider Sayyaf a respected elder of their community. Aqa accuses Haji Muhammad Mohaqeqe, a Hazara commander who is also a candidate, of killing people and flattening houses in his Pashtun neighborhood. When pressed about Sayyaf's link to killings, Aqa admits that both commanders committed crimes. ''They both should be disqualified legitimately," he said. ''But right now [Sayyaf] is running for election, and I'm supporting him."
The electoral body says it cannot be responsible for investigating war crimes of the past, and thus take on the duties of the justice system. The Afghan Constitution says that anyone convicted of serious human rights violations should not be able to hold office, but with a severely limited justice system no one has ever been convicted in an Afghan court of crimes committed during the three decades of war.
Critics say the electoral commission also ignored far more recent instances of violence.
About two months ago, one candidate, Hadi Dabeer, ordered his bodyguards to open fire on police who came to tell him to stop constructing a building in an illegal area, according to Kabul police. The three police officers were wounded, and the police department had to send reinforcements to capture and jail Dabeer. But this did not prove to be enough to disqualify him. The electoral commission ruled that because the violence was not directly associated with the campaign, it did not merit his removal from the ballot.
But at least one Kabul candidate is being celebrated for his honesty. Many voters have been singing the praises of Ramadan Bashar-Doost, the firebrand former minister of planning who never commanded a militia. Known as the ''last honest man in Afghanistan," he quit Karzai's government earlier this year over the role of what he says are corrupt, overpaid nonprofit groups in the country. He now sits in a tent in the middle of town, or tours in a bus that blares revolutionary songs.
Voters across Kabul -- among all ethnic groups and classes -- praise him and go out of their way to come and shake his hand.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. 