Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Karzai Delays Afghan Parliament as Vote Crisis Deepens

New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai ordered a month’s delay in seating a new Parliament on Wednesday, heightening a constitutional crisis that threatens to fuel bitter infighting and potentially even violence among the country’s rival factions.

The move leaves Afghanistan without a Parliament five months after its September election, with the prospect of even further delays. It also puts Mr. Karzai squarely at odds with his international backers, who insist the elections were valid after investing heavily in them as a way to promote Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy.

Mr. Karzai made his decision at the request of a special court he personally appointed to hear complaints from losing candidates, who say fraud and insecurity left large parts of the population excluded from the vote. Many are from the heavily Pashtun south, where the insurgency is most intense and Mr. Karzai maintains his main political base.

Their reduced representation in the new Parliament, which was scheduled to be inaugurated Sunday, threatens to drive more Pashtun regions into the arms of the Taliban insurgency, some have warned. But Mr. Karzai’s decision — which moved the country one step closer to undoing the election — contained real risks of its own and underscored the paucity of good options since the disputed vote.

While the losing candidates say the skewed results could lead to a new dimension of violence in Afghanistan, the winning candidates are unlikely to accept any reworking of the results and threaten violent protests of their own if they are deprived of their seats.

In addition, the Karzai administration’s effort to redress the complaints have precipitated a crisis of its own and drawn charges that the president is trying to engineer a more favorable outcome for himself.

A range of Afghan and international officials consider the special court he appointed to be unconstitutional, insisting that Afghanistan’s election commission has final say over the election. The commission, which has certified the results as legitimate, has refused to cooperate with the court.

The former Parliament adjourned before the balloting last September, and as the dispute lingers Mr. Karzai has ruled by decree, further worrying his international backers.

Furious efforts had been underway on Wednesday by Western diplomats to persuade Mr. Karzai to ignore the court’s demands and inaugurate the Parliament as scheduled on Sunday, but the president rebuffed their pleas.

“We cannot afford a country without a Parliament,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid offending Afghan politicians.

“I see a two-fold danger, a constitutional crisis and how it will affect stability in the country,” the diplomat said. “For Western taxpayers who are hungry for good news — this looks awful.”

In a news conference on Wednesday attended by scores of losing candidates who have been pressing for new elections, Sediqullah Haqiq, the chief judge of the special court, said that the elections were tainted by “huge fraud,” and that he needed at least another month — possibly longer — to rule on the elections. He suggested the court might have to order recounts in some provinces.

While the losers were jubilant at Judge Haqiq’s declaration, winning candidates, who expected to take their seats at Parliament’s inauguration Sunday, were indignant.

“The instability and insecurity you see now will grow ten times over and it will not be like regular violence, it will be worse,” said Qazi Nazir Ahmad, a newly reelected member of Parliament from Herat Province.

Western officials speaking on condition of anonymity, said that delaying the inauguration of Parliament or, even worse, annulling the election, would unravel the country’s nascent democracy. “Is a delay the endgame, or is it no parliament for another year that’s the endgame, or is it a throw-out of the Parliament altogether?” said a Western official in Kabul.

Judge Haqiq complained that when his court wrote to Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission asking for information to help its inquiries, it was rebuffed. The commission’s reply was short and to the point:

“No other organization can question anything about the elections. If you or anyone else wants to know anything else about this, you can go to our website, www.iec.org.af.com.”

The Electoral Complaints Commission, which has already reviewed 6,000 formal complaints from the polling, similarly rejected the ad hoc court’s attempted intervention, also inviting it to view its own Web site, www.ecc.org.af, where the results of its work were published, according to Ahmad Zia Raffat, the commission’s spokesman. “According to the country’s laws and constitution, the special court is totally illegal,” he said.

Judge Haqiq said he viewed “with great sadness” the election commissions’ refusal to cooperate with the court.

“In the whole country, there was no province from which we did not receive any complaints,” said Judge Haqiq. “The whole world should know that there was a huge, enormous fraud in these elections.”

No one disputes that the parliamentary elections were badly tarnished. The election commission threw out nearly a fourth of the total votes recorded as fraudulent or tainted, which invalidated the election of many candidates — particularly members of the most numerous ethnic group, the Pashtuns.

The commissions, however, supported by the international community, ruled that their certification of the results was valid once they removed the problem voting districts and candidates in a process that was legal and transparent.

“Unfortunately losers in Afghanistan will never accept that they are losers,” said one of the winning candidates, Abdul Zuhair Qadir, who was attending orientation sessions for the new Parliament.

The special court’s actions appeared to be just the latest in moves by Mr. Karzai’s government to discredit the work of the two election commissions.

In December, 10 members of the election commission, including all seven of its commissioners and three high-ranking staffers, were indicted by the attorney general on unspecified electoral fraud and abuse of authority charges, according to Abdullah Ahmadzai, the election commission’s chief electoral officer and one of the indictees.

In addition, the attorney general indicted four prominent members of the complaints commission on the same charges, including all three of its Afghan commissioners, Mr. Ahmadzai said.

President Karzai appointed all of the election commissioners and the three Afghan complaints commissioners; the other two complaint commission members were foreigners appointed in consultation with the United Nations. They have not been charged.

“This is all happening because they feel the results need to be changed and they can’t change them,” Mr. Ahmadzai said. The election commission’s certification of the results is final and there is no legal mechanism for changing that, he said.

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