Karzai promises security for polls
KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s 17 rivals in the presidential race yesterday threatened to boycott landmark October 9 elections unless he stepped down before the vote.
“Karzai misuses government facilities for his electoral campaign – all (17) presidential candidates have unanimously agreed to ask for his resignation,” Abdul Satar Sirat, one of the candidates, claimed at a Press conference in a Kabul restaurant.
The candidates want Karzai to resign “within one week,” Sirat said.
“All 17 presidential candidates would boycott the polls,” he replied when asked what they would do if Karzai rejected their call to resign.
The call was the first joint statement by Karzai’s rivals since they were confirmed as candidates last week by the electoral commission.
Sirat, a professor from the ethnic Tajik minority, had run against Karzai at the Bonn conference in December 2001 when delegates chose a leader of the first interim government after the US-led ouster of the Taliban regime.
He won 11 votes to Karzai’s three, but later swung his support behind the president.
Sixteen candidates including his chief rival Yunus Qanooni, part of the powerful bloc of Tajik anti-Taliban commanders from the Panjshir valley, met to discuss pre-election strategies while the US-backed transitional leader Karzai addressed an independence day gathering at the National Stadium.
The only candidate absent from the session was northern Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostam, who was represented by his vice-presidential running mate Safiqa Habibi.
Under Afghanistan’s electoral law all government officials are required to step down from their positions 75 days before polls, with the exception of the president.
Yesterday’s meeting follows days of closed-door negotiations among candidates to establish how alliances might be made and whether some would step down in favour of others.
Discussions over whether Karzai’s rivals could pick a single candidate were ongoing, Sirat said.
“We have not approached that point. However, it is one of the topics that we are still discussing, if we identify it as good to our national interest we will go with that,” he said.
Sirat accused Karzai of misusing his power to influence the United Nations-backed electoral commission and said its members should resign.
“In the electoral commission there are his (Karzai) selected people, but our party, the National Congress, has no representative in the commission,” said another presidential candidate Abdul Latif Pedram.
n Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai promised Afghans greater security when they go to vote in the country’s first ever democratic election during an independence day speech yesterday.
Karzai’s US-backed transitional government is battling Taliban militia fighting to disrupt the presidential election on October 9 and parliamentary polls six months later. Close to 1,000 people have been killed in the past year.
“In order to provide security for the constituencies and voters, the government, the international community’s forces and the United Nations will strongly endeavour to prevent the small groups which come to our country from across the border,” Karzai said at an Independence Day parade as military helicopters hovered overhead.
Afghanistan gained independence from Britain in 1919, but the last 23 years have been a catalogue of war and foreign occupation culminating in the US-led invasion in late 2001 to oust the Taliban militia protecting Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. – Agencies


photo: An Afghan woman wearing traditional clothes holds a portrait of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai outside the Olympic stadium during Afghanistan’s Independence Day celebration in Kabul yesterday. – AP
Last update on: 19-8-2004