In this Sept. 25 column in Al-Hayat, I asked:
- [I]s it possible that the upcoming Afghanistan election-like the one organized under U.S. military control in Vietnam in 1971-is more about consolidating U.S. military power around the world than it is about seeking and respecting the “free will of the (non-American) people”?
Sadly, as of now, it still appears that this answer may end up being answered with a yes.
The whole debacle in Afghanistan over the use of non-permanent inks by election officials is almost beyond belief.
Sometime during the day yesterday, all 15 of the opposition candidates announced their decision to withdraw from the elections because of the demonstrated seriousness of the ink-marking problem.
The AP’s Paul Haven wrote a great piece in which he contrasted the reactions of George Bush– who crowed about the election being a “marvellous thing”– with those of the actual election contenders in Afghanistan:
- the opposition candidates met at the house of Uzbek candidate Abdul Satar Sirat and signed a petition saying they would not recognize the vote results.
Sirat … said all 15 challengers to Karzai agreed to the boycott.
“Today’s election is not a legitimate election. It should be stopped and we don’t recognize the results,” Sirat said. “This vote is a fraud and any government formed from it is illegitimate.”
Islamic poet Abdul Latif Padran, another minor candidate, said, “Today was a very black day. Today was the occupation of Afghanistan by America through elections.”
For my part, I also found extremely arrogant the idea that it should have been the one American member of Afghanistan’s “Joint Election Management Body”, Ray Kennedy, who immediately came out with all the statements certifying that, “There have been some technical problems but overall it has been safe and orderly.”
I saw Kennedy giving his spiel on the BBC last night. He looked young, arrogant, and extremely American. Not quite good-looking enough to qualify as a “blond beast”; but playing essentially the same implemeneter-of-US-control role that Karzai’s actual blond beasts still seem to be playing.
I don’t see how any fair and impartial election-management body could come out with the certification of the election’s integrity so fast and so categorically. The problem was not just that the voting-place procedures were evidently flawed in a number of places– but even more important was the fact that all the non-Karzai contenders had publicly announced their withdrawal from the process in the middle of the main day of voting.
What message should their supporters around the country have been expected to take from that?? Of course, many voters–we will never know how many– would have responded by not casting a ballot, or by spoiling their ballots.
How, then, can anyone at all say, as US viceroy Zal Khalilzad did today, that “”The Afghan Nation has spoken
Helena, last Friday Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org) interviewed Christian Parenti in Afghanistan. He, a foreign correspondent, admitted to receiving two valid voter registration ballots. Sonali Kolhatkar, president of Afghan Women’s Mission, was highly critical of the election and the role played by the USA and suggested that the Afghani election will be more a test of the Bush administration than of the Afghani people and that their election is very likely a prototype for the Iraqi election. No surprises.
Yes, it was the previously known problems with the registration process that led people to rely on the ink-staining mechanism as a safety measure… But even that wasn’t implemented properly.
So, so sad.
Problems with ink, double votes, and stale voter databases have plagued South and Central American elections for decades. Colombia, like Afghanistan, doesn’t have sovereignity over large parts of its territory. I suspect that democracy isn’t perfect in India either, it is an approximation, like every human pursuit.
The system that is not even close is Saudi Arabia, here is today’s status, from the BBC web site:
“The Saudi interior minister has said women will not be allowed to vote in the country’s municipal elections starting in February 2005. In response to a question about women’s getting the vote, Prince Nayef bin Sultan said simply: ‘I don’t think that women’s participation is possible.’ ”
I am pondering if this is yet another rotten trait of the wahabi “peace loving religion”, or it is just due to the physical impossibility of marking a fully covered woman with permanent ink. Waiting for the islamic apologists de jour to enlighten us on this. I have a chair.
E. Bilpe