KABUL, 18 October 2004 — President Hamid Karzai maintained his early lead in Afghanistan’s election after just over eight percent of the ballots had been counted, the Election Commission said yesterday. Karzai has polled 61.6 percent of the estimated 8.3 percent of votes counted, the commission said.
In second place with 17.6 percent was former Education Minister Yunus Qanuni, the Joint Electoral Management Body said on its website in a statement posted at 5:46 p.m. (1316 GMT).
In third place with 11.4 percent was ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, and ethnic Hazara military strongman Mohammed Mohaqeq was in fourth with 3.0 percent. In seventh place was the only woman out of the 18 presidential candidates, Masooda Jalal, who had garnered 1.0 percent of the vote behind Syed Ishaq Gilani Nuhzat-e-Hambastagee and Abdul Latif Pedram who both also had around 1.0 percent. The other 11 presidential candidates all received less than one percent of the vote.
President Karzai is widely expected to maintain his strong lead in the coming days. He commands strong support from the country’s ethnic majority Pashtun community who live mainly in the south and southeast. In the northern Panjshir Valley ethnic Tajik Qanuni has won 95 percent of the vote so far, reflecting how voting has broken up along ethnic lines.
Afghanistan’s election passed off without major violence but was hit by allegations of fraud and mismanagement with opposition candidates alleging the vote had been rigged to favor Karzai.
An international panel was appointed at the last minute to investigate their complaints and head off a threatened boycott of the Oct. 9 polls. Some 686,447 votes have been counted so far out of an estimated total of around seven million.
