KABUL, 20 January 2005 — Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday appointed a new electoral commission in a first step toward parliamentary polls which are scheduled to be held before the end of May, officials said.

“Karzai has signed the decree for the formation for the nine-member election commission,” the president’s deputy spokesman Hamid Elmi told AFP.

Elmi said the independent commission comprised three women and representatives of all Afghanistan’s ethnic minorities. “They are respected people among our society. We have people from all tribes - Pushtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Turkmen, Hindu,” he said. Two of the delegation worked as election staff with the UN during the presidential election, Elmi said.

Among other things, the new commission will be tasked with organizing and supervising the parliamentary and district elections, and setting their dates. During the Oct. 9 presidential election the UN-Afghan Joint Electoral Management Body came under fire from critics because it was simultaneously organizing the election and investigating complaints into its own activities.

The body, which also included a number of foreign electoral experts, was at the center of fraud allegations after supposedly indelible ink used to mark voters’ fingers and prevent multiple voting rubbed off, leading to accusations of ballot rigging. Another hurdle which needs to be surmounted before parliamentary elections can go ahead is the announcement of district boundaries. Elmi said work was ongoing but the government was waiting for the results of a preliminary census before setting district boundaries.

“We are working on that and hopefully we will announce it soon, but first the approximate census must be announced before we can announce the boundaries,” Elmi added. He said it could be a matter of weeks before the government set boundaries and most of the work had already been done.

“Everything must be clear before we can make an announcement. Hopefully we can do it on time and we are trying our best to have our election at the time that we promised,” he added. Parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held before the end of the Afghan month of Saur on May 21. Some analysts have expressed skepticism about whether this will be possible.

“We need to make sure that everything is clear because we want a free, independent and very good parliament for the first stage of democracy that will really represent the people,” Elmi added.

Meanwhile, the head of the United Nations drugs control agency said in Lisbon yesterday that Afghanistan faces a lengthy fight against its growing opium trade but the battle will eventually be won. “The situation will be brought under control,” the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, told a news conference.

“It will take quite some time, public opinion and the media want it now,” he added. It took Thailand 22 years to bring the cultivation of opium within its borders under control while Pakistan and Turkey took a decade, Costa said. He was in Portugal to officially present the findings of a new UN study on the state of the drugs trade in Afghanistan to the EU’s European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction which is based in Lisbon.

The UNODC study, first unveiled in Brussels in November, found that opium cultivation in Afghanistan had increased by 64 percent in 2004 over the previous year to reach a record 131,000 hectares (323,708 acres). The cultivation has spread to all of Afghanistan’s 32 provinces while the percentage of the nation’s total population of 23 million involved in cultivation of the drug rose to 10 percent in 2004 from seven percent a year earlier, the survey said.