KABUL, 6 February 2004 — The United Nations has stepped up a drive to register voters for Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential elections in June, a UN official said yesterday.
Out of an estimated 10 million voters nationwide, only 671,000 people have registered so far, including 137,000 women, said UN spokesman David Singh.
But people are putting in their names fast, Singh added.
“Kabul saw the highest turnout for Afghans wishing to register for the election for a single day,” he said, adding 13,521 people registered in the capital on Wednesday, including 1,901 women.
The United Nations is anxious to register as many women as possible as part of an overall campaign to raise their standards of living and give them more political power.
“In Mazar, there will be a rally on Saturday encouraging women to vote,” Singh told a regular news conference in Kabul.
Mazar-i-Sharif is the main city in northern Afghanistan.
The registration process has been moving slowly because the United Nations considers vast areas of the country too dangerous to work in.
President Hamid Karzai, who is backed by Washington and is considered the favorite to win the poll, has vowed to hold the election on schedule and registered to vote in mid-January. Voter registration comes as war-shattered Afghanistan has experienced its worst period of violence since US-led forces overthrew the Taleban in late 2001, with more than 500 people killed since August.
Intelligence Boss Sacked
President Karzai has replaced the head of his national intelligence agency, a presidential spokesman said yesterday, prompting speculation that further changes in the administration may be planned ahead of the presidential elections.
The government said yesterday that Mohammad Arif Sarwari would be replaced as head of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) by Amrullah Saleh, until now external affairs spokesperson for the NDS. Arif has been appointed minister without portfolio advising the president, the presidential palace said.
“Amrullah Saleh has been appointed head of the National Directorate of Security and we have informed the provinces,” deputy spokesman for the president, Hamid Elmi, said, adding that the replacement was a “routine thing.”
The move follows a re-shuffling of governors and security commanders in recent weeks in the provinces, as Karzai seeks to extend the power of the central government ahead of elections.
NATO Rules Out Merger
NATO will not merge its Afghanistan operation with a US-led force hunting Al-Qaeda and the former Taleban regime in the country, but the two could be led by a single commander, NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said yesterday.
“There could be one military commander with two hats to ensure synergy,” de Hoop Scheffer told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.
NATO has about 6,100 soldiers deployed in the Afghan International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), with most in Kabul and about 200 in the northern city of Kunduz. Some 70 of them are from the United States.
Meanwhile, a 12,000-strong US-led force of mostly American troops, separate from the NATO-led peacekeepers, is hunting remnants of the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper said on Wednesday that plans were afoot to bring those troops — Operation Enduring Freedom — under NATO control.
This is an option which the United States signaled at a December meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.
However a NATO spokeswoman said no action was imminent on this front.
“At some point” the alliance will discuss possible synergies between ISAF and Operation Enduring Freedom, she told AFP.
“But there is no question of talking about a merger between the two forces.”
