KABUL, 3 July 2004 — Elections in Afghanistan scheduled for September could be held by mid-October at the latest, a government official said yesterday, as more people were reported killed in attacks by militants determined to disrupt the vote.
President Hamid Karzai has called repeatedly during recent international visits for the elections to be held in September.
But in pronouncements in Afghanistan’s Dari and Pashto languages, he has also mentioned holding them in Mizan, a month of the Afghan calendar that runs from Sept. 22 to Oct. 21. If elections are to be held in the western month of September, the election law requires the date to be announced 90 days before the vote, depending on how that is interpreted, election officials said.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad said there were still differences among election parties, both foreign and Afghan, over timing, but he expected a decision “within the next few days”.
The polls have already had to be postponed from June due to security worries and slow voter registration, and unless they are held by mid-October, would have to be delayed until spring, given the fasting month of Ramadan and the onset of winter.
The United Nations, the election co-organizer, suggested on Thursday they may have to be delayed beyond September, but said a matter of a few days should not be seen as a major problem.
But an Election Commission official insisted on Thursday the aim was still to hold the polls at the end of September.
Some political groups want the vote delayed until security is better and disarmament properly implemented. They are concerned that Karzai aims to win an early poll by cutting deals with factional powerbrokers, thereby cementing the status quo.
The picture has been complicated by persistent militant violence in the southern half of the country, which continued yesterday with three civilians killed when Taliban fighters attacked a district headquarters, a district official said.
The attack in Deh Rawud district of Uruzgan came as hundreds of US Marines from the 20,000-strong US-led force in Afghanistan were conducting a sweeping operation in the province aimed at boosting election security.
In another incident, a civilian was killed, apparently by US fire, when US troops fought off a militant attack in Uruzgan’s Charcheno district, district chief Sayed Rasoul said.
In Jalalabad, the eastern city where bomb blasts on Wednesday killed four people and two female poll workers on Saturday, intelligence agents found a mine planted in the city’s flour market, provincial spokesman Faisalullhaq said.
Separately, US military spokesman Maj. Rick Peat said a “high value” provincial Taleban commander US Marines reported captured in Uruzgan on Thursday was not in fact a militant and had been released.
Meanwhile, Australian journalist Carmela Baranowska, feared kidnapped by Taleban in southern Afghanistan earlier this week, said yesterday she was safe but refused to divulge how she had spent her missing days.
Baranowska, 35, was working for Australian television network SBS in Afghanistan’s insurgency-hit south when her employer lost contact with her for several days.
Rumors that a foreign female journalist had been kidnapped swirled around Afghanistan and SBS alerted Australian foreign affairs official when she failed to call at appointed regular times.
Baranowska was last seen leaving Kandahar last Sunday with an Afghan interpreter for Zabul province, where Taliban fighters are active.
A man claiming to be a Taleban spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi, said the militants were not holding any journalist, but another purported spokesman was quoted in news reports claiming the Taleban was holding a foreign woman.
An Afghan intelligence official in Kabul said he believed Baranowska had been accompanying Taleban militants to film them for a television documentary.
“I think she was not kidnapped by Taleban, but had instead gone to Taleban areas with them to do some documentary filming,” the official said.
SBS television head Shaun Brown said Thursday the network had been in “indirect contact” with Baranowska and no longer feared she had been kidnapped by Taleban.
