KABUL, 8 September 2004 — Campaigning for next month’s presidential election in Afghanistan began yesterday, opening a race in which a war-weary and ethnically-divided people will choose their leader for the first time. Eighteen candidates including US-backed incumbent Hamid Karzai are running in the Oct. 9 vote, which will fall three years after the United States unleashed a military assault to destroy the Taleban regime for harboring Osama Bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Karzai and three other candidates made campaign announcements but there were no policy pronouncements from the 14 others. “I am confident that he is going to win,” Karzai’s campaign spokesman Hamid Elmi told a press conference as Karzai made a public appearance at a factory opening on the other side of Kabul.
Karzai’s campaign team will make trips to the provinces in the next month and he will make a speech about his policies in the coming three to four days, Elmi said.
Poet Abdul Latif Pedram, monarchist Homayoon Shah Asifi and former police Col. Abdul Hasib Aryan also held press conferences to launch their campaigns. But there were none of the party conventions, balloons, banners or speeches which characterize Western election campaigns.
“Few people have said what policies they will campaign on but there have been a lot of back-door meetings between candidates trying to cut deals,” said a diplomat. The vote count will take two to three weeks. If front-runner Karzai fails to win a clear majority, the election could drag on through the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and into November.
Fundamentalist fighters loyal to the Taleban have vowed to disrupt the polls and have been waging a bombing and guerrilla campaign, killing hundreds of people including 12 election workers since the beginning of the year. Despite the bloodshed, about 10.5 million people have registered to vote in the central Asian state’s first-ever presidential election — more than the 9.8 eligible voters earlier forecast by the United Nations.
Spiraling violence, especially in south and southeast Afghanistan which are in the grip of a Taleban-led insurgency, will also hamper the election, analysts said. The European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have scaled back their election monitoring teams because of rife insecurity.
An angry mob attacked two international aid organizations in northern Afghanistan yesterday following rumors that four Afghan women working for one of the charities had been poisoned and raped, officials and aid workers said.
The attacks on Focus for Humanitarian Assistance and Swiss charity Medair happened in Faizabad, the capital of normally quiet northeastern Badakhshan province. Hundreds of angry demonstrators poured down the streets in Faizabad, accusing the aid organizations of rape. Several local and international staff were injured but none seriously, according to a Medair employee.
“Four women working for Focus were poisoned and were there till the evening and after that they were taken to hospital for medical check-ups,” provincial Deputy Governor Haji Shamsul Rahman Shams told AFP.
The women at Focus, which is run by the Aga Khan Development Network, had been mixing nutritional supplements with wheat for the World Food Program and had passed out on the job, said a source at the Aga Khan network. An investigation was continuing into what had happened but it appeared to have been food poisoning and there was no foundation to the rape allegations, he added.
An Afghan named Emal, working for Focus has been arrested and is accused of poisoning the women, and the case was under investigation, he said. “Whether the women were really raped or not it is not known yet. The details will be given when the investigation is finished,” he told AFP.
The crowd threw stones at the Focus building and Medair office and set fire to the buildings injuring staff at both organizations, witnesses said. “The provincial police director on the site was injured by stones and is in hospital,” Shams added.
All foreign Medair staff had been evacuated to Kabul and Medair was looking into the security situation before deciding on further plans, Medair Afghan desk officer Marilynn Johnstone said. “Medair at the moment is assessing the damage but remain committed to assisting the people of Afghanistan with health and relief,” she told reporters.
In an attack in Zabul, Afghan troops battled Taleban insurgents for five hours Monday after about 70 radical militiamen attacked government offices in the Naw Bahar district.
Six insurgents and an Afghan soldier were killed in the clashes. An aide to Zabul’s governor said US and Afghan troops had also killed two Taleban fighters, and arrested two others, in the province’s Sorai district earlier Monday.
Meanwhile, Taleban spokesman Mufti Latifullah Hakimi claimed that Taleban fighters shot down a US helicopter in the southwestern Uruzgan province late Monday killing 18 soldiers, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported.
