KABUL, 26 October 2004 — Hamid Karzai was set yesterday to become Afghanistan’s first elected president after winning historic Oct. 9 polls by a landslide, but a fraud inquiry and a slow final count delayed a formal announcement. Karzai, 46, has won 4,352,188 or 55.5 percent of votes, according to preliminary results published on the election commission website yesterday, with 97.2 percent of votes counted.
The charismatic Pushtun tribal chief who has led Afghanistan’s interim administration since the Taleban was ousted in late 2001, has had the simple majority needed to avoid a second-round runoff for more than 24 hours. But Karzai, who will serve a five-year term, has been silent on his victory, choosing to wait until the election commission formally announces the results sometime this week. His aides said they were holding off celebrations. “Everything has been done. Now we only need one official announcement,” campaign spokesman Hamid Elmi told AFP. “We don’t want to celebrate before that. We respect the (electoral) institutions and its decision and we want to give them enough time to do their job properly.”
Karzai’s chief rival, Yunus Qanuni, who has 16.2 percent of the vote, has also acknowledged Karzai as “the winner”. But Afghans were in limbo a day after Karzai’s silent outright victory. “They are just waiting, they are confused, they don’t know what will happen next, because they don’t know what the opposition candidates will do,” Kabul resident Freshta, 21, told AFP.
“God knows who is the winner. But I hope it’s Mr. Karzai,” said high school student Fawad Ahmad. A formal announcement is not possible until the final 300,000 or so votes have been counted and an international fraud probe has concluded.
The drawn-out count could wrap up late today, election commission technical adviser Reg Austin told AFP. Most of the remaining ballots are from remote northeast province Badakshan and Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Austin said. “They’ll also be dealing with released boxes from quarantine, so with any luck we’ll be finished today,” Austin told AFP. The panel investigating alleged fraud has released 77 of 90 quarantined ballot boxes. The remaining 13 will “be permanently quarantined”, Austin said. The panel briefed candidates’ representatives at United Nations offices on the probe, but some emerged unsatisfied.
“What is disappointing for us is that the panel is only investigating the election day fraud, and not fraud before and after the election,” Bashir Ahmad Bejan, who represents French-speaking Tajik intellectual Abdul Latif Pedram, told AFP.
The 14 opposition candidates, who had threatened to boycott the ballot, plan to hold their own meeting to discuss their response to its findings.
“If the results of the investigation are independent and acceptable, our position is as before: we will accept the results. Otherwise the candidates will ... decide on a new stand,” Qanuni’s campaign spokesman, Syed Hamid Noori, told AFP.
Among the complaints were the apparent failure of indelible ink that was supposed to stain voters’ fingers to prevent multiple votes. The elections are a crucial step in uniting Afghanistan’s disparate ethnic and tribal groups under an elected leader for the first time after decades of occupation, communist rule, civil war, warlords and the Taleban.
Karzai now must battle a rampant opium and heroin trade, warlordism, poverty, illiteracy, and a shattered economy that is propped up by drug money and aid dollars to the tune of two billion dollars each annually. Afghans earn an average of $300 per year, according to a recent World Bank survey. Around 86 percent of its estimated 28 million people cannot read or write. Karzai must also expand an undersized army and police force and persuade 40,000 militiamen to give up their weapons in a bid to dilute the power of warlords.
But analysts said Karzai would have an uphill battle trying to end warlords’ power and rule without them. One of his two vice presidents, Karim Khalili, is a warlord from the Hazara minority. The other, Ahmed Zia Masood, is the brother of revered anti-Taleban commander Ahmad Shah Masood.
