Karzai Delays Afghan Parliament as Vote Crisis Deepens (ANOTHER good reason to get OUT!)

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai decided on Wednesday to postpone the inauguration of a new parliament for another month on the recommendation of a special court he appointed to study electoral fraud, deepening the nation’s political crisis.

The move will leave Afghanistan without a Parliament five months after its September election, with the prospect of even further delays, and puts the president at odds with his international supporters, who have insisted the elections were valid.

The winning candidates and a range of Afghan and international officials consider the special court unconstitutional and say Afghanistan’s election commissions, which have certified the results, have final say over the legitimacy of the election. The commissions have refused to cooperate with the court, saying it has no jurisdiction.

But in a courtroom packed with candidates declared losers by the Independent Election Commission on Wednesday, the court’s chief judge, Sediqullah Haqiq, declared that it could throw out the results of the election entirely if it wants, and asked President Karzai to postpone seating the new parliament. The inauguration was scheduled for this Sunday.

While the losers were jubilant at Judge Haqiq’s declaration, the move threatened political turmoil and an even more protracted period in which President Hamid Karzai is in effect ruling by decree, as he has since Parliament disbanded in advance of the Sept. 14 poll.

The president’s decision seemed certain to deepen the rift between the winning candidates, who are unlikely to accept any reworking of the results, and the losers, who say fraud and insecurity left much of the nation’s majority Pashtun population, based mostly in the south, disenfranchised in the balloting.

The Electoral Complaints Commission, which has already reviewed 6,000 formal complaints from the polling, rejected the ad hoc court’s attempted intervention, also inviting it to view its own Web site, www.ecc.org.af, where the results of its work were published, according to Ahmad Zia Raffat, the commission’s spokesman. “According to the country’s laws and constitution, the special court is totally illegal,” he said.

The E.C.C. had the authority to review complaints and remove winners, which it did in numerous cases, while the I.E.C. was responsible for certifying final results. It did that Nov. 24, after two months of deliberation, sparking persistent public protests by the losing candidates. President Karzai invited the disgruntled losers to make their cases to his attorney general, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, and later appointed the special court to hear the evidence Mr. Aloko gathered.

Mr. Aloko, a strong supporter of the president, was critical of the commissions for certifying the results, calling their findings premature. In an interview on Wednesday, he expressed the hope that the special court would eventually invalidate the elections entirely, requiring holding a new poll, a process that would leave Afghanistan without a legislative body for many months or even years.

No one disputes that the parliamentary elections were badly tarnished. The I.E.C. threw out nearly a fourth of the total votes recorded as fraudulent or tainted, which invalidated the election of many candidates — particularly members of the most numerous ethnic group, the Pashtuns. The E.C.C. also invalidated other candidates on fraud charges.

The commissions, however, supported by the international community, ruled that their certification of the results was valid once they removed the problem voting districts and candidates in a process that was legal and transparent.

“In the whole country, there was no province from which we did not receive any complaints,” said Judge Haqiq. “The whole world should know that there was a huge, enormous fraud in these elections.”

Judge Haqiq said he viewed “with great sadness” the election commissions’ refusal to cooperate with the court.

“Unfortunately losers in Afghanistan will never accept that they are losers,” said one of the winning candidates, Abdul Zuhair Qadir, who was attending orientation sessions for the new parliament.

The special court’s actions appeared to be just the latest in moves by Karzai’s government to discredit the work of the two election commissions. In December, ten members of the I.E.C., including all seven of its commissioners and three high-ranking staffers, were indicted by the attorney general on unspecified electoral fraud and abuse of authority charges, according to Abdullah Ahmadzai, the I.E.C.’s chief electoral officer and one of the indictees. In addition, the attorney general indicted four prominent members of the E.C.C. on the same charges, including all three of its Afghan commissioners, Mr. Ahmadzai said.

President Karzai appointed all of the I.E.C. commissioners and the three Afghan E.C.C. commissioners; the other two E.C.C. commissioners were foreigners appointed in consultation with the United Nations. They have not been charged.

“This is all happening because they feel the results need to be changed and they can’t change them,” Mr. Ahmadzai said. The electoral commission’s certification of the results is final and there is no legal mechanism for changing that, he said.

RUBIN & NORDLAND
NYTimes