John Sifton, Human Rights Watch’s Afghanistan researcher, and Sam Zia-Zarifi, the deputy director of HRW’s Asia Division, are in Afghanistan conducting research and advocacy in advance of the October 9 presidential polls, the country’s first direct national election.
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The election is now mere days away, and the HRW team will be sending periodic updates by e-mail through the week. These updates are not meant to comprise a comprehensive evaluation of the election process, but are merely about day-to-day events here.
Sifton and Zia-Zarifi are available to answer your questions by e-mail. Please send messages to feedback@hrw.org and check HRW’s Web site for a response. Because of the high volume of e-mails HRW gets, we regret that we will not be able to respond to all messages in person.
Saturday, October 2, 2004
In Kabul today. We spent the morning preparing a briefing for some humanitarian and human rights officials at the AIHRC and arranging some meetings with election officials and a few presidential candidates.
The election is one week away. Election officials are scrambling to prepare, but the joint Afghan and U.N. election board are still severely short-staffed. We spent yesterday briefing journalists about the problems with the election we’ve been documenting over the last few weeks: poor security for polling sites, voters and political organizers complaining about harassment and threats, local militia commanders ordering local residents and leaders how to cast their votes. Journalists are already finding out about these problems themselves.
One basic problem we’ve seen across the country is that many (but not all) Afghans don’t understand or believe in the secrecy of their vote. That’s a serious problem, because it removes the last protection to the right to vote freely. With a true secret ballot, gunmen and militia factions can threaten a voter all they want, but the voter can still vote freely. After all, if it’s secret, who’ll ever know? But if people don’t believe in the secrecy of the ballot, or don’t understand it, it means they’ll think they have to vote as their told. Militia commanders or faction leaders can order community leaders or voters how to vote and expect them to obey.
We’re going to spend the next few days talking to voters, especially outside Kabul, about this problem.
So, after a quick lunch, we met up with Zalmai Ahad, the distinguished Swiss-Afghan photographer whose work has appeared in Human Rights Watch reports and materials.
We went west of Kabul to take some photographs and interview local residents about their expectations about the election. We asked a lot of people questions to see if they understand the secrecy of the ballot. The results were mixed: Some people said they had received civic education of some sort—they’d attended a community meeting, heard announcements on the radio—and understood how to vote and that their vote was secret. Others seemed not to understand, and many other people said that while they understood the secrecy of the ballot, they knew that many people in rural areas did not.
Zalmai took many great pictures, which we will be posting on the Web site in coming days.
In the late afternoon, we met with F.B., a women’s rights activist in a city outside of Kabul (we have to leave out particular details for her security). We discussed the problems where she works. She described cases in which local militia commanders intimidated local residents to vote for certain candidates and affirmed that many voters, particularly in rural areas, did not understand that their vote will be secret.
“There’s a little freedom in the city,” she said. “But outside, the commanders and gunmen control everything.” She described a case of a local commander in one village intimidating people to vote for President Hamid Karzai, while a commander in the next village told people to vote for Yunis Qanooni, a senior leader in the Jamiat-e Islami faction. Though much of the intimidation from warlords we’ve documented has involved commanders pressuring people to vote for factional leaders, we’ve also uncovered several cases in which local commanders affiliated or allied with the President Karzai in Kabul are using their dominance to deliver votes for him.
We also discussed problems with local Afghan journalists who have faced threats for trying to report openly about the election. Human Rights Watch closely follows press freedom in Afghanistan, and we’ve been particularly worried during the last two years about intimidation and harassment of local journalists working outside of Kabul.
A few weeks ago, for instance, I interviewed M.K. (again, we’re leaving his name out for security reasons), a journalist and editor in a city outside of Kabul. He came to talk to us a few weeks ago about problems he was facing in his province. He runs a local newspaper, which he tries to print every week. It’s not easy to publish probative work in his region, and several journalists in the last few months have told Human Rights Watch that they face pressures there.
A few weeks ago, M.K. published a letter to the editor complaining of the local authorities’ corruption and incompetence and leveling specific charges against them.
“I printed the letter,” M.K. said. “I didn’t use the writer’s name, to protect him. I am not so brave: I have faced problems before. But I have promised to use my newspaper to promote the values of free speech and free expression. I took the risk.”
Anyway, the predictable thing happened. The local authorities called M.K. into the local prosecutor’s office and threatened him. One official reportedly asked, “Why did you publish this? You knew it would create problems for you.”
“I believe in free speech.,” M.K. responded. “My paper is devoted to the people and to free expression. People should be able to say what they want.”
M.K. said the official warned, “No. You can’t live in [this province] anymore. You should leave.”
The local governor couldn’t protect him. M.K. became increasingly anxious. “I am afraid right now. I have visited here, Kabul, because I want people to know what happened to me.”
All over Afghanistan, other journalists—even those working as “stringers” for major international media corporations—have told us of similar cases of intimidation: threats and harassment they face when they try to publish probative work or file critical stories.
October 3, 2004
Zalmai and I went up north of Kabul today, to Parwan province. Zalmai took a lot of good pictures and we interviewed various people around the province—shopkeepers, teachers, some medical staff. Parwan is relatively less repressed than other areas, and it appeared that many people understood the secrecy of the ballot and planned to vote for a candidate of their choice. Interestingly, people expressed preferences for many candidates—including some men who told us they planned to vote for Massouda Jilal, the sole female candidate.
In mid-afternoon, we ate a little rice and kebab at a local restaurant and then started to head back to Kabul, interviewing a few more people on the way.
October 5, 2004
Sam here: We woke up to the sound of helicopters flying around Kabul; both gunships and military transports. People here are pretty blasé about this sort of thing now, because it generally means that President Karzai is on the move. In fact, he was traveling south to the city of Ghazni for his first election campaign appearance—with only four days before the election.
John and I met our trusty driver and his yellow-and-white taxi station wagon at 8:30. It was a later start than usual but we were both exhausted from the previous day’s activities launching HRW’s latest report on threats to women’s rights.
Kabul’s morning rush hour traffic is always challenging, and especially so when the president is moving around and streets are blocked off. It’s not a gridlock, like New York, or a parking lot, like Los Angeles. It’s more like the running of the bulls in Sevilla, if there were about 20,000 bulls. Part of the problem is that nearly half the cars in Kabul (including our taxi), are right-hand drive (following the British system). Kabul’s streets are designed for left-hand drive vehicles (like the U.S.). So many drivers can’t quite see where they are going. This only aggravates the tendency of most drivers to drive very aggressively and to squeeze into every tiny space available to move their cars forward.
We spent the time trapped in traffic doing what seems to be one of our chief activities: speaking on mobile phones. Today, we received a lot of calls from the press regarding the report on women’s rights. John took most of the calls, while I handled the Persian-language media. Persian-language radio stations, especially the BBC and the Voice of America, have huge audiences here, and so it is very important for us to get our message across. Sometimes the interviews are ruined by the honking of horns and sudden stops—if you hear any of us on the radio, keep listening for the background traffic noises.
When not being interviewed, we made appointments for our advocacy work. It was a good day today: We made appointments to meet the ambassadors of Germany, Canada, and the U.K., each very important because of their role as donor nations and also because of their position in NATO, which has the responsibility for supplying security in Afghanistan. One of our chief recommendations is (and has been for the past two years) that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) must be expanded. ISAF has only about 8,000 troops in a few select sites around the country. By way of comparison, keep in mind that there are 40,000 NATO troops providing security in the Balkans, an area one-tenth the size of Afghanistan.
Our destination this morning was the Joint Election Monitoring Board (JEMB), which has the unenviable task of trying to uphold the legitimacy of the elections. Despite all the huge problems associated with warlords, the Taliban, and lack of international support (documented in our recent reports) there is little question that the staff of the JEMB take their jobs seriously. John, Zalmai and I received accreditation as elections observers for HRW. When we delivered our letter requesting accreditation, the JEMB official asked us how many people we wanted accredited. When we said “three,” he tried to confirm: “Three hundred? 3,000?” We told him that three was the size of the HRW team.
There are only 1,500 or so independent observers monitoring these elections, a far smaller number than monitored similar elections in East Timor and the Balkans. Fewer than 200 observers are internationals. The European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), both of which have a great deal of experience in monitoring elections, chose not to send a full complement of monitors because they feared, based on the available information, that the elections would probably fall short of international standards. So, following the dictum “if you can’t say any thing nice, don’t say anything at all,” they’ve sent skeleton crews.
But the JEMB has been deluged with requests for accreditation of observers working for the political candidates—more than 60,000 requests over the past three days. The theory here is sound: Each party’s observers can enter the polling sites to make sure that the ballots are honestly handled. But there are serious concerns that some of these observers may interfere with the voting. One candidate, Yunis Qanooni, a leader of one of the most powerful military factions, sent some 28,000 applications on Sunday. Qanooni’s faction has been implicated in numerous cases of intimidation of politically active Afghan men and women over the past two years, in particular during the 2002 emergency Loya Jirga. The major problem is that none of these political agents have been vetted, which opens the process up to abuse.
The JEMB staff was surrounded by stacks of accreditation cards that they were feverishly filling out by hand, since they had run out of pre-printed official cards. One official was working the phone to get an official stamp that could be used to mark the cards. In another room, JEMB workers were up their ankles in the remains of material used to prepare the cards: the sticky backs peeled off laminating sheets, chads punched out of the cards to affix clips, and other paper refuse. John, of course, waded right in to make sure our cards looked official enough to pass muster.
