http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/international/asia/21afghan.html
March 21, 2005 Afghans Get One Election Date and Await Another By CARLOTTA GALL KABUL, Afghanistan, March 20 - Afghanistan's much delayed parliamentary elections will be held Sept. 18, over a year after they were originally scheduled, the country's election commission announced Sunday. The elections will include voting for the upper and lower houses of Parliament. But the voting by individual districts within each province, to select a third of the members of the upper house, will be postponed yet again, until 2006, the election commission chairman, Bismillah Bismil, said at a news briefing. Voters will elect 249 representatives from Afghanistan's 34 provinces to sit in the lower house of Parliament. They will also pick one representative per province to sit in the upper house. The upper house ultimately is to be made up of 34 provincial representatives, 34 presidential appointees and 34 district representatives; the district representatives - one per province - will be the winners of the greatest number of votes in the district elections. Until district elections are held, the upper house will consist of the provincial representatives and half as many presidential appointees, a solution suggested by the Supreme Court, Mr. Bismil said. Many parliamentary systems give proportional representation to parties that receive the most votes. Afghanistan plans instead to use a system in which each voter casts one vote for an individual candidate. The system has been criticized by political parties and election experts, but was chosen last year and signed into law by President Hamid Karzai as a way to reduce the influence of the wartime jihadi parties. The September election date reflects the third postponement of voting for Parliament, most recently scheduled for May. Mr. Bismil said that severe winter conditions would have prevented election workers from reaching many regions to register new voters in time, and that the complexity of parliamentary and provincial elections presented enormous technical challenges. The government has not decided yet whether to allow the one million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan and Iran to take part and how to provide representation for the Kuchis, Afghanistan's nomads, he said. Electing a Parliament is the final step in the political process laid down in the United Nations-sponsored conference at Bonn in December 2001. Parliamentary elections were originally scheduled for June 2004, along with the presidential election, but both votes were postponed because tens of thousands of guerrilla fighters were still armed. The presidential election was held last October. Parliamentary elections were postponed until spring, because of the complexity of the operation and also because of fears that powerful regional commanders and armed factions would dominate the process. Improving security and disarming irregular militias remain the most important reasons to delay the parliamentary and provincial elections, foreign diplomats here said. But they also cited other problems: the country has a literacy rate of only 28 percent, a poor road network and geographical features that will make many areas hard to reach. Nearly 200 people have died from heavy floods in the last week, as melting snow and rains, after years of drought, have caused rivers to burst their banks. Thousands of houses and livestock have been swept away in Uruzgan and Farah provinces in southern and southwestern Afghanistan, local officials said. Five thousand to 10,000 candidates nationwide are expected to take part in September's elections and 69 ballots will be printed - two per province plus one for nomads. Some of the ballots will be the "size of posters," with the names of as many as 200 to 300 candidates, said Peter Erben, the United Nations technical consultant on the elections. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Take a look at donorschoose.org, an excellent charitable web site for anyone who cares about public education! http://us.click.yahoo.com/_OLuKD/8WnJAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
