Tribal Leaders Say Karzai’s Team Forged 23,900 Votes - NYTimes.com

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By DEXTER FILKINS

KABUL, Afghanistan — Just a week before this country’s presidential election, the leaders of a southern Afghan tribe called Bariz gathered to make a bold decision: they would abandon the incumbent and local favorite, Hamid Karzai, and endorse his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah.

Mr. Abdullah flew to the southern city of Kandahar to receive the tribe’s endorsement. The leaders of the tribe, who live in a district called Shorabak, prepared to deliver a local landslide.

But it never happened, the tribal leaders said.

Instead, aides to Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali — the leader of the Kandahar provincial council and the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan — detained the governor of Shorabak, Delaga Bariz, and shut down all of the district’s 45 polling sites on election day. The ballot boxes were taken to Shorabak’s district headquarters, where, Mr. Bariz and other tribal leaders said, local police officers stuffed them with thousands of ballots.

At the end of the day, 23,900 ballots were shipped to Kabul, Mr. Bariz said, with every one marked for President Karzai.

“Not a single person in Shorabak District cast a ballot — not a single person,” Mr. Bariz said in an interview here in the capital, where he and a group of tribal elders came to file a complaint. “Mr. Karzai’s people stuffed all the ballot boxes.”

The accusations by Mr. Bariz, and several other tribal leaders from Shorabak, are the most serious allegations so far that have been publicized against Mr. Karzai’s electoral machine, which faces a deluge of fraud complaints from around the country.

The Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission said Tuesday that the number of complaints about vote stealing and other forms of fraud had reached 2,615.

Mr. Karzai’s campaign is accused of forging ballots, stealing votes and preventing people from going to the polls.

In Kandahar Province, where Mr. Karzai’s family is in control, allegations of a type similar to those made in Shorabak have been made in many of the province’s 17 districts. Early election returns show that Mr. Karzai has managed to capture nearly 48,000 votes, compared with only 3,000 for Mr. Abdullah, his nearest challenger.

Slightly less than half of all ballots have been counted. Mr. Karzai leads with about 46 percent of the vote, compared with 33 percent for Mr. Abdullah.

Mr. Karzai and his aides deny any sort of fraud, and they have hunkered down in the presidential palace to await the final results. But the allegations are casting a cloud over his re-election campaign, raising the prospect that even if he wins his presidency could be seriously tainted.

At the same time, the allegations are increasing the pressure on American officials to ensure that the accusations of fraud are properly investigated. An election widely perceived as having been stolen could deal a serious setback to the Obama administration, which has committed itself to prevailing here in the nearly eight-year-old war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Allegations like those described by Mr. Bariz are throwing the basic integrity of the election into question. Much of the story told by Mr. Bariz and the other tribal elders was impossible to verify. But it appeared credible. All three men spoke in great detail. And all of them were willing to be publicly named and to have their photographs taken.

As recently as 10 months ago, Mr. Bariz said, he had considered himself an ally of President Karzai. He had been nominated by a group of Bariz elders to be the governor of the Shorabak District, a desolate stretch of sand and scrub that sits on the country’s southwestern border with Pakistan. Mr. Bariz’s nomination was ratified by Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar Province, who was appointed by President Karzai.

But as election day neared, Mr. Bariz and other leaders in his tribe said they could not bring themselves to support Mr. Karzai for another five-year term. The reason, he said, was that Mr. Karzai’s government had done so little good.

“There are no clinics, no schools, no roads, no water dams — nothing,” Mr. Bariz said. “We decided to support someone who would unify the country.” The leaders of the Bariz tribe picked Mr. Abdullah, a former foreign minister.

In theory, the decision by the elders sealed Mr. Abdullah’s victory in Shorabak: nearly everyone in Shorabak belongs to the Bariz tribe. As is common in many such societies, tribal leaders in Afghanistan often negotiate with politicians to deliver the votes of their tribe.

Mr. Abdullah’s campaign manager in southern Afghanistan, Esmatullah, who like many Afghans uses only one name, said the candidate met a large group of Bariz tribal elders in Kandahar on Aug. 12 to receive their endorsement. It was a joyous affair, Mr. Esmatullah said, for which even women turned out. But not everyone who wanted to come to the endorsement ceremony was able to make it.

“The police were blocking the roads,” Mr. Esmatullah said.

The next day, Mr. Bariz said, officials in Kandahar were furious. One of Kandahar’s senior officials, Mohammed Anas, ordered Mr. Bariz not to return to his home in Shorabak. Mr. Anas said he had no choice.

“When I asked him why he wouldn’t let me go home, he said, ‘Because your whole tribe is going to vote for Dr. Abdullah,’ ” Mr. Bariz said.

Mr. Bariz did not speak to Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s younger brother, only to more junior officials like Mr. Anas. But few decisions of any import are believed to be taken in Kandahar without the approval of Ahmed Wali Karzai. On the streets, his nickname is “The King of the South.” Last year, for instance, Ahmed Wali Karzai was widely seen as having replaced the governor, Rahmatullah Raufi, when he fell out of favor.

Attempts to contact Ahmed Wali Karzai were unsuccessful.

When election day finally came, the ballots were never delivered to the polling centers in Shorabak, said two Bariz tribal leaders who were charged with overseeing the sites. Instead of going to the polling places, all the ballots and ballot boxes were delivered to the district government’s headquarters. That place, the tribal leaders said, had been commandeered by the Afghan Border Police.

“The ballots were never delivered,” said Abdul Quyoum, a farmer from the village of Karaze, where one of the polling sites was supposed to be. “I waited all day.”

Mr. Quyoum was one of two tribal elders from Shorabak who traveled to Kabul with Mr. Bariz. The other was Fazul Mohammed, who told a nearly identical story.

When the ballots were not delivered to the polling site, Mr. Mohammed said, he walked to the district government headquarters to see what was wrong. The building, he said, was being guarded by officers of the Afghan Border Police. As an election official, Mr. Mohammed said, he was allowed to go inside.

“The border police were stuffing the ballots, hundreds of them, into the boxes,” he said. “And there were other people who were counting the ballots and keeping the records.”

Mr. Mohammed said he protested but was told to leave. Later, he said, he was told that a total of 23,900 ballots had been filled out, all in Mr. Karzai’s name.

“Dr. Abdullah did not receive a single vote,” he said.

Mr. Bariz, the governor, said he had not returned to Shorabak.

“I don’t think I am going to be governor much longer,” he said.

Sangar Rahimi contributed to this report from Kabul.

Many Women Stayed Away From the Polls In Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

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By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 31, 2009

KABUL, Aug. 30 -- Five years ago, with the country at peace, traditional taboos easing and Western donors pushing for women to participate in democracy, millions of Afghan women eagerly registered and then voted for a presidential candidate. In a few districts, female turnout was even higher than male turnout.

But on Aug. 20, when Afghans again went to the polls to choose a president, that heady season of political emancipation seemed long gone. This time, election monitors and women's activists said, a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise.

With insurgents threatening to attack polling places and voters, especially in the rural south, many families kept their women home on election day, even if the men ventured out to vote. In cities, some segregated female polling rooms were nearly empty, and many educated women who had voted or even worked at polling stations in previous elections decided not to risk going out this time.

"Everywhere I went before elections, I urged women in the villages to vote. But when the day came, even professional women in the city who normally felt free to go to work and shops and weddings stayed home. I was shocked," said Safia Siddiqui, a legislator from Nangahar province. "There has been a lot of talk about women's civic life and political movements, but security comes first."

Although no official turnout figures are available and the election results are not yet final, election monitoring groups and political activists from Taliban-plagued provinces report that in dozens of insecure districts, almost no women voted. Nationwide, they say, women's participation was much lower than in either the 2004 presidential or 2005 parliamentary elections.

The sense of eroding political rights for women did not begin with this election. In the past several years, Taliban attacks on prominent women have sent a powerful message to others who dreamed of entering public life. In the southern province of Kandahar alone, a female legislator, a women's affairs official and a female prosecutor were gunned down by terrorists. Others have received constant threats, travel with armed guards or rarely visit their constituencies.

When rural women did vote in this election, it was often by proxy, which lent itself to fraud, monitoring groups report. Monitors and others said that across the south, women's voter registration cards, which often had no photographs because of conservative taboos on women's faces being seen, were taken to the polls in batches by male relatives or tribal elders.

In some cases, they said, those same cards were used by officials or partisans to stuff ballot boxes, either for President Hamid Karzai or his top challenger, ex-foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, as well as for candidates for provincial council seats. With about one-third of the vote counted, Karzai now leads Abdullah 46.2 percent to 31.4, leaving both short of the 50 percent-plus-one-vote needed to avoid a runoff.

"Our constitution gives all men and women equal rights to vote, but in most areas that were not safe and secure, men did not let the women leave home and voted for them," said Sabrina Saghib, a member of a parliamentary committee on women's rights. "That is against the law and those votes should not be counted as women's votes."

Abdullah and Karzai have accused each other's camps of widespread election fraud. More than 2,000 complaints of fraud have been sent to the internationally led Electoral Complaints Commission, reportedly including some that describe the use of women's voting cards for ballot-box stuffing. The commission has not released any details, and it could take weeks to finish investigating the most serious claims.

A contributing factor in the low female turnout was that in many insecure areas, not enough women were willing to work at the polls as monitors or staff, so men were sent instead. That meant many families would not allow their female members to vote at those sites.

Accounts of low participation by women came from female activists and politicians in Kabul and a dozen provinces. Some described voting in short lines and empty rooms, or said they were unable to vote because of Taliban threats. Some tried to encourage local women to vote but found them afraid, confused and subject to strong family pressure to stay home.

Sahira Sharif, a women's rights activist from the southeastern province of Khost, said that in 2004 and 2005 she traveled freely across the province, talking to women about the importance of voting. This time, she said, she received support from the International Republican Institute to undertake a similar campaign but had to arrange her meetings in secret to avoid detection by the Taliban.

"It made me sad to see how far backward things have gone for women in my province in just a few years," Sharif said, adding that long distances from villages to polling stations made it especially risky for women to vote. In an ironic twist on the abuse of women's voting cards, she also said that a female candidate for Khost's provincial council took several thousand unused cards and stuffed ballot boxes for herself.

Shahazad Akbar, a staff member of the Free and Fair Election Foundation in Kabul, said her mother, a teacher, had worked as a polling official in the last election but was too fearful even to go to the polls this time. Akbar's sister knocked on doors as a campaign worker and found that most women had little idea about the election. Akbar toured several polling places in the capital and found almost no women there.

"Women feel special pressures in our society," she said. "Even in areas where you'd think women would face less obstacles, they could not get permission to go because of insecurity." In Kandahar, she said, female election observers from her organization did not tell their friends or neighbors what they were doing.

Many urban women who did go to the polls expressed a strong sense of defiance, saying they were determined not to be cowed by Taliban threats to cut off their ink-dipped fingers. But others said they were fed up with national leadership and saw no point in risking physical harm to participate.

"I voted for Mr. Karzai last time. We were all so excited then, and we thought peace would come. But now things have gotten much worse, and I decided not to vote at all," said Shuqufa, 38, a mother of five in Karte Nau, a Kabul district where suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the police station on election day. "These political leaders bring us nothing but fighting and rockets. We are fed up with the Taliban, and we are fed up with them."

The major candidates did little to appeal to the women's vote, campaigning without their wives in deference to conservative traditions. At the last moment, Abdullah and Karzai brought their wives out to vote with them, but the gesture seemed like a belated photo opportunity. Abdullah's wife was the only female voter in her polling room.

Some rights activists said the election-day chill signified a wider, continuing setback for Afghan women's role in social, political and economic life after a brief period of hope for change after the Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001. They noted that domestic violence against women is increasing, that the Taliban has attacked and shut down hundreds of girls' schools and that most women remain economically in thrall to their fathers and husbands, even when they are abused.

"Things are reverting, and it's because of a mix of insecurity, economy and culture," said Soraya Sobrang, a physician and member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "For a few years when security was better, women could participate in public life and the new constitution gave them political rights. But then the attacks started, and people were warned not to send their daughters to school, not to send their wives to work. All their new rights came under threat, and nothing really changed in their lives."

Now, Sobrang said, many Afghan women have lost hope.

"We have lost a lot of the ground we made. Women still face forced marriages, still work in the fields, still depend on men who beat them every day," said Sobrang, who voted on Aug. 20 in a very short line of nervous, unsmiling women. "We can give a card to a woman and tell her to vote, but that does not protect her from danger, and it does not give her any real rights at all."

Accusations Of Vote Fraud Multiply in Afghanistan - washingtonpost.com

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By Joshua Partlow and Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 28, 2009

MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan -- One week after Afghanistan's presidential election, with the winner still undeclared, increasing accusations of fraud and voter coercion threaten to undermine the validity of the results, deepen dangerous regional divisions and hamper the Obama administration's goals in this volatile country.

With U.S. popular support for the war in Afghanistan wavering, an election viewed as illegitimate by many Afghans would be a major setback for President Obama, who has increased U.S. military and economic efforts in a conflict central to his foreign policy. Officials worry that a Kabul government tainted by allegations of election-stealing or destabilized by a potentially violent backlash could derail U.S. efforts to beat back a resurgent Taliban and build Afghan security forces.

In interviews here in the capital of Balkh province in northern Afghanistan, the governor, election officials and residents described incidents of ballot-box stuffing and voter intimidation, particularly by election monitors. The many allegations of fraud add to the chorus of doubts from candidates and observers in other parts of the country about the fairness of the election process.

In a jailhouse interview, election monitor Abdul Hakim Ghafurzai, bruised and bloodied and slumped in his cell, said he knows how it feels to challenge election fraud in Afghanistan. "I am in pain," said Ghafurzai, who alleged he was beaten and arrested after complaining that police outside this northern city shut down polling places because people were voting for President Hamid Karzai.

"Fraud has taken place by the Independent Election Commission, and there were also many threats," said Atta Mohammad Noor, the governor of Balkh, who broke with Karzai before the election and backed his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who is very popular in the north. "If this government wins through fraud, I won't be with this government."

All five leading candidates have filed complaints of ballot-box stuffing or destruction, intimidation and pressure on voters at polling stations, and ballots cast by phantom voters. One candidate, former anti-drug official Mirwais Yasini, personally delivered boxes full of shredded ballots to the foreign-led Election Complaints Commission. Yasini and five other candidates issued a joint statement this week saying the election was marred by "widespread fraud and intimidation" that threatened to "increase tension and violence in the country."

Because the complaint process is slow and cumbersome, officials at the complaints commission office in Kabul said they do not expect to finish their investigations until mid-September, at least two weeks after the official election results are announced. That could create public tension and possible unrest, especially if Karzai is announced as the winner before the numerous complaints have been resolved.

Karzai and Abdullah have denied allegations that their followers committed systematic fraud.

In the past week, Abdullah has held two news conferences to allege "widespread rigging" by the Karzai administration, its campaign aides and employees of the Independent Election Commission. He has shown reporters thick blocks of ballots with identical check marks next to Karzai's name and photograph, and shown videos of people sitting on the floor in closed polling stations and systematically marking ballot after ballot.

Legislators and other leaders in a number of provinces, especially those threatened by insurgent violence such as Kandahar, Khost and Wardak, have complained that at polling stations where very few people were able to vote because of insecurity, sealed ballot boxes inexplicably full of hundreds of ballots were sent to Kabul.

Election observers have described northern Afghanistan as a place where the election proceeded relatively peacefully, with as many as half of registered voters going to the polls -- far more than in some Taliban strongholds in the south. But interviews with those monitoring the election here and looking into allegations of irregularities painted a bleaker portrait that implicated the followers of both Karzai and Abdullah.

"I was a witness to fraud, and I couldn't do anything to stop it," said a female election monitor at a voting site in Barga village, in this province, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. She said her fellow staff members voted at least 100 times for Abdullah and forced other residents to make the same choice. "I was really upset. The voting system was not good. People didn't have the right to choose," she said.

At least one polling center was set ablaze, destroying all records, and an election supervisor was gunned down while driving with boxes of ballots, said the top provincial election official, Dur Mohammad.

"Some candidates bought off the election officials. I think there were several cases," said Mahgul Yamam, the head of the Election Complaints Commission in Balkh. "The system is not great in Afghanistan."

In a jailhouse interview, Ghafurzai, 47, the top election monitor in the Chimtal district outside Mazar-e Sharif, said he received a phone call about 3:30 p.m. on election day that police were shutting down polling centers in his district because too many people were voting for Karzai.

"Police interfered with the counting. They didn't let people vote; they locked the boxes," he said.

Ghafurzai said that he alerted his provincial superiors about the problem, and that the next day, while counting votes at the Wali Asr High School, he was visited by the local police commander and three of his guards.

The guards "punched me and kicked me," he said, showing his bruised arms and back and blood-speckled scarf. "I said, 'Why are you arresting me? You have no documents.' They didn't say anything. They just handcuffed me and took me away."

Ghafurzai is accused of assaulting the police commander, a charge he denies. Noor, the governor, described the matter as unrelated to politics and as a personal dispute between the police commander and the official, but he said he had formed a team to investigate the incident. Noor said Abdullah won 3,988 votes in the Chimtal district, compared with 2,287 for Karzai.

One tribal elder from Chimtal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Abdullah supporters collected registration cards from poor villagers and cast votes themselves. He said these supporters offered food -- taken from Red Crescent aid supplies delivered to the area this year after a flood -- in exchange for the voting cards.

"I am the elder of the tribe. People share their problems with me. I know this was going on," he said.

Palwa Shah, a 20-year-old university student, said that the polling site she attended was decorated with posters of Abdullah and that the election staff members and police there told people to vote for him.

"That voting center was not free. People could not choose their own candidate. They were being forced; they were not happy," said Shah, who voted in the Dehdadi district of Balkh. "They said, 'If you don't vote for Abdullah, the security situation could get worse, and you won't be able to live here anymore.' "

At the Election Complaints Commission office in Kabul this week, teams of workers began sorting through thousands of brown envelopes filled with complaint forms. More than 80 percent were blank, officials said, suggesting that there were few problems with fraud or, more likely, that many people were reluctant to file complaints for fear of retaliation or because they were illiterate. Few forms have been received from the southern regions, where fraud is generally thought to have been the most widespread.

"One reason so few forms were filled in may be because people didn't trust them," said Nellika Little, a public information official at the commission. "They do have to be in writing. If someone is being intimidated at a polling station, are they really going to complain to the officials there?"

Little said the commission had received nearly 1,500 formal complaints, including 150 that it considers potentially serious enough to affect the result of the election. Those 150 cases are being investigated by teams of professionals, including some who are traveling to the districts where they originated to question witnesses and officials.

Commission officials said many complaints would be difficult to investigate because they are vague and contain little or no evidence.

"I'm really worried about the result of the election. All the candidates are complaining, and they are feeling there were many problems," said Farid Muttaqi, a human rights worker in Mazar-e Sharif. "For sure the people will not cooperate with the government or feel they are a part of this government. And this could give a chance for the Taliban to come and do their work here."

Constable reported from Kabul.