Afghan Elections Delayed To September

“The joint election commission with UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) came to me and informed me that they can hold presidential and parliamentary elections both at the same time,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Karzai as telling a press conference.

“And that will happen late Sunbola or early Mizan,” he said naming the portion of the Afghan calendar which corresponds to mid to late September.

Under the Bonn peace accords drawn up in late 2001 following the ousting of the Taliban regime, war-ravaged Afghanistan was due to hold democratic elections in June2004 .

However, the election process has been hampered by low voter registration, threats by Taliban remnants, and security problems that have driven many international aid workers out of large parts of Afghanistan’s south and southeast.

Security in the country remains uncertain, with some6 , 000NATO-led peacekeepers in Kabul and the northern city of Kunduz, while U.S. troops are conducting a major operation in the Pakistan border region to root out Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters.

Karzai acknowledged that Afghanistan had experienced serious factional fighting in the past week, during which Aviation Minister Mirwais Sadiq was killed in the western city of Herat.

But he said electoral officials had assured him that progress was being made in organizing the polls.

While he welcomed the announcement, UNAMA head and U.N. special envoy Jean Arnauld said “the right conditions are not yet there” to hold elections.

“In order to have a proper election in September, clearly many things that haven’t happened in the past couple of years must now happen in a very, very short period of time," he told a press briefing in Kabul.

These included disarming many of the more than100 , 000militiamen around the country to improve security and strengthening political freedoms, he added.

News of the elections came as Afghanistan prepared to ask the international community for further pledges of aid to rebuild the country and prevent it becoming a failed state at a conference to take place in Berlin on March 31 and April1 .

Militias Reduced

Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s administration has formally announced plans to reduce its armed militia forces by 40 percent and collect all heavy weapons from around the country before elections.

“The Security Council decided to reduce the number of its military units by 40 percent,” Deputy Defense Minister General Abdul Rahim Wardak said Saturday, March27 .

Speaking at a ceremony in Kabul to mark the last phase in the collection of heavy weapons from the capital, Wardak said the U.N.-supported Disarmament, Demobilization and Re-integration (DDR) program would complete the twin tasks before the general elections.

Some of the disarmed militiamen will be integrated into the new national army while others will be re-trained and helped to find employment.

Disarmament is widely considered necessary before free and fair polls can be held.

Eradicating private militias is one of the priorities for Karzai as he attempts to extend the authority of his government to the provinces which have been troubled by factional fighting and rights abuses by commanders.