Asia Security
Monitor
No. 87, July 6, 2004 Tribal culture impacts Afghan women votes;
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| June 14: Afghani president Hamid Karzai has come under fire from critics for inviting former Taliban militants to join the government, reports The Washington Times. The criticism came after Karzai stated that the only exceptions to the invitation were “about 150” of the top-ranking Taliban leaders close to al-Qaeda. Karzai defended his actions in a recent interview with CNN, saying “[the rest are] from Afghanistan. They should come back to this country and lead a normal life… We want normalcy to return to Afghanistan.” Karzai has also offered similar invitations to the Hezeb-I-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) militant faction. Furthermore, Karzai has taken executive prerogative in the appointment of provincial governors rather than allowing local elections, when he installed a former HIA commander in the Farah province and a former Taliban collaborator in Zabul. Many of Karzai’s critics spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of offending his official supporters in Washington. June 26: Afghanistan’s strict rules of tribal culture have hampered the process of registering women to vote in the upcoming elections, especially in the south and east where Afghan women rarely leave their compounds, reports The New York Times. This fall’s parliamentary and presidential elections will be the first time women have voted or registered to vote in Afghanistan. With the permission of the men of the village, female election teams must visit each household in many districts to register the women to vote. Whether the women ultimately vote may depend largely on whether their husbands let them out of the home. The Council of Clerics in the south - a body of the most important religious figures - recently issued a religious edict saying that women had the right to vote, and some mullahs in the districts were being enlisted to help with registration. However, the edict is being challenged by the Taliban chiefs, who are running a propaganda campaign in the villages warning people not to register to vote. Reuters reports that three women working to register voters for Afghan elections were killed and 17 female election workers were wounded when a bomb destroyed their bus in the eastern city of Jalalabad. Registration of women has lagged behind the men partly due to difficulty in recruiting female poll workers. July 5: Afghan and U.N. officials failed Tuesday to agree on a date for national elections, reports the Associated Press. A vote for president that would be put off until late September or October, could be further postponed because of the onset of winter snow or continued attacks on election workers and voters, which have been blamed on Taliban militants. Afghan officials also worry that logistics and intimidation by warlords could yet push the election of a 249-seat parliament into next year. Electoral officials have no census data to calculate the distribution of seats in parliament, and there are no laws yet on campaign finance or media access for 2,000 expected candidates. Election registration teams are still unable to enter parts of the Pashtun-dominated south, which has been rocked by a series of Taliban attacks apparently designed to disrupt the process. In addition to the attack on female election workers in Jalalabad, in Kandahar province, dozens of suspected Taliban attacked a school used as a voter registration site in Kandahar province. In Uruzgan province, around 17 men were executed after Taliban gunmen found that they were carrying voter ID cards. |
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Copyright
© 2004, American Foreign Policy Council.
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