First provisional results on the Afghan elections will be published
tomorrow (if we are
lucky enough), but some polls are already showing an
impressive win for the current president Hamid Karzai. A comfortable difference of 50 points (Karzai, 72% of the votes; Abdullah Abdullah, the closest competitor, 23%) that would make unnecessary a second round. Still, two million votes have to be counted, but are from zones supposed to be Karzai strongholds.
The election day, by the way, was relaxed and calmed. Few reports leaked about problems caused by road devices, the Talibans or bombs. Indeed, Karzai’s government was trying to minimize the impact of Western media, but truth seemed to be that news were that there weren’t any news.
So, the Afghan elections are over, you’d think... Well, not yet. Now is when the party starts and truth comes out.
Despite the fact that Karzai's government
lacks of the control of half of Afghanistan (here the
map that illustrates it), apparently the votes casted in the other half under their control may not have been as clean as they should.
Abdullah Abdullah has already
alleged fraud in millions of votes. Maybe he’s right. Like with Ahmadinejad in the neighbour Iran, Karzai was the winning horse. But the difference in votes between the first one and the runner up is, at best,
suspicious.
Millions of votes appear to be casted magically. Everyone has voted in Afghanistan. Even
Britney Spears.
Tom Coughlan, from The Times,
reports from the town of Pul-e-Charki, near Kabul. At 8am, an hour after the polls opened, several polling stations across the country (including the one where Coughlan was) were empty of voters. According to the officials there, it was because an hour before everyone came to cast their votes.
The result of a frenetic hour of enthusiastic voting by Afghan nomads was a total of 5,530 votes casted. Surprisingly, each box had uniformly between 500 and 510 votes. Even more surprisingly, 3,025 (54%) of those votes were from women. Coughlan makes the maths:
“Assuming that the last voter disappeared at least two minutes before the Times arrived at 7.55am, the staff working on the 12 separate ballot boxes at the site must have been processing at least 100 voters per minute since polling began”.
Quite impressive. Specially taking into account that only a few hours later, after the arrival of another truck loaded with voters…
“As the thirty voters each made their way to the ballot box it became evident that the staff were able to process a maximum four voters every three minutes, or at best 80 voters per ballot box per hour, or 960 for the entire polling centre per hour. How was it possible then to process 5,530 in an hour, The Times wondered. Did the election officials suspect any sort of fraud?”
Fraud? Sure not.
Coughlan is
not the only one reporting this kind of incidents. Jason Reich, from War is Boring,
reports from Nerkh, a remote American outpost in Afghanistan, over the phone that all the success claimed by the EU, the Americans, Afghan officials and the UN is just bullshit, a "joke":
“My sources tell me that two people voted and there is very, very heavy fighting”.
In fact, the fights didn’t stop at all during all the previous week to the election’s day. It actually
increased ahead of the elections. And now we know even more after the Taliban released a video in
YouTube that shows how voters were indeed prosecuted.
Maybe I have to revise my notes, but this doesn’t look at all like democracy and freedom.
Photo: picture-alliance/dpa
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8/27/2009
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