UN envoy in Afghanistan calls a little too often, loud and late for respect of "process"

"I think Kai Eide should be fined $100 every time he uses the word 'process' " said my friend Alex, as we discussed the elections over a glass of wine the other evening.

At that rate, the U.N. Special Representative would be broke in no time. In his increasingly frantic efforts to limit the damage from a very public and extremely unattractive spat with his recently sacked deputy, Peter Galbraith, Eide has speckled his utterances with more and more references to the need to "respect the process" in the Afghan elections.

Those of us who were here for the entire, well, process, are a bit flummoxed by the debate. I personally saw very little to respect, especially in the behavior and reaction of those who were charged with ensuring a free, fair, and transparent election — people like Kai Eide, in fact.

My own patience ran out on Sept. 7, when, in the middle of a small dinner party, my host was called away. I was at the home of an election official, and an emergency had necessitated his leaving his guests and rushing off to meet with others of his ilk.

He came back shaking his head in disgust.

“The IEC (Independent Election Commission) has decided to un-quarantine the boxes,” he said.

To the uninitiated, this might sound like gibberish, but it was a bombshell in the looking-glass world of the Afghan elections.

The IEC — the "independent" is something of a misnomer, since the majority of its high-ranking officials were appointed by, and are loyal to, President Hamid Karzai — had set up red flags to alert them to the possibility of fraud at the ballot box.

If any single candidate received more than 95 percent of the vote, or if the number of ballots received exceeded the possible number of voters, they were required by their own rules to isolate the boxes for further investigation. The votes could not be entered in the final until they had been examined and found to be valid.

Based on these indicators, the IEC has quarantined over 400 ballot boxes.

The problem was that the results were being dribbled out in 10 percent increments, and Karzai, while edging ever closer to the magic 50-percent-plus-one threshold, had not yet cleared it. The president was getting impatient, and the IEC was prepared to push him over the top with their next announcement. But discounting the votes from the 400-plus boxes would keep him under 50 percent.

So, magically, they “unquarantined” the offending ballots.

“Can they do that?” I asked incredulously.

“Well, I don’t think it’s legal,” said my host. “But they are going to do it anyway.”

This, then, is the “process” that Eide is so keen to respect.

From all reports, Galbraith has been on a tear since before the elections. The IEC was quite open about the fact that an estimated 1,500 out 6,500 polling centers would not be able to open because they were located in areas of such high insecurity that no one would be able to get to them.

Most of these areas were in the south, where tribal leaders loyal to Karzai obligingly offered to organize polling stations in their very own homes. Ballot boxes were duly delivered to them.

As a reporter, I had spoken with dozens of Afghan journalists who told me that these tribal leaders had been busily collecting voter registration cards from the people in their areas, promising that the cards would qualify them for some sort of assistance — wheat, cooking oil, rice — after the elections.

Now they had all they needed to falsify the poll — names and numbers of voters who would never set foot outside their homes on election day; all the accoutrements of officialdom, such as ballots, stamps, and boxes; and the privacy needed to mark the ballot papers far from any prying eyes.

Even so, they made a hash of it. I have seen numerous photos of badly faked votes — ballot papers marked but not even separated from the counterfoil; hundreds of ballots marked in the same handwriting; thousands of ballots in women’s polling stations, when not a single female had been observed the entire day.

Some process.

Galbraith, as well as others, had warned of the dangers of these “ghost” polling stations, but was reportedly told to hold his tongue for fear of upsetting the government. The very same government that by all accounts was preparing and perpetrating wholesale fraud.

Within hours of the polls closing, Kai Eide held a press conference to hail the Afghan people and government for their achievement.

“August 20 has been a good day for Afghanistan,” he said, presumably seriously.

It was anything but, as we have seen during the long post-election agony.

To his credit, Galbraith has tried to keep the debate focused on policy, even as he has heaped scathing in his criticism on his erstwhile boss. He has even gone so far as to accuse him of partiality towards Karzai.

Eide, for his part, has called Galbraith “a petty, vindictive man,” while having little to offer against the damning charges other than repeated calls to “respect the process.”

On second thought, Alex, make that $1,000 a pop.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/afghanistan/091005/un-envoys-call-respect-the-afghan-electoral-process-little-too-loud-and