From Sam
Election Day!
It was a day of amazement and frustration.
We started the day at 5:00 a.m. We made our way out of Kabul in the pre-dawn darkness, heading north toward the Panjshir valley and Kapisa province and into the foothills of the Hindu Kush, the massive mountain range that runs diagonally through Afghanistan from its northeast and towards the southwest.
The polls were set to open after 7 AM, and we wanted to get into some of the more remote rural areas in time to see the voting start.
We traveled for about 45 minutes without any incident, but then almost flipped our minibus into a ditch because of a speed bump that appeared out of nowhere. John saw the speed bump first and called out to the driver, who slammed on the brakes. The car began to fishtail, and we skidded off the road and smashed into a small concrete block. We managed to pry the car off the block and drove on. After a few minutes, our driver turned to us and said, matter-of-factly, “That was really scary.”
The first stop we made was in the scenic hillside village of Golbahar, in Kapissa province. Apparently, there was delay in opening the voting on time, but our presence seemed to galvanize and motivate the polling officials to begin the process.
Golbahar lies within the stronghold of one particular political and military faction—the predominately Tajik Jamiat-e Islami—and we became concerned immediately with the large number of agent-monitors for Yunis Qanooni, Jamiat-e Islami’s presidential candidate. The candidates are all allowed to have agents at the polling sites to monitor the elections, but in this case all of the agents were from one candidate, and they seemed a little too closely involved in organizing things. In other nearby polls, we saw agents from different candidates keeping each other in line.
The polling staff took their jobs very seriously, and as the voting began, it suddenly dawned on us that we were witnessing a significant moment in Afghan history. We had goose bumps, and they were not caused just by the cold. We took some pictures as the first voter approached the ballot box to place his folded ballot inside, and watched in amazement and admiration as the next few voters entered.
Almost immediately, we realized that there was a problem with the supposedly indelible ink used to mark voters’ thumbs to prevent multiple voting. Voters and election officials anxiously showed us that the ink easily washed off, and in some cases expected us to give them some guidance about how to move forward. Unfortunately, we had neither the authority nor the information to help them.
By late morning, we visited several mountain villages around the provinces north of Kabul, and we kept in touch with other observers via satellite telephone. It soon became clear that the ink was failing around the country. There had been many allegations of multiple voter registration before the vote, and the United Nations and the JEMB had described the indelible ink as the last line of defense. And the line was crumbling, or rather being washed off by saliva.
Despite the snafu, election officials called upon legendary Afghan resiliency to address the problem as best as they could: In some places, they simply dipped voters’ fingers in the well of indelible ink, in other places they rushed to the bazaar and bought magic markers to do the job. Wherever we went, people were quite proud to show us how smoothly things were progressing, and voters were eagerly waiting for their turn.
A few images of the Afghans’ determination to vote remain with us: one old man, severely bent over, simply disregarded the line and marched up to the poll to snatch his ballot from an astounded official. Leaving the partitioned voting area, he quickly folded his ballot in his hand and was about to march off with it without depositing it, until other voters, laughing, called to him and directed him back to put his ballot in the box.
In another village, we saw a group of women in blue burqas marching purposefully toward the polling center, accompanied by a young boy we guessed was about six years old. He was wearing a jacket much too large for him, which kept his arms akimbo away from his body, and, inexplicably, a large motorcycle helmet. He looked like E.T. going to the polls.
But the ink failure was really starting to create problems. Around noon, most of the candidates –except Karzai– started to complain about the ink, and called for the election to be stopped. These candidates had already made noises about boycotting the election even before the ink snafu, and Afghan observers largely stated that these candidates were waiting to seize on any opportunity they could to call foul.
There was agreement that the candidates had every reason, in principle, to complain about the ink problem, but the call for the election to be stopped, in the middle of the day, only led to more confusion.
As far as intimidation and human rights abuses are concerned, it was a rather quiet day. As Human Rights Watch had tried to point out before the election, most of the intimidation and political pressure took place before election day—and in rural areas many of us feared that the people coming out to vote had already been told how to vote and perhaps didn’t understand or appreciate the secrecy of the ballot.
By the end of day, as we got back to Kabul, we were happy to hear that the day had passed without any reports of serious violence or overt intimidation of voters.
We were also frustrated – nauseated, really – by the failure of the international community to give Afghans the proper tools necessary to support their participation in deciding their own future. We had worried about many things that could disrupt the polling today — major Taliban attacks, violence between warlord factions — but not this. No one expected that the day’s biggest failure would be the fault of international officials. The ink was just one problem—a more serious problem was that there were not enough monitors for the elections. The presence of more monitors, both before and during the election, may have prevented the ink crisis from occurring. Moreover, because of the shortage of monitors, it will now be very difficult to investigate claims of abuse.
The Afghans seem to have done their best to do everything right, and they were let down by the United Nations and the JEMB.
Related Material
Special Report: Daily Afghan Election Diary
Special Focus, October 9, 2004