A gathering of civil society groups from northern Afghanistan in Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province, on Tuesday raised concerns over voter intimidation in the upcoming elections.
With the April vote coming at a pivotal time for Afghanistan ahead of the NATO troop withdraw in 2014, emphasis on the legitimacy of the elections has been top-priority for Afghan officials and civil society activists. Threats to the credibility of the spring elections, which could mark the first democratic transition of Presidential power in Afghanistan’s history, have been widely discussed yet remain unresolved.
Chief amongst these, according to civil society groups in Mazar on Tuesday, is the issue of local power-brokers bullying residents into voting for their favored candidates. They called on the government to ensure voter intimidation was prevented.
“The main anxiety amongst the people is whether or not the interference of powerful figures will be prevented,” civil society activist Raz Muhammad Dalil said.
In the 2009 Presidential elections, electoral improprieties were widely documented, with many cases of public officials and security forces coercing voters to cast their ballots a certain way.
Afghan government and electoral officials in Kabul have paid a great deal of lip-service to the transparency and integrity of the spring elections, but whether or not that will translate on the April 5 election day remains to be seen.
Ultimately, with a significant amount of districts throughout the country remaining beyond the purview of Afghan security forces, there may be little officials in Kabul can hope to do to prevent voter intimidation in certain areas. That is, if polls are able to open in those places in the first place.
One of the major initiatives this election cycle has been to increase the participation of Afghan women, which amounted to about 35 percent of the votes cast in 2009. At the moment the Independent Election Commission (IEC) claims that of the over three million Afghans registered to vote this year, 30 percent of them are women.
However, getting women to register to vote and turn up on election day may not be enough, as activists on Tuesday pointed out that it is likely many women would be forced to vote according to their husbands' demands.
“As a woman, my concern is that there is major group of women who will follow the dictates of their husbands, meaning they have no freedom of choice in the election,” civil society activists Malalai Usmani said.
“Most women are under their husband’s order,” added Arezo Sadaat, who also attended the meeting in Mazar. “Literate women are not an exception and they are being ordered by their husbands who to vote for.”
The activists gathered on Tuesday also expressed concerns about the election being fueled by longstanding ethnic tensions in Afghanistan.
“Another issue is people think that the candidates may encourage people based on their language and ethnicity to participate in the upcoming elections,” Dalil said.