Skip to main content

Afghanistan’s presidential election put off till July 20

KABUL: Afghanistan’s presidential election will be postponed until July 20, an official said on Sunday, as US-led efforts to end the 17-year war with the Taliban gather steam.

The three-month delay, announced by the Independent Election Commission (IEC), comes after weeks of speculation that the vote would be put off to create more space for peace talks with Afghanistan’s largest militant group.

The presidential ballot was originally scheduled for April 20, which many observers had considered unrealistic given the IEC was still finalising results of October’s shambolic and bloody parliamentary elections.

Provincial and district council elections, as well as a previously postponed parliamentary vote in Ghazni province, will be held on the same day, IEC chief Abdul Badi Sayyad told reporters.

A spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, who plans to seek re-election, welcomed the new timeline. “The Afghan government respects the decision by the IEC and is prepared to cooperate with the commission in holding the election in July,” Haroon Chakhansuri said in a statement.

Official reasons for the delay included the cold weather across much of Afghanistan in April, the expense of holding four separate elections and the complication of deploying security forces to protect different ballots.

Organisers also needed more time to recruit staff, train them in the use of biometric verification devices, and resolve other problems that had plagued the legislative vote.

“Based on the lessons we have learned from the previous election and to allow time for reforms, we had to review the decision of the previous election date,” Sayyad said.

Sayyad said the new date and the decision to hold the four elections on the same day were reached after two weeks of “extensive talks” with political leaders, security agencies and the government.

Many Afghans are worried that Ghani’s fragile unity government would collapse if US troops pulled out, enabling the Taliban to return to power and potentially sparking another bloody civil war.

There also are concerns the presidential election, which will now be held in the middle of the Taliban’s traditional fighting season, could unleash a wave of deadly violence as militants seek to disrupt the vote.

Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2018



from The Dawn News - Home http://bit.ly/2Al8CdC
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more