In a new presidential decree, President Hamid Karzai has explicitly mandated that the security forces involved in maintaining the safety of election staff, voters and candidates must not interfere in the process.
The 12 article decree, issued by the Presidential Palace on Monday, is comprised entirely of demands on the security forces. Yet as many election monitors have been keen to point out, the vast majority of fraud in the first round was a result of Independent Election Commission (IEC) employees meddling in the process, not the security forces.
“The Defense and Interior ministries and National Directorate of Security must assign female security personnel to polling centers and sites for effective female participation, and the security forces must not interfere in the election and must not enter the polling centers, polling sites and tally centers,” Karzai’s decree reads.
“The security forces are obliged to avoid any sort of ethnic discrimination while conducting their duties,” it also notes.
Meanwhile, the IEC has been criticized for not doing enough to seek punishment for those who were engaged in fraud in the first round. More than 5,000 IEC employees have reportedly been blacklisted by the commission for misconduct, and the IEC has begun recruiting staff to replace them. But without there being an legal repercussions for those who committed fraud, observers are concerned there may be nothing to discourage the same thing from happening again.
For now, the IEC is focused on investigating candidates supposedly involved in fraud rather than its own employees.
“We are continuing our investigations into those candidates who were found guilty of rigging, and if their involvements are proved, they will be introduced to the legal and judicial organs,” IEC spokesman Noor Mohammad Noor said.
The Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA) has expressed concerns about the new employees being recruited by the IEC for the runoff round.
“If the election commission wants transparency, it should publish the names of those who involved in fraud, so that their reentry in the commission is prevented,” FEFA spokesman Fahim Naeemi said.
Source/Fuente: http://www.tolonews.com/elections2014/karzai-cautions-security-forces-ag...
