Kabul, Oct 31 (DPA) Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s challenger in the presidential run-off election is widely expected to boycott the poll scheduled for Nov 7 unless his conditions are met by Saturday midnight, officials said.
Abdullah Abdullah, the second-placed finisher in the country’s Aug 20 elections cancelled a planned trip to India Saturday and was scheduled to announce whether he would boycott or take part in next week’s elections in a gathering Sunday morning, according to spokesman Ali Farhad Howaida.
Abdullah, a former foreign minister, hinted this week that he might withdraw from the second round unless three cabinet ministers including the interior minister were suspended, and the head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) was dismissed.
Abdullah said that he set the conditions to avoid a repeat of the fraud which marred the August election.
A UN-backed investigation rejected nearly 1 million fabricated votes from Karzai’s tally, pushing the election to a run-off.
Afghan government officials have said that Abdullah’s demands were not practical, while the IEC spokesman has said that no candidate could remove the commission chief. Abdullah has accused IEC head Azizullah Ludin of bias favouring Karzai and his office of co-engineering the fraud.
“The government has until this midnight to meet our conditions,” one of Abdullah’s aid told DPA.
“If these people are not removed, the same game will be played again, the same fraud will take place and they will declare Karzai as the winner, so we don’t want to be part of this process,” he said, but declined to be named.
“So if our conditions are not met by end of today, Abdullah will boycott the elections,” he added.
Another source from Abdullah’s camp had earlier said that the former top diplomat was holding meetings with his advisors and major supporters to consult them before announcing his stance. He has also been meeting with a number of Western officials since Friday, he said.
Citing a Western source, CNN reported Friday that talks between Karzai and Abdullah have broken down and that Abdullah would likely announce this weekend that he will boycott the run-off vote.
Former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad told CNN earlier this week that there was possibility for a power-sharing deal between the two foes to avoid the run-off vote.
The Afghan-born Khalilzad said that Abdullah lacked fund for the new vote, adding “I think that he thinks that, given the situation, he’s likely to lose, and maybe he’ll get less votes than he did in the first round, so that would be embarrassing.”
Daoud Ali Najafi, chief electoral commissioner, said Saturday that no candidate could withdraw from the race after his name was printed on the ballot papers. He said the commission had already printed 15 million ballot papers for the two-man race and dispatched them to country’s 34 provinces.
Other election officials said that if Abdullah withdraws, it would be up to country’s Supreme Court to decide whether Karzai face Ramazan Bashardost, who finished third in the first round of the elections, or he would be announced as the winner.
The political uncertainty comes amid Taliban threats of attack to stop the second round of the elections. The militants could not stop the first round of the elections, but their assaults scared away voters from polling stations, causing a lower turnout.
At the start of the anti-election operation Taliban militants attacked a UN guesthouse in Kabul Wednesday, killing 11 people, including five international UN staff. The militant group said that the attacked UN workers were helping convene the fresh vote.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Friday that they were not deterred by the attacks.
But he has said that as part of precautionary measures non-essential UN staff working in Afghanistan will be relocated to safer locations and security will be beefed up to protect those working to assist Kabul in the presidential run-off.