Helmand Vote Marred by Rockets and Fraud

The city was a ghost town as election day, August 20, dawned. Very few people were on the streets, the shops were all closed, and the roads were blocked. Packs of dogs roamed freely through the deserted parks.



The polling centres were supposed to open at 7 am, but at Karzai stadium, in the centre of town, there was a twenty minute delay. And then, just one minute after the doors opened, a rocket slammed into the stadium grounds, killing a child and wounding two adults.



The rocket had done its work. The handful of people at the stadium started to leave.



Helmand governor Gulab Mangal arrived at the stadium 20 minutes after the rocket hit. He expressed his sorrow at the child’s death, and then went to cast his vote in the country’s presidential and provincial council elections.



“Hamed Karzai,” he answered when asked for whom he had cast his ballot.



The rockets continued throughout the morning – eight in all. Preliminary reports suggest that fourteen people died in the attacks.



“Why are the foreign forces not preventing these rockets?” asked Hezbollah, a resident of the Kart-e-Lagan district of Lashkar Gah. “People here are afraid. Nobody is going to vote.”



Helmand, the centre of poppy and the insurgency, is also now the centre for international forces. More than 10,000 United States troops arrived over the summer, joining the nearly 8,000 British soldiers already stationed there. The two groups have been conducting major offensives over the past two months, designed to clear the area of the Taleban.



Judging by residents’ complaints, it is not working.



“I am just sitting here with my melons,” said Sher Ahmad Afghan, a resident of Babaji, an area just across the Helmand river from Lashkar Gah. “I cannot vote because they have not made any polling stations here. The Taleban won’t let them.”



Mohammad Azim Zahiryar was also a no-show at the polling centre.



“The Taleban are patrolling all the intersections, and they will not let anyone go to vote,” he said. “And they have these cleavers with them. They say that if they catch anybody with ink-stained fingers they’ll cut them off. And if they catch you with a voter registration card, they make you eat it. This happened to my neighbour.”



Far from the capital, things were even worse. In Sangin, most polling centres are not open, and those that are have had few visitors. The Taleban have managed to choke Sangin off almost completely.



“I am so upset that these Taleban tyrants have managed to close all the roads to the Sangin district centre,” said Fazul Haq, the district governor.



He confirmed that the vote was not going well. The Taleban had forced more than 15 rockets into various areas of Sangin, which had kept voters at home.



“It’s already 9.30 and we have had only three voters,” he told IWPR. “People are very angry, because the foreigners have not managed to bring security to Sangin.”



Mullah Abdul Salaam, district governor of Musa Qala, said that some people in his area were voting despite the violence.



“We have had about 15 rockets, which had frightened people and kept them from coming out,” he told IWPR. “But still, people are coming in groups to vote. Unfortunately, we do not have polling stations for women, so they have to stay in their homes.”



At 11, news came in that the polling centre in Bolan, a district immediately adjoining Lashkar Gah, was under attack and had to be closed down.



The head of the Helmand election commission confirmed the attack, but did not say whether another location would be found.



In addition to violence, there were several alleged irregularities in the voting process.



Several polling centres are said to have refused to allow journalists access, giving rise to speculation that they were hiding something.



“How do I know what is going in there?” said Zainullah Stanekzai, a reporter for Pajhwok Afghan News. “Maybe there is fraud?”



In at least one polling centre, election workers are alleged to have interfered in the vote, reportedly telling older voters to cast their ballot for a specific candidate. In one case, an election worker is claimed to taken the ballot from the hand of an elderly man and ticked the box himself.



In the Kart-e-Lagan area of town, five women waited impatiently at the polling centre. They had been told by a woman they described as their “leader” to show up, but she herself had not come.



“She collected our voter registration cards yesterday,” said one of the women. “We really do not know who to vote for, and she was going to help us.”



In a number of polling stations, there were large posters of incumbent president Hamed Karzai, newly hung. According to the election law, no campaigning is allowed within 72 hours of the election.



Ashraf, an observer for another presidential candidate, objected. “This is a violation of the election law,” he fumed. “The IEC (Independent Election Commission) should not allow it.”



The head of the polling station, Rishad Ahmad, just shrugged.



“I have reported this to the IEC, but they say these pictures are everywhere, and there is nothing we can do about it,” he said.



Fatima Bayat, and her sister, both of them students of the Malalai high School in Kart-e-Lagan, told IWPR that they had been strongly encouraged to vote for Karzai.



“How can this be?” she asked. “I thought these were supposed to be free and fair elections.”



In most centres of Helmand, an essential piece of equipment was missing: a hole punch. Once a voter has taken a ballot, his registration card is pierced to prevent him or her from using the card again.



Lacking hole punchers, the inventive election workers began to use scissors to make a cut in the card. This did not sit well with some voters.

“I came all the way from Marja to vote, and [they] cut my card,” said Anwar. “They ruined it! I am so upset.”



Mohammad Ilyas Dayee and Aziz Ahmad Tassal are IWPR staff reporters in Helmand.