Afghanistan: Rights body warns of warlords' success in elections

[sabra]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/c5b9823861f848aa275790aece09e875.htm

AFGHANISTAN: Rights body warns of warlords' success in elections

KABUL, 18 October (IRIN) - More than half the candidates elected last month to Afghanistan's lower house of parliament and provincial councils are believed to have links to armed groups, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) has warned.

"More than 80 percent of winning candidates in provinces and more than 60 percent in the capital Kabul have links to armed groups," AIHRC deputy chairman Ahmad Fahim Hakim said on Monday, adding some were notorious warlords.

Horia Mosadiq, country director for the Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium (HRRAC), said one of the main reasons for the low voter turnout was the presence of candidates linked to illegal armed groups. "Infiltration of candidates being linked to groups to the parliament would hurt the process of democratisation in the war-ravaged country," she added.

Electoral law barred anyone with links to armed groups seeking election, but activists claim that with nearly 2,800 candidates, many warlords involved in the bloodshed of the past quarter-century slipped through a UN-backed review.

[LynnTheDem]

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:eyes: