AFP/Kabul
Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah will reject the results of a UN-supervised audit of the election, his spokesman said yesterday, tipping the country deeper into crisis a week before the scheduled inauguration.
Fears grew of a violent backlash to the eventual result after Abdullah withdrew his observers from the audit earlier yesterday in the latest twist of a prolonged dispute over allegations of massive fraud in the June 14 election.
The UN moved rapidly to try to save Afghanistan’s first democratic transfer of power by asking Ashraf Ghani, the other presidential candidate, to also remove his observers from the vote-checking process.
The stand-off between Abdullah, a former anti-Taliban resistance fighter, and Ghani, an ex-World Bank economist, has threatened to revive ethnic unrest as US-led Nato combat troops prepare to exit by the end of this year.
“We will be out of the process, and any kind of result from the process will not be acceptable for Dr Abdullah,” Muslim Saadat, one of his spokesmen, said after Abdullah’s observers did not attend the audit yesterday.
Abdullah claims he was cheated out of victory in the 2009 presidential election against incumbent President Hamid Karzai and says history is repeating itself via massive ballot-rigging in favour of Ghani, whose camp denies the charge.
Abdullah won the first-round election in April out of a field of eight candidates, but preliminary results from the June run-off showed that he was far behind Ghani.
UN deputy mission chief Nicholas Haysom described Abdullah’s withdrawal as “regrettable.”
“We requested the team of Dr Ghani to review whether they should participate actively in the process,” Haysom told reporters.
“The audit must be seen to be even-handed by all Afghans... Dr Ghani’s team has agreed to withdraw.”
The audit of all 8mn votes was designed to strengthen the legitimacy of the next government.
But any street protests by Abdullah supporters could set off a spiral of instability that the UN fears would revive the divisions of the 1990s civil war.
Many of Ghani’s supporters are Pashtuns in the south and east, while Abdullah’s loyalists are Tajiks and other northern groups.
With both candidates claiming victory, Karzai has raised the stakes by insisting that his successor will be inaugurated next Tuesday.
“Because we don’t want any problems to be created, and based on the UN request, our team decided to withdraw from the process too,” said Ghani spokeswoman Azita Rafhat.
“We trust the UN and election commission, and whatever result that comes out of their audit is acceptable to us.”
Furious allies of Abdullah have pushed him to form a “parallel government,” while officials have denied reports that some current ministers planned to set up a “interim administration” to take power.
Election workers count ballot papers for an audit of the presidential run-off in Kabul yesterday.
